Coast Chronicles: A lot of history is behind every PB&J sandwich

Why did Jelly break up with Peanut Butter?

She felt she was spread too thin!

Laugh, but the next time you bite into a PB&J sandwich, know that you are biting into a piece of history that includes 20th century wars, late 19th Century health sanatoriums and 18th century slavery.

Today, peanut butter is ingrained in American daily lives – at least 75 percent of our households have PB in the cupboard – but this protein and nutrient rich food is not native to our country.

Peanuts originated in South America, where they were domesticated at least 5,000 years ago, and eventually spread to Asia and Europe. In U.S. agricultural hands, it has been improved for yield, size and disease resistance but the peanut’s basic and ancient genetics are not drastically altered.

Did you know that the U.S. annually produces the most peanut butter in the world? It doesn’t produce the most peanuts – that honor goes to China – but it makes the most PB. USDA says of the 6.5 billion pounds of peanuts produced last year, 60 percent was turned into peanut butter, which also makes us the top PB exporter in the world.

A majority of Americans eat between 3.5 to 4.4 pounds of peanut butter a year.

Confession: I hate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (or any sweet peanuts for that matter) but I love plain peanut butter on multi-grain bread. Throw on a little white cheese, or butter, or Elvis-style banana and I’ll be a happy camper.

Because my little sister just celebrated her birthday, I woke up this morning thinking about the time Dad fixed our school lunches when Mom was at the hospital for what would become Estelle’s problematic but ultimately successful birth.

Before heading to the hospital, Dad rushed through making our school sandwiches and, not surprisingly, forgot that I hate sweet peanut butter. After all, what normal child hates PB&J? Thankfully, he included some fruit so I didn’t completely starve.

Cultivation of peanuts has never been a big thing on the Mississippi Gulf Coast because the soil is not well suited for the crop. Of course, some farmers have grown them for livestock or to be able to make the salted boiled peanuts once in demand here.

Peanuts never made a local inroad like the radishes, cabbages, pecans, watermelons, sweet potatoes, cucumbers, tomatoes and oranges of various eras of our Coast history.

Upstate farmers grow peanuts to the tune of about 92 million tons a year, making Mississippi the ninth state in peanut growing. But like the production of most varieties of cotton that do well upstate, our coastal soil just isn’t right. But that doesn’t mean we eat peanuts any less.

To justify today’s topic I looked in our old Herald newspaper microfilm to find the first mentions of peanut butter, or just plain peanuts. Bingo!

“The peanut requires a light, sandy soil and plenty of warm, sunny weather,” began an item titled “Peanut Culture,” Aug. 4, 1888. “...the peanut may be grown in New England or where ever Indian corn will mature, but as with sweet potatoes there would be little profit and much work.”

Foodways historians would have fun interpreting that 138-year-old observation. Meanwhile, the first mention I found of actual peanut butter is from 126 years ago, dated May 25, 1900:

“Peanut butter is one of the latest uses of the peanut. It is made by grinding the nuts very fine and reducing the mass to a pasty substance, a portion at least of the oil being removed. Salt is added as flavoring.”

I can’t say positively those are the earliest local mentions because the first 4½ years of this newspaper’s printed editions were lost in a fire. These dates, however, mesh with the American introduction of the peanut and its tasty paste.

For all you PB&J lovers, that history is presented here in an easy to digest form. After all, the ease of spreading on bread and eating a sandwich led to today’s proliferation of PB.

*It takes 540 peanuts to make a 12-ounce jar of peanut butter, and by U.S. law any product labeled peanut butter must be at least 90 percent peanuts.

*The U.S. is the biggest exporters of PB, annually sending away 500,000 metric tons each year. That said, the U.S. is not the largest producer of peanuts. We are only the fourth largest producer coming in behind China, India and Nigeria, or sometimes Argentina.

*Earliest evidence of peanut paste is found in the Aztec and Inca civilizations, with Aztecs using peanut paste for aching gums. Africans were grinding peanuts into stews by the 15th Century. The Chinese have crushed peanuts into sauces for centuries.

*The peanut came to North America via the transatlantic slave trade, and the colonials learned it grew well in the humid, warm South. They used it as slave or animal food. But by the mid 1860s,

Civil War soldiers were eating peanut porridge to keep from starving.

*Peanut butter, as we know it, would not come until the 1890s, and several people are credited with making PB a common household staple.

*An inventor named Marcellus G. Edson of Montreal, according to the U.S. National Peanut Board, got the first patent for a method of producing PB from roasted nuts on heated surfaces to reach a semi-fluid paste which he made harder by adding sugar. That was in 1884.

*The next big step came in 1890 when a St. Louis physician encouraged George Bayle Jr. to process and package ground peanut paste as a nutritious protein substitute for folks with bad teeth.

*No doubt you’ve heard of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, the cereal man. He believed in plant foods as a healthier choice than meat, so enter the peanut. He ran a health sanatorium and in the late 1890s began serving his patients PB because it was nutritious and contains high protein that could be easily eaten.

*PB then became a food sought by the wealthy who knew about sanatoriums but that didn’t last long as other people and events stepped in to make it more readily available to the masses. World War I helped do that because of food shortages and PB’s cheapness. Ditto for WWII.

*California businessman Joseph L. Rosefield tackled the problem of oil floating to top of peanut paste in jars. In 1922 he kept the peanut oil from separating by partially hydrogenating some of the peanut oil. He licensed the idea in 1928 to the creator of Peter Pan peanut butter.

*Ah, but Rosefield just couldn’t keep his hand out of the PB jar. Several years after selling to Peter Pan, he invented another process for making PB even smoother. Next he mixed in pieces of peanuts to create the first chunky style and put his PB in wide-mouth jars. He called his new products Skippy

*Jif enters the scene in 1956 when Proctor & Gamble created a slightly sweeter peanut butter, adding sugar and molasses to the basic recipe. Jif is today owned by the J.M. Smucker Co., which has a factory in Kentucky that produces 250,000 containers of PB a day.

*George Washington Carver, who died in 1943, introduced the peanut as part of his efforts for agricultural in the South, where soils were depleted after repeated plantings of cotton. He showed peanut cultivation could improve soil with crop rotation.

*Annual production of American PB is increasing in the 21st Century, mainly because we once again realize it is high in protein, nutritious, easily consumed and affordable as food prices soar.

*During the Covid Pandemic’s first month in March 2020, retail sales of PB increased by 75 percent. Though no other month reached that high, pandemic sales remained brisk as people searched for affordable, shelf-ready foods.

*Last but not least, peanuts are misnamed because they are not a nut. They are legumes, like peas and beans. The pods also grow underground or on the surface, but not on trees.

Kat Bergeron, an award-winning veteran reporter and feature writer who specializes in Gulf Coast history and sense of place, is retired from the Sun Herald. She writes this Gulf Coast Chronicles column as a freelance correspondent. Reach her at:

BergeronKat@gmail.com

Or, at Southern Possum Tales, P.O. Box 33, Barboursville, VA 22923