Today I’m going to be peeking at another nut.
Carya illinoinensis is formally 长山核桃 (cháng shān hé tao), which literally means ‘long, mountain walnut’ but less formally and more commonly 碧根果 (bì gēn guǒ), meaning 'jade root nut’. They are in fact a type of hickory. The ‘long’ in the first name points to them not being true nuts but yet another drupe. I’m talking about the humble pecan.
Pronunciation varies regionally to the extent that the US National Pecan Growers Association felt obliged in 1927 to choose one while acknowledging the others as legitimate variations. A classic case of hedging their bets. They opted for puh-KAHN, IPA: /pəˈkɑn/ with the stress on the ‘can’, stating:
Quotethose in the habit of using any other pronunciation therefore be requested henceforth to adopt exclusively the pronunciation above specified above and hereby adopted by the Association.
Of course the good people went on pronouncing it as they always had done.
The word comes from the native name of the nut in various Algonkin dialects, e.g. Cree pakan, Ojibway pagan, Abnaki pagann, suggesting they couldn’t decided either!
The nut itself comes from the southern USA and northern Mexico in the Mississippi region. Although known to the Native Americans and the early colonists, commercial cultivation began only relatively recently – in the 1880s. Nearly all cultivation still takes place in their native range. The pecans here are imported from the USA.
As elsewhere, they are used as eating nuts on their own and incorporated into baked goods, but aren’t a mainstream choice. Searching Taobao, China’s Amazon equivalent, for ‘pecans’, returns more instruments of torture for opening the damn things than it does the actual nuts. It is no coincidence that the original Algonquin name meant something like ‘that which is cracked with an instrument, by a stone or hammer’.
I heard a rumour that, in the nuts’ native area, people put them into some sort of pie! Obviously fake news! I searched the Chinese internet for ‘pecan pie’ and all I got was children’s comic books! Who starts these stupid stories?
