left to right: unroasted Texas pecan half from my local Greek supermarket; unroasted Schley (Georgia) pecan half from Sunnyland Farms in Albany, GA; Schley in the shell
It was in one of my favorite food travelogues, Pascale Le Draoulec's American Pie, that I was introduced to the idea of Dumpster Pie, the pie of which you take a bite and know, after that first bite, that the rest of the pie is fit only for the dumpster. It is pretty easy to find Dumpster Pie on the road, and even easier to find it in diners and coffee shops that really should know better. It is harder, but not impossible to find it at home. Finding it on the road is sad enough; finding it at home is sadder, and producing one with your own two hands is saddest of all. I know this because last night I threw away nearly three quarters of a maple walnut pie, Chez PTMYB's own Dumpster Pie. It could have been that the filling, a combination of dark brown sugar, grade B maple syrup and Australian golden syrup, was too sweet, or too rich. It could have been that the top of the pie baked a little too darkly, and the walnuts became a bit too bitter. But I am inclined to agree with the plain and simple words of Lloyd: "I just didn't like this with walnuts."
It should not have been a lesson I needed to relearn, but apparently I did, and now I have: No matter how elegant the prose that may have seduced you into the idea, it is never a good idea to make a pecan pie with anything but pecans. It may sound self-evident, but once you have turned a few hundred pies out of your oven, including a pair of pecan pies that surprise you with how wonderful they are, you may be inspired to branch out into combinations like maple walnut, or almond with a reduced-milk custard. These are delightful combinations for ice cream, but put them in a pie and all they will do is remind you of how much better the pecan is for the job at hand.
I will confess: I came to pecans long before I came to pecan pie. As a kid I eschewed nuts of all kinds, with the exception of crunchy peanut butter. I was one of those annoying little squits who would methodically pick the walnuts out of a brownie or the pecans out of a piece of fudge or the almonds off the top of an Almond Joy bar, leaving little cairns of uneaten nuts and smudgy chocolate fingerprints in my wake. Eventually I learned that the enemy was not nuts per se, but stale or rancid nuts; once I had my first taste of brownie with a snapping-fresh walnut, or a piece of almond bark made with Merckens milk chocolate and almonds from Bazzini's, that house of the rapid nut turnover, I never looked back. But I still shied away from pecan pie. Pecans were fun to eat out of hand, more fun to eat after they'd been tossed with a spicy butter sauce and baked, and really wonderful on top of a piece of sea foam divinity, or embedded in dark fudge, or soaking up the richness of a chocolate cherry cake saturated with bourbon for a month before Christmas. Pecan pie, though, was weird. I used to happily eat brown sugar straight out of the box for as long as it took for my mom to catch me and yell at me to stop doing that, but even I found pecan pie to be scarily sweet. The texture was even scarier: I'd always had visions of chewy caramel dancing in my head, so to take a bite of pecan pie and be greeted by a jelly-like filling set all of my finicky gross-out-o-meter alarms. Now that I am older, I can appreciate it better, but it was definitely an acquired taste.
It wasn't until reading John Thorne's essay "Perfect Pecan Pie" in Outlaw Cook that I finally came around to the greatness of pecan pie. Thorne's experience was similar to mine: he ate a lot of pecan pie, he found them spooky, he wondered if he could make something tailored to his palate. Fortunately, his palate doesn't fall far from mine: I took his advice to replace the corn syrup with Lyle's Golden syrup, I replaced the rum with bourbon, and I upped the quantity of pecans he uses by about 30%, and there it was: my own little beauty, the closest thing I have ever made to perfect pecan pie, which was devoured by seven people on Christmas Eve. I was afraid that it might have been a lost chord pie, that I would never be able to duplicate it, but I put the lie to those fears on New Year's Eve, when I made it again for my pals who gathered at my house for the Smithfield ham salt-fest.
The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink informs me that pecan trees can be grown from both seedlings and grafted cultivars. The first grafts were achieved in 1846 or 1847 by a slave owned by a Louisiana plantation owner; in 1877, Emil Bourgeois began work on cultivars that laid the groundwork for the cultivation of pecan orchards. Georgia is the largest producer of pecans from cultivars, while Texas is the largest producer of pecans combined from cultivars and seedlings. There is, of course, some controversy among pecan lovers over just which pecans are the best. The Turkish owner of the Greek/Italian/Slovak deli in my neighborhood insists that Texas pecans are the cream of the crop, what every serious baker needs. My mother, on the other hand, has been ordering pecans annually from Sunnyland Farms in Georgia, and she finds them hard to beat. I'm still trying to make up my mind via numerous quality controls and double-blind testing, but I haven't quite made up my mind yet. 
I do know that I am mad for a varietal that Sunnyland sells called Schley, which to my palate is a bit sweeter and more moist than most pecans. Sunnyland brags that the shells of Schleys are so thin that you can crack them by squeezing them together. I thought this was a bit of advertising hyperbole until I did it myself. It is a neat thing to crack a pecan, and even neater the first time you manage to extract from the shell an entire unbroken nut, sweet and self-contained and perfect, ready to offer itself up to your pie, or to your sea foam, or to your biscotti (Maida Heatter has a recipe for an ultrathin pecan biscotti; when you cut into the loaf for the second baking, the pecans look like lace, just ridiculously beautiful, or to the rich, boozy pecan cake that the artist Thomas Hart Benton's wife shared with Clementine Paddleford, or even just to your open, waiting mouth.