Pecans are as synonymous with Georgia as Scarlett O'Hara, and this year's bumper crop will provide 110 to 115 million pounds of them.

Whether you're snacking on a handful of freshly shelled nuts, or tossing a cup into a favorite recipe, pecans provide taste and health benefits. They are rich in oleic acid, the same acid found in olive oil, fiber, vitamins and phytochemicals, which are helpful in the prevention of some cancers.

November is recognized as Georgia Pecan Month. The next 30 days celebrates the annual harvest of this food crop, which this year is double what it was in 1998. Buttery, firm and crunchy, pecans have evolved from the 1920s when they were sugared, spiced and enjoyed as candy (recipe page?) to ingredients in haute cuisine. Chef David Burke of the Park Avenue Cafe in New York and Chicago created a unique salad of seasonal greens tossed with a pecan vinaigrette, then garnished with goat cheese, apples and rich goat cheese fondue. (Recipe on page ?)

Georgia leads the nation in pecan production and for more than 150 years the state has enjoyed its reputation for delicious nuts.

The following is brief history of Georgia pecans compiled by the Georgia Agricultural Commodity Commission for Pecans.

One hundred years ago, freshly harvested Georgia pecans were savored in much the same way they are today — toasted and lightly salted or turned into a signature pie or candy. But what our ancestors didn't know about pecans is what we have discovered. Pecans fit beautifully not just in desserts, but in main dishes, side dishes, soups and healthy salads.

It is believed that the first pecan trees were grown in the tiny coastal town of St. Mary's, beside the Atlantic Ocean. According to legend, Capt. Samuel F. Flood found some pecans floating at sea and his wife, Rebecca, planted them. The first pecan trees were fruitful, heavy with nuts and subsequent trees were taken from St. Mary's and planted in other Southeastern states.

It wasn't until the late 1880s that the first commercial planting of pecans was begun in southwest Georgia. Thirty years later, developers from outside Georgia would plant pecan orchards in the their states as well. So for the turn of the century cook, pecans were a ready ingredient, if not from the backyard tree, then from the local market.

According to the Atlanta History Center, pecans were used extensively in the cooking of the early 20th century. During this period, most of the recipes calling for pecans were homemade cookies and candies and had a decidedly Creole flavor. Many contained the addition of ground cinnamon. For example, in the 1913 cookbook “Southern Recipes Tested by Myself” by Laura Thornton Knowles, pecans were used in a tiny meringue-like cookie called a Creole kiss, as well as a whipped cream and gelatin dessert known as nutted cream. Candy making in the home would continue well into the 1930s and 1940s as a 1949 cookbook entitled “Cooking Way Down South” in Dixie proved. Written by A. Monroe Aurand Jr., this book told you the proper way to make the famous New Orleans pralines, plus something called pecan fondant: cook sugar and water to a soft boil stage, then add butter, vanilla, a pinch of salt and a generous amount of chopped pecans. This is poured into a lightly buttered dish, and when set, cut into squares.

Also in the 1930s came the invention of the legendary pecan log roll by Ethel Stuckey, wife of Stuckey's Pecan Shops founder Williamson Stuckey Sr. The family began selling pecans at one south Georgia store, but gradually sold pecan candies, rubber snakes, Mexican blankets and all sorts of fun souvenirs as Stuckey's grew into an American icon. Stuckey's locations with their teal blue roofs, were a Florida-bound tourist haven where many American families first tasted Georgia pecans covering that sweet and chewy log roll.

In early Southern cookbooks, you will also see a Depression-style of cooking, using scarce ingredients, often without eggs and butter. These recipes carried over into the war time years when food rationing forced cooks to use fewer ingredients. Such pecan recipes that reflect this significant style of cooking include the study but delicious pecan brown bread from legendary cook Mrs. S.R. Dull, former food editor of The Atlanta Journal and author of “Southern Cooking.”

The bread contains no eggs or butter, but it is moist from buttermilk and is leavened with baking soda.

At the same time that 1930s cooks were economizing and gobbling up Stuckey's log rolls. Pecan growers were busy battling something called pecan rosette, a zinc deficiency that nearly wipes out the Georgia pecan industry. Fortunately, a clever pathologist discovered that galvanized water sprayers contained zinc and the trees were saved in 1932.

Pecans remained a popular addition to pies in the 1930s mostly combined with stiffly beaten egg whites, sugar and some type of cracker. They went by the names of pecan meringue or sawdust pie. But all along, an ingredient that would become something of a culinary partner with pecans sat on store shelves and waited until that fortuitous moment when some cook would combine corn syrup with pecans, eggs, a little butter and flavoring and pour this mixture into an unbaked pie crust.

The classic and gooey pecan pie was born in the 1940s, and it remains a fixture on bottles of Karo corn syrup today, but it didn't come into its own until the 1950s and 1960s when it was a mainstay at church suppers, school picnics, bake sales and dinner parties. It would withstand the following years, even the gourmet 1980s with such additions as bourbon or chocolate chips, or being baked, not as a pie but in a sheet pan and cut into Pecan Diamonds.

Both the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y. and the kitchen of the Georgia governor's mansion in Atlanta are known for their diamond-shaped bites of pecan pie.

It was during this pecan pie heyday that a real breakthrough in pecan cultivation was made — mechanical harvesting. As Darryl Sparks, a pecan historian and horticulturist with the University of Georgia in Athens explains, growers had, up until then, been picking up fallen pecans by hand. One grower, he recalled, had resisted the temptation to buy a mechanical harvester that would shake the pecans off the tree.

When the California salesman came calling, this grower told the man that he had no interest in machines because “we've got plenty of help.” The salesman persisted until the grower allowed him to shake the trees and that good shaking freed enough nuts still clinging to the limbs that the grower was able to pay cash for his very own harvester.

Sam Pennington, whose family has been growing pecans in Matthews, Ga. for three generations, felt the impact of mechanical harvesting firsthand. “The day John F. Kennedy was shot, I was a sophomore in high school and I remember coming home and helping to pick up over 20,000 pounds of pecans from the ground — enough for two truckloads. That was hard work.” Now, with mechanical harvesting, says Pennington, the process is much more effective.

Mechanical harvesting resulted not only in more nuts, but a quicker harvest because growers didn't have to wait until the pecans fell to the ground. To the consumer, this meant pecans in stores before the winter holidays, just in time for baking or gift giving.

In the 1960s, irrigation was installed throughout the orchards and pecans were watered well in September, a crucial and usually bone-dry period in southern Georgia, when pecans take on shape and need water to gain flavor and size. In addition, researchers and horticulturists such as Sparks began working with growers to actively manage their orchards through thinning trees in a bumper crop year, thus assuring that the next year's harvest would also be good. Traditionally left unattended, the pecan tree will produce fewer nuts the year after a bumper or big harvest.

To cooks this meant no pecan shortages for their pies, in addition to a savory nibble that had taken the South by storm, the cheese straw or cheese cracker. Made with butter, sharp cheese, flour, pecans and little ground red pepper, these crisp buttery and nutty crackers were baked each weekend and placed in cookie tins lined with wax paper. There has always been a strong link between pecans and cheese — in these cheese crackers or wafers of the 1960s, and later in the famed cheese ring made popular by former first lady Rosalyn Carter.

Her husband, Jimmy Carter, was Georgia's governor in the early 1970s, then U.S. president from 1976 to 1980. She made a cheese ring with shredded sharp cheddar cheese, mayonnaise, grated onion and pecans with strawberry preserves piled in the center. The pecan encrusted cheese ring and the sweet preserves were spread on crackers and this appetizer was on every stylish Southern sideboard in the 1970s.

Pecans would also be paired with blue cheese in the 1980s, whether on a cheese board with sliced apples and pears, or in a delicate but powerfully flavored sauce over chicken breasts — one of the most requested recipes of the Georgia Department of Agriculture (see page ?).

Whereas cooks in the 1930s were accustomed to scrimping on expensive ingredients, the cooks of the 1980s reveled in excess. The more cheese, the more butter, the more flavor, the better. It's fitting, then, that in 1986 a pecan named the Desirable rushed into our markets. It was a favorite of the growers, and it would become a favorite of consumers too — big pretty halves and sweet flavor.

The strong connection between pecans and candies in the first part of the century gave way to pecans in main dishes and salads in the 1990s. Pecans have also found their place with nutty grains like wild rice, barley, quinoa and couscous because of our current emphasis on healthy cooking and eating. They are a natural plant food and are also cholesterol free.

“We've come a long way,” said Buddy Leger, chairman of the Georgia Pecan Commission, as he reflected on the past century of growing and eating pecans. “Pecans are not just for the holidays. People are using pecans in a number of recipes whereas before they might have just been making a pie.

“We feel confident that the message is getting out that pecans are a healthy food.”

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