Of pears and pecans

Since dessert at Thanksgiving was a pumpkin cheesecake with a maple-pecan praline topping, it's not surprising that the current pecan shortage became a topic at the table. Nuphy called up the recent NYT article which ascribed the situation to, among other factors, a surge of demand in China. This came as news to me, because I've never come across pecans in Chinese cuisine before, not here nor over there. In fact, only a week ago when monshu bought some for use in our stuffing, I remember musing that East Asians probably wouldn't know what the hell these were.

It goes without saying, then, that I hadn't a clue what the Chinese word for "pecan" was. The NYT claimed they used a phonetic loan, but I couldn't find it in the Wikipedia entry as it appeared on Nuphy's phone. Now that I have access to the full version, I can see that it's 碧根果 bìgēnguǒ, lit. "jade root fruit". (The semantic value of the characters is all but arbitrary, of course, but I do wonder if Chinese children think the tree must have petrified green roots.) The usual name, on the other hand, seems to be 長山核桃 or "long mountain walnut".

At first I thought this might indicate it was introduced to them by being cultivated at a place called Changshan, but it appears that 山核桃 or "mountain walnut" is the name of the most closely-related Chinese species, Carya cathayensis, the Chinese hickory, whose nuts are (as the accompanying image shows) rounder even than walnuts. Pecans are, in my father's words, essentially thin-shelled hickories and, in fact, an alternative name for the tree in China is 薄殼山核桃 "thin shell mountain walnut". Another name is the very straightforward "American mountain walnut" (美國山核桃).

I also had Asian pears on my mind ever since the Snore King had mentioned he was making a cranberry-Asian pear relish for Thanksgiving, so when I went to the market (on Thanksgiving Day, because I despise retail workers, y'all) for milk, I looked for them. I was surprised to find "Yali pears" on one side of the aisle and "apple pears" on the other because I thought these were synonyms. Or rather, I thought the Yali (鴨梨 yālí "duck pear") was a cultivar of the Asian pear (Pyrus pyrifolia) colloquially called "apple pear" on account of its shape. Turns out the Yali is a variety of Pyrus × bretschneideri, a hybrid of P. pyrifolia with P. ussuriensis, the Siberian pear. And, in fact, they are also named for their shape, which apparently recalls a duck's head.

Whatever they are, they were selling for three times as much as the domestically-grown "apple pears" which were so tasty and sweet that the Old Man just came back from the grocery with more. Sad that it literally took a prescription from my doctor for me to rediscover a fondness for apples, pears, and dried fruits of all sorts. But now I'm back on the fibre train and loving it!