It’s one of the most popular sandwiches in the U.S., if not the world, but it’s made with 2 ingredients that, to an outsider, wouldn’t seem to go together.
So where’d it come from? Freak accident? Some English aristocrat in 1542? Anyone know? And what flavor jelly was used first?
The two links below suggest that GIs in WWII were fed PB&J sandwiches. The second site says that no mention of this sandwich can be found that dates to earlier than the 1940s.
http://members.home.net/jjschnebel/Cookup23.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/1998/03/03/home/home.1.html
I hated PB&J as a kid now as an adult I love it. But only grape jelly.
Goober Grape is the best. I could eat that stuff by the jar directly.
Ugh, don’t remind me. On my mission trip every day we had PB&J for lunch. Probably the invention of someone with nothing better to do than to experiment sandwich fillings on each other.
I like mine with homemade jam, a tradition I picked up from my mother. Plum again this year, off my brother’s tree, then possibly later in the season peach (if our tree has a good crop this year). Crabapple jelly, too, once that tree gets big enough. When all the family trees fail, there are the local strawberry stands. A flat of berries makes a LOT of jam.
It’s interesting that G.W.Carver didn’t invent peanut butter. He arrived too late in the process. It seems that mushing up nuts (I know, a peanut is a legume) was popular in the 19th century.
Varina Davis, wife of the President of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis, liked to offer hot bread and “a walnut paste on it derived from the large tree on the White House grounds.”
Confederate Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin commented
“Ah, with bread made of Crenshaw’s flour, spread with a paste made of English walunts and a glass of McHenry’s sherry a man’s patriotism becomes rampant.”
Okay. Anybody tried walnut butter?
You can nut-butter almost anything. Look around at health food, gourmet, or foreign food stores. Some that I have seen are soybean nutbutter and walnut nutbutter and pecan nutbutter.