Pecan Pie

With simple base ingredients like eggs, sugar, butter, and mixed nuts, Pecan Pies are creamy, crunchy desserts with a strong association to the US. There are several of the US holiday staple, like swapping in maple syrup for corn syrup for a more textured sweetness. An easy addition to an adult-only meal is adding a few spoons of bourbon or whiskey into the sugar and butter mix. Sugar levels can be reduced and instead, cacao butter can be added to the mix. And pieces of chocolate can sit alongside the nuts on top.

There’s some dispute about the origin of this unique dessert. Pecans are native to North America and the Native Americans used the nuts in their diet. After the Civil War, commercial developers brought the nut to Georgia—the state is the US’s main commercial grower of pecans now. The name pecan is derived from the French word "pacane", which in turn is borrowed from the Algonquian word for nut. Because of this connection, some people believe the French settled in New Orleans invented the pie.

The other theory is that it’s an American invention. The idea is that once pecans became popular, people started including it in their baking. Pecan Pie recipes show up in Texas cookbooks in the 1870s and 80s. The pie took almost half a century to become popular outside of Texas, aligning with the company Karo Foodservice printing a Pecan Pie recipe on Karo syrup cans. Soon, the pie became popular across the US, and today sits alongside the Pumpkin Pie and the Apple Pie as a holiday special.