Pecan pie is a sweet custard pie made primarily of corn syrup and pecan nuts. It is popularly served at holiday meals and is also considered a specialty of Southern U.S. cuisine. Most pecan pie recipes include salt and vanilla as flavorings. Other ingredients such as chocolate and bourbon whiskey are popular additions to the recipe. Some recipes even use an amount of maple syrup instead of corn syrup for flavoring. Pecan pie is often served with whipped cream. New Orleans Pecan PieThe tradition holds that the French created pecan pie soon after settling in New Orleans, after being introduced to the nut by Native Americans. It is sometimes referred to as "New Orleans pecan pie," adding an aura of French cuisine to a home-cooked comfort food. Attempts to trace the origin have, however, not found any recipes earlier than 1925, and well-known cookbooks such as Fannie Farmer and The Joy of Cooking did not include it before 1940.The process for refining corn sugar was not developed until the 1880s. Thus, the corn syrup which is considered an essential part of the modern recipe was not available to the settlers of New Orleans.There is no doubt that the makers of Karo syrup popularized the dish, and many recipes—even one ascribed to a well-known New Orleans restaurant—specify Karo syrup by name as an ingredient. This suggests a prosaic 20th-century origin in Karo promotion, and in fact the maker's website currently credits the dish as a 1930s "discovery" of a "new use for corn syrup" by a corporate sales executive's wife. The company asserts that "Down South, today, that same recipe continues to be called Karo Pie" but in fact this name for the dish seems to be rare.Although the standard recipes call for corn syrup, cookbook author Mark Bittman comments "There are two kinds of pecan pie, one of which contains not only sugar but corn syrup. I don't like this version—not only is it too sweet, if you taste corn syrup by itself you'll never cook with it again." The version he favors uses white and brown sugar, no corn syrup, and "thickens the sugar with eggs—in other words, it's a custard pie, loaded with pecans."Jim Turner of Glencoe, Alabama developed a recipe for making pecan pies with sorghum syrup.A classic old English confection known as a "Banbury Tart" (as in the nursery rhyme), is essentially a small pecan pie, minus the pecans.Pecan tassies, another Southern specialty, are similar to pecan pie, but are miniature portions. In addition, many recipes for pecan tassies differ in the inclusion of cream cheese in the crust and omission of corn syrup from the filling. QuotationsPecan pie is often mentioned in American literature (and television) as associated with Thanksgiving, Christmas and other special occasions; for example: