In 1927, pecan growers tried to settle the pronunciation argument by decree
Americans have never agreed on how to say pecan, even within the same region. In 1927 the National Pecan Growers Association tried to end the debate, declaring the official pronunciation to be pea-con and asking everyone else to switch. The disagreement carried on regardless, and still lacks any settled answer.
The word itself comes from Algonquian languages, where related terms covered pecans, walnuts and hickory nuts. That overlap makes sense, because the pecan, Carya illinoinensis, is a species of hickory in the walnut family. It is native to the southern United States and northern Mexico around the Mississippi River, and it is the state tree of Texas and the state nut of five states.
Botanically, a pecan is not a true nut. Like every hickory fruit, it is a drupe: a single stone wrapped in a husk. The brassy green-gold husk turns brown when ripe and splits into four sections, releasing the thin-shelled seed. The trees are giants, commonly 20 to 40 metres tall with crowns up to 23 metres wide, and a well-grown ten-year-old sapling stands about 5 metres.
Their family history is long. The walnut family appears in fossils from the Cretaceous, and a key step toward the pecan was a switch from seeds carried by wind to seeds carried by animals. That change came with the growth of a husk and a reversal in the balance of two fatty acids, oleic and linoleic. The pecan's lineage split from its relatives about 44 million years ago. What separates pecan fruits from walnuts today is only how the husk forms.
For all that age, pecans are among the most recently domesticated major crops. Native and colonial Americans treasured wild pecans, but commercial orchards in the United States only began in the 1880s. By 2014 the country harvested 119.8 million kilograms a year, three quarters of it from Georgia, New Mexico and Texas. The trees thrive where summers are long, hot and humid, and the harvest usually arrives around mid-October, in time for pralines and pecan pie.
Source: Pecan
