Having grown up in semi-rural Texas, you’d think I’d have a handle on hick stereotypes and behavior. However, this behavior has never made sense to me; does depositing peanuts into your Coke enhance the flavor somehow? Of the soda? Of the Peanuts? Salted? Unsalted? Who came up with this practice, and does anyone do it anymore? None of my more agrarian friends will confess to doing it, nor have I caught them in the act. Or is this a baseless streotype foisted upon southerners by by a vast Yankee conspiracy?
But don’t ask me why.
I’ve always understood that salted peanuts and RC Cola was the proper way to do it. Doesn’t work as well with dry-roasted nuts, IMHO.
To expand on the way that I do it, one needs COLD RC cola in a 16oz bottle and a sleeve of Tom’s or Lance salted nuts. Open the bottle, drink a swig or two, then deposit a handful of nuts into the bottle. Not too many, or it bubbles up too much because of the salt. Then, enjoy a few peanuts with each swig. When you get low on peanuts in the bottle, deposit a few more.
It’s the combination of the sweet cola and saltiness of the nuts. They compliment each other quite well.
Of course, being a Virginian (YES, By God’s own hand!) and now transplanted into Ohio, I get quite the stare when I do that.
Also took me a LONG time to figure out what people meant when they referred to “Buffalo Wings”.
(me…“Huh? Buffalos got no wings!”)
But, I guess that belongs in the “smack on the forehead” thread.
If I have peanuts and I have a soda they get mixed together. It’s the way your supposed to eat them! I’ve tried many different sodas, I find RC Cola and Dr Pepper get flat real quick with your salty peanuts. Coke and Pepsi work better and still taste good. I prefer Dr Pepper with my peanuts even though it gets flat. I am just a Dr Pepper addict though. My Aunt freaked when she saw me doing this when I was 21!! She was sure I would choke on them and she grabbed my bottle away almost causing me to choke from shock. I grew up in North Carolina but my family is from OKlahoma. My husband is from Illinois and he eats them the same way only he drinks all the soda first and the peanuts last. He’s an odd man.
I always thought that the only way to drink an RC Cola was with a Moon Pie. 
[sub]NRBQ reference[/sub]
This was a fairly common practice when I was a teenager around Pensacola, Florida in the '60s. Tasted pretty good too. But I can’t remember doing it since then.
[slight hijack] On a similar note, the girls in that time and place were convinced that if a person put an aspirin in a bottle of coke and you drank it, you would turn into a raving sex maniac, and so wouldn’t ever accept an already opened coke from a boy. [/slight hijack]
[Homer] Moon pies…mmmmmmmm [/Homer]
This was a moderately common practice in my old rural Louisiana home. I still do it from time to time. There are a number of effects:
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As GrizzRich noted, the salt releases some of the carbonation, making the cola semi-flat (which some of us prefer–I like just a little carbonation in my sodas, not wild fizzing).
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The salt mixes evenly throughout the cola, offsetting the sweetness slightly. This is a very different effect from washing down salty peanuts with cola, which produces a contrast that makes the cola seem sweeter and the nuts saltier. Again, the change in taste appeals to some of us.
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It washes some of the salt off the freakin’ peanuts. The concentrated salt on the peanuts is often a bit too much for my tastes. I prefer to have it diluted.
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It combines two elements of a snack so that you only have to carry one container around (unlike Grizz, I tend to pour all the peanuts in at once). This is clearly a more efficient mode of snacking.
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It invariably leaves one or two ritually acid-cleansed peanuts at the bottom of the bottle as a sacrifice to the great Ghod of Inscrutable Southern Customs, Bubba.