| Butter pecan | |
| Country: | United States |
| Main Ingredient: | pecans, butter, and vanilla |
Butter pecan is a flavor, prominent especially in the southern United States, in ice cream, cakes, and cookies. The flavor is an element of soul food, the cuisine of Black Americans. They popularized the flavor during Jim Crow as an alternative to the vanilla flavor that Black people were often forbidden by white Southerners from eating solely because of its white color.[1] [2] Though it was not a definitive practice in some southern states, particularly along the east coast, countless Black American oral traditions have substantiated the claim.[3] [4] Poet Maya Angelou recalled that Black Americans could eat vanilla ice cream only on the 4th of July. Research by culinary historian Michael Twitty states that Edmund Albius, an enslaved Black man, improved the cultivation of the Mexican spice that flavored ice cream on Réunion Island in the Indian Ocean.[5] [6] [7]
Roasted pecans, butter, and vanilla flavor are used in butter pecan baked goods. Butter pecan ice cream is smooth vanilla ice cream with a slight buttery flavor, with pecans added. It is manufactured by many major ice cream brands. A variant of the recipe is butter almond, which replaces the pecans with almonds.
Butter pecan is a popular flavor of ice cream produced by many companies and is also one of the thirty-one flavors of Baskin Robbins.[8]