November Is National Peanut Butter Lovers Month!

November 12, 2012

Does peanut butter conjure up memories of your favorite sandwich when you were a child? If you carried your lunch to school, did it almost always have a PB&J in the bag? If so, you may be one of the millions who consider peanut butter a comfort food.

Peanut butter has been around a long time. As early as the 1400s, Africans grounded peanuts into stews, Chinese crushed peanuts into creamy sauces for centuries, and Civil War soldiers dined on "peanut porridge." But peanuts are not actually nuts at all. They are legumes, like beans and peas. We all learned in school that Dr. George Washington Carver is considered to be the father of the peanut industry. But did you know that in 1890 a St. Louis physician developed the idea of packaging peanut paste for people with bad teeth? Another interesting fact is that Americans eat three pounds of peanut butter per person every year. If you want to learn all about how peanuts are grown, harvested, and processed, along with recipes and much more information, you can visit a very interesting website.

If you can remember when your favorite brand of peanut butter came packaged in reusable drinking glasses, you might be a baby boomer like me. I remember helping my mother pick out "matching sets" of glasses for when company came. What a thrill it was to have enough for the table settings. I wonder what those "free" glasses would be worth now. MCPL has two reference books available to check on value.

•  Tomart’s Price Guide to Character and Promotional Glasses by Carol Markowski 
•  Peanut Butter Glasses by Barbara Mauzy

If cooking with peanut butter interests you, MCPL’s catalog is loaded with cookbooks just for peanut butter. You might enjoy:

• Peanut Butter & Co. Cookbook by Lee Zalben
• Peanut Butter Sweets by Pamela Bennett

No matter how you like it, there’s nothing like good ol’ peanut butter!

Cindy K.
Camden Point Branch