OH NUTS!
STORY AND PHOTOS BY CHERYL KOEHLER
It’s worse than a bad hair day…you know…mega-disaster: Your food isn’t arriving from the other hemisphere the way it’s supposed to. Everyone’s getting hungry. What are you going to do?
If you live in California, you will have done well to keep a supply of locally grown walnuts, almonds, or pistachios on hand. In the shell, nuts can last at least a year, and probably much longer. What’s more, they have enough calories to help you survive until the people in charge figure out how to get the food moving again.
Almonds and walnuts are two of California’s most prodigious, nutritious, and storable crops. We produce virtually the entire supply for the United States and still have plenty left over to export around the world. If you have any doubt about this, just take a drive into the Central Valley and most anywhere you’ll be looking down the long rows of walnut and almond groves. Even here in our diminishing Alameda and Contra Costa County growing regions, there are a few small-scale growers of almonds, walnuts, pistachios, and pecans who bring their products to market.
Until last Spring, I was unaware that pecans grow locally. The revelation came when I acquired a gunnysack full of pecans in the shell from a friend, who said they came from a ranch in Vacaville. The rancher, Randy Garcia, didn’t want them and gave them to his dad, John Garcia, who in turn gave them to his neighbor, Ralph Prince of Richmond, who in turn gave them to me. John Garcia was moving out of his house, so he had handed the sack of pecans over to Prince along with an old nutcracker that had been moldering in his garage. The nutcracker sent Prince back into a childhood reverie.
“I hadn’t seen one of these since the late 50s,” he told me. “My stepfather and Aunt Edith were always giving each other comical gifts, like a bag of prunes or this nutcracker, and sometimes they would pass the same gift back and forth-he to her and her to him. We called this a ‘Texas Nutcracker.'” Prince demonstrated how the clever rubber band-powered contraption explodes the pecan’s shell inside a metal capsule, leaving the nutmeat entirely whole. Once we got the hang of it, we were able to crack seven pecans in a single minute.
Grabbing the nutcracker, I ran out to the Walnut Creek Farmers’ Market to show it to Jim McKeown, the “backyard farmer” of Danville, who tends one large pecan tree along with many citrus trees, walnut trees, plum trees, and various row crops. I guess it ought to have been no surprise, but there was McKeown, working his way through a sack of pecans, using his own Texas Nutcracker
“I use to put them out in the shell, but nobody bought them,” he said. “Then I found this old nutcracker in the garage-it was Grampy’s Christmas gift in the ’60s. I’m here at the market every week for four hours, so there’s plenty of time to crack pecans.”
As McKeown cracked the nuts, he explained that Grampy’s farm was one of the first properties to be developed in Danville. When they bought the land in 1952, it was all monstrous valley oaks. Now, over fifty years later, the nut and fruit trees they planted loom almost as impressively as the oaks.
On returning home, I hopped onto the Internet to satiate my curiosity about the origin of the nutcracker, and with a little poking around found www.inertianutcracker.com – the home page for the Texas Native Inertia Nutcracker. I learned that the nutcracker is named for the “Texas Native” pecan. The manufacturer calls himself “The Nutcracker Guy” and claims that he’s been making Texas Native Inertia Nutcrackers in the mountains of western North Carolina for more than 25 years. “I’m a Tarheel by birth but a Texan at heart,” he asserts.
While you’re waiting for your nutcracker and the new crop of local nuts, buy some shelled pecans or walnuts to use in place of pine nuts, and some parsley to use in place of basil, and you’ll have a delicious Fall season pesto. This recipe comes from the Georgia Pecan Commission, and is printed here with the permission of the Georgia Pecan Commissioner himself, Mr. Charles M. “Buddy” Leger.
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