The Perfection of a Pecan Log Roll

Oh. My. Word.  Is there anything in the world as good as a pecan log roll? Yesterday, I had the pleasure of meeting some long-time friends at the Cracker Barrel for lunch. Of course, we wandered around the little store for a a while, after we sat for almost two and a half hours eating and chatting.  I bought myself a pecan log roll and just took a bite. 

It’s hard to describe how much I love a pecan log roll.  (BTW, I say pee-can, not pee-CAHN, or pe-CAHN.)  I don’t know if it’s the crunchy outside or the soft, gooey inside, but I just love it.  I think it may be a memory sense thing. 

When I was little,  during a couple of summers, my mom would drive my granny somewhere – and of course, we all went with her.  My granny always had a newer car than we did, so Mom would drive Granny’s car, and we’d have Mom and Granny in the front seats, and three little girls in the back seat. 

I remember one day, Patti’s door wasn’t closed properly and this car of very nice people kept trying to tell us, and Granny just kept saying to ignore them.

I remember always having to sit on the “HUMP” in the back seat, because I was the smallest.  Occasionally, much to the dismay of my sisters, I would lay in the back window.

There are pictures somewhere of the three of us wearing sombreros on one of those trips. I don’t know why we were wearing sombreros, or how they even fit in the car, but we were. One time our Aunt Julia, Granny’s sister, got us scrub suits.  There are pictures of that too! I remember they smelled funny to us.

This is why I think I love pecan log rolls.  My mom would stop at Stuckey’s. Remember Stuckey’s?? You could get a bag of “oranges”  - horribly orange gumballs, packed in a net to look like fresh picked oranges. They tasted a lot like orange Tic-Tacs, which taste a lot like baby aspirin, but they were sort of pretty.  I think the reason we stopped at Stuckey’s was always to use the bathroom, of course! With five of us in the car, we stopped a LOT!   Mom would buy a pecan log roll, then when we got in the car, she’d pull out the tiny knife she always kept in her purse and slice it up into tiny, thin slices.  She’d pass them around, and we’d eat them up like crazy. 

So, as I took the first bite of that pecan log roll, all those memories flooded into my head.   Do I really love the pecan log rolls so much or is it the memories that make the candy so sweet?