There's Nothing Wrong With A Good Ol' PB&J
I was at one of my favorite Italian hangouts the other day hanging out with some of my favorite Italians. I had backed out of having lunch with them because I had some errands to run. Naturally, one of my smart-ass paesani piped up with, “Nah, he's just going home to have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.”
I actually wasn't, but so what if I was? There is absolutely nothing wrong with a good ol' PB&J.
Italians aren't much into peanut butter. Despite having many supermercati that feature imported American foods, peanut butter just doesn't make the list. In fact, Italy ranks second among European countries where peanut butter is nearly impossible to find. (France, of course, is first.) Now, you want to talk about Nutella and it's a whole different game. But peanut butter and jelly? Not so much. Yeah, they have marmellata (jelly) in Italy, but I think you'd probably be arrested if you were caught spreading it between two slices of bread.
I'm a child of the 1950s and here in the United States PB&J sandwiches were a childhood staple. I don't remember for sure how often Mom fixed them but I know I had PB&J at least a couple of times a week. Probably more. I was a picky kid and PB&J, along with grilled cheese, was a drop dead sure thing. I read somewhere that the average American child consumes 1,500 PB&J sandwiches before graduating from high school. I'm sure I was at least average in that regard.
A peanut butter and jelly sandwich consists of three elements: bread, jelly, and peanut butter. So let's take a quick look at the history of each element.
Oh, come on! We don't really have to go into the history of bread, do we? Well.......yeah, we do. At least the recent history, because it directly contributes to the popularity of PB&J.
Back when John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich “invented” the concoction that bears his name – the “sandwich” as opposed to the “john” – he had to have his servant hack slices of bread off a whole loaf because pre-sliced bread hadn't yet come into being. Once it did, of course, it immediately became the greatest thing since.......well, you know.
And we have Davenport, Iowa's own Otto Frederick Rohwedder to thank for that. A jeweler by trade and holder of an optometric degree, Otto somehow became obsessed with the idea of developing a machine that would slice bread. So he sold his three St. Joseph, Missouri jewelry stores and put the money into his invention. After a couple of setbacks – including a fire that destroyed his blueprints and prototype – he finally got it right and sold his first machine to a friend who installed it at the Chillicothe Baking Company in Chillicothe, Missouri. The first loaf of “Kleen-Maid” sliced bread was produced and sold there on July 7, 1928. The concept caught on. A review on the front page of the Chillicothe Constitution Tribune raved, “The idea of sliced bread may be startling to some people. Certainly it represents a definite departure from the usual manner of supplying consumers with bakers loaves. As one considers this new service one cannot help but be won over to a realization of the fact that here indeed is a type of service, which is sound, sensible and in every way a progressive refinement in Bakers bread service.”
Improvements were made on Otto's original design and soon the idea got around. In 1930, the Continental Baking Company introduced sliced Wonder Bread to the world. Three years later, American bakeries were producing more loaves of sliced bread than unsliced. (You can see Otto's original machine in the Smithsonian, by the way.)
Like bread, jams and jellies have been around forever. But, like Otto Frederick Rohwedder, it took Paul Welch, son of New Jersey dentist and grape juice inventor, Dr. Thomas Welch, to further the development of PB&J by coming up with a process in 1917 for pureeing Concord grapes into a jelly which he originally called “Grapelade.” (That's pronounced “grape-uh-lade,” a play on “marmalade.”)
Now, peanut butter has several fathers and, surprisingly, George Washington Carver isn't one of them, although he is widely credited with the paternity. Oh, in the early 1900s he masterfully pushed the Southern peanut crop to the forefront of agriculture, manufacturing, and just about everything else and his seminal “300 Uses for Peanuts” did include a peanut paste. But Canadian Marcellus Gilmore Edson (not to be confused with a guy named Edison) patented the process for making the stuff in 1884. He made his paste by milling roasted peanuts between two heated plates.
A few years later – 1895, to be exact – Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, the somewhat eccentric Michigan physician and health-food pioneer who gave us corn flakes, patented the process of making peanut butter from raw peanuts, which he marketed as a high-protein food substitute for people with no teeth.
Another peanut butter daddy was St. Louis physician Dr. Ambrose Straub, who first became acquainted with peanut butter at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. He got a local food company to produce a product he had developed and he took it to the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, where it joined the hamburger, the hot dog, iced tea, Dr. Pepper, cotton candy, Jell-O, and the ice cream cone as the newest rage of the age.
And those of us who prefer creamy peanut butter to the crunchy variety have to give credit to California chemist and food businessman Joseph Rosefield who, in 1922, invented a process for making smooth peanut butter by using partially hydrogenated oil. He licensed that process to a company that created “Peter Pan” peanut butter in 1928 and in 1932 he marketed his own product under the name “Skippy.”
As far as bringing these three elements together into the palate-pleasing comestible we know today, here's what happened.
In the closing years of the nineteenth century and the opening of the twentieth, peanut butter began to spread.......no, I just can't do that.......began to make a name for itself among the habitués of upscale tea rooms in places like New York City, where it was often paired with pimento, watercress, celery and the like and served on saltines. Then in 1901, Julia Davis Chandler, writing in The Boston Cooking School Magazine of Culinary Science and Domestic Economics, included this instruction: “For variety, some day try making little sandwiches, or bread fingers, of three very thin layers of bread and two of filling, one of peanut paste, whatever brand you prefer, and currant or crab-apple jelly for the other. The combination is delicious, and, so far as I know, original.” Hence the first published “recipe” for a PB&J sandwich.
But peanut butter was still kind of “uppity,” you know. The stuff of tea rooms and arcane publications. So how did it come down to the masses? Well, two world wars and a depression did the trick. And here's where Rohwedder and Welch and the tetrarchy of Edson/Kellogg/Straub/Rosefield come into play.
Seems the US Army bought a large quantity of Welch's Grapelade to distribute to soldiers in WWI. They liked it and brought it home with them. Then Rohwedder gave the world sliced bread and the former soldiers and their families started spreading it with the already popular Grapelade. Now Rosefield's smooth, creamy, hydrogenated, and, most importantly, affordable iteration of Edson/Kellogg/Straub's original creation came along just as the country was slipping into an unprecedented economic depression. Hmmmm......You could buy a loaf of “nutritious” Wonder Bread (“Helps Build Strong Bodies 12 Ways”) for about eight cents. A jar of peanut butter went for around a nickel and jelly was equally inexpensive. So, put them all together and you've got a decent meal of plenty for a pittance.
Uncle Sam figured that out, too, and issued rations of high-protein, shelf-stable peanut butter, along with Welch's entire run of Grapelade, to G.I.s in WWII. When G.I. Joe came home in 1945, he brought a taste for PB&J with him and passed it on to his baby-boom kids, of which I am one, bringing about a PB&J heyday that stretched from the '50s through at least the '70s.
And the beat goes on. According to a survey of 1,000 people recently conducted by Peter Pan and published in the New York Daily News, modern American children get their first PB&J at the age of four years and two months and keep on eating them right up through adulthood, to the tune of three sandwiches per month on average. Nearly half of all Americans regularly eat PB&J sandwiches and will enjoy 2,984 of them in their lifetimes. The other half just don't know what they're missing.
So, to my friend's opinion of the beloved American classic, I say, chi se ne importa. I like Nutella well enough, but give me two slices of my fresh, homemade bread, a jar of Jif and a jar of Welch's grape jelly, and I'm a happy camper. And now I've gone and flung a craving on myself so I think I'll go keep up my average. Ciao!
