Love is a Pecan Pie

by David Turgeon, SVP

We all know about the 5 “Love Languages”. For me, I actually think that there is a 6th language of love - every one of us have either shown or received love through food. As a child, as the holidays approached, I was always so excited to go to my grandmother’s house and spend the day watching her bake. My “Gramma”, as we called her, was born of good French-Canadian stock. Bright blue eyes, quick to laugh and with hair sometimes the same color as her eyes (on the days she came back from the hairdresser) she never used a recipe. As she asked me to bring my chair up to the kitchen table, I knew I was about to watch the creation of something very special. Our family’s favorite was Gramma’s Pecan pie. A rich, caramel brown pie made with a homemade pie crust and a simple filling mixture of butter, eggs, brown sugar and every French-Canadian’s secret weapon, maple syrup. The pie was then topped with carefully selected pecans halves and placed (by me) in concentric circles and baked till the house smelled like a “cabane au sucre”. I’ve had many a pecan pie since those magical days watching her bake, but I have never tasted a pie like hers. She would always tell me that the most important ingredient in any recipe is love - thinking about the people that you love and passing that love into the dough, the filling and every last pecan on that pie transformed the ingredients into a delicious gift of love. By the time I was a teen I finally got her to write her recipe for pecan pie down - and she did, handwritten on the back of an envelope with the last ingredient listed being “une grande mesure d'amour” (a heaping measure of love).