Free Food

My husband and daughters found these pecans on the terrace of the local Irish pub. They gathered twice as many, but we ate half of them immediately. They are much better than the pre-shelled pecans you buy at the store—sweeter, buttery, with a hint of maple. There are so many pecan trees around our home, whenever I go out walking and I see one, I make a mental note (with the squirrel part of my brain) so that we can come back in the fall and scrounge. Usually the squirrels beat us to them (since they are much better climbers and we are forced to wait for the nuts to fall), but occasionally we hit the jackpot. My girls really enjoy the thrill of the hunt—for nuts, that is, not squirrels.

Speaking of squirrels, it is actually true that until fairly recently they were considered a valid dinner option. I've got a recipe for squirrel in my 1964 edition of The Joy of Cooking, along with opossum, bear, raccoon, woodchuck, beaver (separate recipe for beaver tail), peccary, and wild boar among others. I'm not really sure when they phased them all out, though I noted with interest that Ms. Rombauer recommends serving the squirrel with polenta. To me that seems remarkably ahead of its time for 1964.

But back to pecans—another great thing about them, aside from being free and delicious, is that they are native to the South, growing wild in the deciduous forests here for thousands upon thousands of years. So when you gather them, you are really being a "gatherer" in the historical sense of the word. Strangely, I often feel a bit like a "thief" when I am gathering the nuts, even though they are in the public domain. That's a sad commentary on the state of our society, when we equate the acceptance of nature's bounty with stealing. (What's next? Paying for water? Oh, well, actually...) For me, each nut is a tiny message in a shell, reminding me that we are not far removed from that life, and that food can still be here for us, free for the taking. As for roast squirrel, I know that's free for the taking, but... I'm not quite ready to go down that road yet. (However, this person was.)