It Must Be ( The first holiday together) Love

The Great Pecan Pie Debacle of 1978

Dr. Linda Karges-Bone

Looking back, I realized that the tall, skinny Southern guy that I was dating during the holiday season of 1978 was the one I should marry. I knew this because of the now famous "pecan pie debacle". I was young, just 19 and an English major at the College of Charleston. My head was in the books, poetry mostly , with Emily and Walt. Cooking was not my forte, but this authentically Southern “good old boy” liked food more than poetry. And I liked him. A lot. So I decided to make him a pie. Specifically, a pecan pie, because that was what he liked the most and what he had been talking about for weeks as the holidays approached. How hard could it be? I pulled out the Fannie Farmer cookbook that my ever hopeful mother had secured for my Hope Chest, because nice girls kept such a chest 30 years ago, and looked up the recipe. Now, I must note here that I am Italian and from the North. Add that to my desire to become a writer and my absolute lack of knowledge of Southern cooking, pecans, and indeed any kind of baking and what happens next will become plausible. I assembled the ingredients and began to chop the pecans. The cookbook suggested a food processor for such work and not having one around, I thought the blender might suffice. It did for a minute or two, but began shaking and belching and emitting a horrible burnt cinder kind of smell as the ( unshelled) pecans resisted. I kept at it, mulching small handfuls at a time. “No wonder they only make this at the holidays,” I thought. “It is really hard to chop these nuts!” You see where this is going and so did my beau, once he bit into the nicely browned, nut filled custard of the pie. He was fooled for a moment, since the syrupy, buttery custard was less challenging and camouflaged the jagged pieces of nut and shell that had been baked into it. He chewed carefully, occasionally removing ( carefully) pieces of shell and placing them on the dessert plate. My family was busy devouring the traditional pumpkin and apple pies that my father had made earlier in the week. He had been at work and missed my own floundering attempts, or maybe he didn’t look too closely, in some kind of effort to gauge the worth of this suitor. My brother recognized the truth first, laughing until he literally fell out of the chair. “She left the shells in the pie! Who does that? Wait, she’s an English major. That explains it.” Gary, now my husband of 36 years, lowered his head and grinned, thankfully pushing the plate away before he broke a tooth. “Why didn’t you say anything?” I asked, absolutely horrified at the realization of my error. “I couldn’t believe it, “ he admitted. “Didn’t you ever shell a pecan?” I reasoned that Up North, we ate walnuts, not pecans, as if this explained anything at all. “You tried,” he patted my hand. “That was real nice.” And I knew then, this guy was a keeper. So now, I make several, quite tasty pecan pies each season. My extended family requests them, since my sisters all married Southern men who can’ live without greens, cornbread, and pecan pie. And every year, the story is re-told and my husband has to answer the question: “And you still married her?” “She has other talents,” he’ll say with a sly smile, and that makes it alright.