The Annoyance of My Nut Bowl Overfloweth

On the adaptability of ingredients, to start the New Year.

Dear Tamar:

I have three pecan trees on my property. It wasn’t a problem until this year, when they decided to drop a ridiculous number of nuts. Pecans everywhere! I can’t go outside without crunching them underfoot. Even the squirrels are overwhelmed and have stopped burying them. I collect heaps at a time and pour them into overflowing bowls. All this abundance inspires gratitude and mild panic. What should I do with them all? Eat them? Cook them? Freeze them? Give them to friends and neighbors? Why is bounty—the thing we all supposedly long for—so unmooring? (P.S. Just finished Feast on Your Life, and LOVED it.)

-My Nut Bowl Overfloweth

Dear My Nut Bowl Overfloweth,

First: happy new year! I hope you feel scrubbed and new, and open to what comes, and welcoming of the uncertainty that is the only sure thing.

Second: contemporary human experience in the global north so rarely includes what you describe in your letter that it is—as a collective reference point—almost extinct. You refer to something far more regular and natural and primordial and ugly and beautiful than a “bounty”—though that’s rational diction given the cultural context in which you choose.

What you describe—an inescapable abundance that threatens to overwhelm its witnesses, that implies rot and difficulty and logistical and physical and even horticultural challenges—is a glut.

You might argue that this is word choice. Beyond my general belief that word choice, often treated as window dressing, is one of the most sneakily important choices Anglophones regularly make, there is the fact that helplessness in the face of “bounty” generates guilt. Helplessness in the face of a “glut,” on the other hand, is forgivable, even to be expected. The word “glut” is related to “glutton.” It means too much, and even the most proverbially innocent among us can report and even mean, that too much of a good thing is too much.

Having a glut of pecans clarifies your strategy. Now, you can act as humans always have when faced with gluts. It is time to use that-of-which-you-have-a-glut for everything. Your glut must be a main dish when you need a main dish, a sauce when you need sauce, a soup when you need soup, and so on. For this time-tested strategy to work, that-of-which-you-have-a-glut must stand in for other ingredients, ingredients to which it seems to bear no similarity. It must come to be a sort of synecdoche for “food.” This is how gluts have always been managed, and it remains the most reliable way I know.

Before you object that this sounds revolting, tolerate my reminder that Italian specialties like panzanella, pappa al pomodoro, ribollita, and polpette (meatballs!) were invented in this mindset—the glut being of stale bread. Minestra and minestrone exist to receive an ever evolving seasonal vegetable glut, with one week’s soup comprising mostly fagiolini (green beans) and another week’s zucchini. Arancini and riso al salto were conceived to deal with a glut of uneaten risotto.

The two most famous meat Gallic meat dishes—coq au vin and boeuf bourguignon—were devised to deal, respectively, with a glut of meat in the form of tough roosters who couldn’t be roasted or fried, and a glut of hard-working cuts of meat on a cow, plus light, unsellable wine and wine just past its prime.

And I would be doing my argument—and French cuisine—a disservice if I did not point out that the most famous French dish—the Provencal fish soup, bouillabaisse—was created and eaten daily by fishermen who had no food but the glut of unsellable fish left in their nets after they’d sold all they could.

I haven’t touched on any non-European cuisines, an exclusion for the sake of brevity, not because they haven’t birthed exquisite innovations from the same combination of too-much and too-much hunger. I’ve just been going on for a while and haven’t mentioned your pecans. I shall now, moving gracefully from glut to nut.

For a nut as main dish, look to the horridly named but nonetheless delicious British concoction called…nut roast. (I know, but the alternatives—”nut loaf,” “vegan nut shape,”—were worse.) Or set your sites on a version of the Ligurian polpettone, in which I always include a great quantity of pounded walnuts, and you could pounded pecans. This recipe is in Italian, but I believe that either you or a computer can make it legible to you. For nuts as sauce, make salsa di noci but with pecans instead of walnuts. Here’s a second recipe, for a different version of the same idea. Nut soup may sound strangest and also may present the most options. Try French nut soup, or this brothier version. (Again, Google translate is your friend in this pursuit.) And there’s West African peanut soup, and a soup that is supposed to be made specifically with pecans, from Oaxaca, and this one, which looks like Mexican-French fusion.

Dear cook, when I ran a restaurant kitchen in Athens, Georgia, my pesto was made with pecans instead of pine nuts, and spiced pecans were the only nut on our bar menu. Neither creation was on par with panzanella or bouillabaisse, but that is an issue of time. I cooked in Georgia for under two years; the inventors of those culinary treasures fed themselves on their respective gluts for decades or centuries, refining the details of their approaches. I don’t know how long you plan to live with your pecan trees, but if you start tomorrow, it will only be several generations before you have the working model of a local speciality. Then the only bowl that will overfloweth will be the metaphorical one we all hope for.