Love of Peanut Butter, and Confessions of a Picky Eater - 2008-05-23 20:33:29
<<< Previous - San Diego Things That Went Boom and Random Linkage | Next - Stonehenge II and Easter Island Moai in Hunt, Texas >>>We were just watching
Alton Brown's Good Eats Peanuts episode (I do loooove our new DVR - it's so hard not to slip and call it a VCR - but best part is not having to scramble around and find blank tapes or one to tape over) which starred the ghost of
George Washington Carver, who's been a hero of mine since childhood. (I did a book report on him in 3rd grade I think.) And I got to pondering whether in my journeys to the deep south I'd ever had
Boiled Peanuts. Maybe when I was on a vacation in Georgia or South Carolina? I can't remember. Maybe the peanuts my great aunt used to send us from Virginia in large tins (I really need to find the company she bought those from) were boiled - they always tasted different, but delicious. (Can't seem to find them online - but I'm betting they changed the design of the can.)
All the talk of peanuts had me realizing how long I've been consuming
peanut butter, and consuming it in a more devoted manner than most. As a child I literally had peanut butter sandwiches for lunch
every day. To the extent that my mother once made me one on Thanksgiving while everyone else had turkey - not that I was having a tantrum, just that I'd not have eaten anything. Yeah, I was a weird kid, I was ok with not eating things, or not eating very much at one sitting. Mom usually just let me be, knowing that it wasn't like I was going to starve - but I think on this holiday we had guests who were worried about "the poor lil thing going hungry" as kind southern relatives do. I actually have no memory of this, it's just one of those stories I've heard. Anyway I ate peanut butter in an almost religious manner, and when I started elementary school it was the same - peanut butter in my bag lunches every day. I never got tired of it - and looking back that was probably a nice thing for Mom, no exotic things to pack in my lunch and no complaints! Until - dramatic pause! - the dentist came into the picture. Seems that one of the side effects of daily consumption of peanut butter is having it gradually stain your teeth. Or so the dentist claimed. Mom took this seriously and thus began the rationing of the peanut butter. I was much older by this time, and not about to refuse to eat or grumble too much, but I was sad. I still loved peanut butter. I was also brand picky - it had to be smooth
Peter Pan Peanut Butter*. Jelly was optional - I actually didn't care if there was jelly or not. And humorously I can still sing the Peter Pan jingle that was all over the tv at the time. ("If you believe in peanut butter, you gotta believe...") If a jar of chunky was bought by accident I'd not eat it - and if someone else offered chunky peanut butter at their house I'd politely decline. Much as I loved peanut butter I'd eat anything else rather than chunky - I was a purist and wanted my peanut butter smooth!
Flash forward to the present. I've switched to
Jif Peanut Butter for many years now - because it doesn't seem quite as sweet as the other brands, but at the same time it's not as salty/bitter as some of the "homemade" or freshly made or organic peanut butter I've tried in the past. (I'll also eat the chunky kind, though smooth is still my favorite.) I have to admit I like processed food. I've grown up with it, and I like it that way. It's a comfort food. So although
Alton has shown us how to make peanut butter - that's interesting, but not something I'd ever want to bother with. Sure I'm eating preservatives, chemicals, etc. etc. etc. I'm often curious if there's something in that list of chemical additives that I actually like the taste of and am attracted to - because how else to explain my similar love of the nuclear orange
Kraft Macaroni and Cheese? Which now comes in these great lil packs that you can just pop into the microwave and make a single bowl - which is just
too perfect.
Then again, I'm also from the generation that drank
Tang because the astronauts did, which was cool. Stuff tasted nothing like orange juice, but that wasn't the point. And then we moved on to
Kool Aid** and sodas. And you know, I can't somehow feel this is any great tragedy or that I was missing anything. I still look on that stuff as a lot of fun. Though when I drank some Kool Aid recently I was really amazed at how sweet that stuff is - and this is from someone addicted to drinking
Coke.
Meanwhile I had the same purist attitude about my
Jello - don't put anything in it please, I'd only eat it clear and unadulterated by fruit or - *shiver* - vegetables. You haven't had a freaky jello experience until you've tasted some with cabbage and onions added to it. This is the kind of thing that pretty much made me shrink from trying anything new when I was younger - there is a lot of very BAD stuff that adults will try to pawn off on you, and insist that it tastes good. And believe me, it does NOT. Even as an adult you won't get me to eat jello with vegetables in it. (And I include
aspic in this, because it fits that description, and can be very deeply nasty.) Oh perhaps it
might taste good, if cooked by someone who's a master chef - but believe me, the odds of it tasting nasty are very high. I'd prefer to save my food adventures for something like squid eyeballs.*** I mean, at least if you're trying something like that and it tastes awful that's not entirely a surprise, but you'd then have bragging rights. You tell someone "ugh, that cabbage jello was awful" and most normal people will tell you "well of course it was, why did you bother eating that stuff?!" Eat sheep
entrails and it may be nasty, but at least you'll have a good gross out story to tell next time there's a lull in conversation at Thanksgiving dinner.
In the south all sorts of unusual things get onto the table - gizzards, chicken necks, chicken liver, collard greens, black eye'd peas. (Note: I wouldn't touch any of those things as a child, only later, only some of them. Yes, I was picky.) If you don't think the last two are odd then you are southern, and you also don't realize that those are vegetables that a lot of the country doesn't eat, or were once considered the discard items. So much of what is considered southern home cooking is really "what folk who didn't have much money ate because it was all they could get." I'd probably like collard greens a bit more if I hadn't had so many of them that were cooked until they were dead, limp and sad. I love black eye'd peas if they're served with something that tastes good with them, or they have something added to them. I can also remember moving to Kansas and my mother being amazed when she found out that black eye'd peas were considered something to be fed to livestock, that they weren't something that was normally thought of as food for humans.
Some of my attitude has to do with the fact that I spent a lot of time with my southern grandmother. Every summer I would visit my grandparents in east Texas - something I'm still happy I was allowed to do. (We usually spent Christmas and Thanksgiving with them as a family.) During this time my grandmother would cook some, but she never pretended to be a great cook - she just made simple food of the same sort that everyone in her region ate. And damn fine pound cake - but that's another story. No, the important part of this is that they lived in the south and had a LOT of friends and relatives. Part of my visit meant that I too had to go visiting - which was something that southern women had done for hundreds of years, though of course in the 1970s and 80s it wasn't as formal as it had been. No dressing up in nice clothes, no name cards to send in via butler. Thankfully. We would call ahead, run any errands we had to do, then drop by various people's homes. I could never keep straight if I was related to everyone we visited because my grandmother literally had hundreds of friends and acquaintances. (She was a retired college drama teacher and directed the community theater for years. So that's no exaggeration.) And part of every visit was that you were offered food and a beverage. Because that was required - in southern homes you
always had something in your kitchen to offer guests, and some guests still didn't bother to call before they dropped by, so you had to be prepared. Luckily for me what was offered was usually a dessert - though there are some freaky and bad tasting desserts out there as well. (Many southern women liked to experiment in their cooking. Sometimes results were epic...sometimes...not.) But if we were visiting for lunch or if we went to a family reunion - where there're several long tables of food set up - you were definitely in danger of having to try Great Aunt Somebody-or-other's fig and onion salad, or some other odd thing.
If you come from a family of people where everyone cooks lovely things (my husband's family is this way, bless them, they all can cook amazingly delicious foods) you may not know the danger this kind of visiting can take on. It was a MUCH easier strategy to become known as the little granddaughter who was from the midwest (therefore unfamiliar with certain southern food) and who was very picky. If you're well known as a "picky eater" there's a huge safety factor in it. (Grandmother would usually warn people ahead of the meal and apologize for me. Of course now I feel badly about that.) You won't be pressed to try something that the more polite adults are putting tiny dabs of on their plate while trying very hard not to make faces. You won't have to bravely eat something very nasty and finish as much as possible for fear of hurting the cook's feelings.
However once I went away to college and then traveled some I regretted this. You see it was then that I found myself in
many situations where I was a guest and found myself bravely eating bad tasting foods and trying to smile because I really liked my hosts. This made me realize that it's better to get into practice doing this rather young, as there's an art to consuming food that you dislike and not letting it show on your face. I admit, the other art form of moving the food around on your plate so it appears to have been eaten is something that I did study as a child, and I'm fairly good at it, though not an expert. Because I also remember that even waitresses at restaurants would worry over me not eating all my food - which I suppose is also a very southern thing.
I still have strange eating habits, I admit it. I was brought up to feel that it was ok to leave food on your plate - but also that it was nice to clean your plate and thus let the cook know you appreciated the meal. Mom felt that if I didn't like a food it wasn't vital to make me eat it - and we never had dessert regularly, so there was none of that as a bribe. Often as long as I tried a bite and then said I didn't like it, that was enough for her. (There were foods she and my father didn't like either, so it was never made out as a real problem.)
Suddenly I remember a
George Carlin monologue:
"We're eating that? I don't like that."
"But how do you knoooow you don't like it if you never even tried it?"
"It came to me in a dream!"
So I still struggle between which it's going to be when we go visiting or when we're at a restaurant - leave food on my plate or eat something I don't want. (There are still restaurants you can go to where they honestly care if you don't finish your food. Not many, but some.) Also with portions are large as they seem to be at some restaurants there's the issue of just getting full - and over-eating is not something I enjoy either, even if the food is wonderful. Odds are that unless I serve myself I'm not going to eat everything on my plate unless I've skipped a meal that day. Even if I just love the food. I get full quickly, and if I have a salad or any bread I can actually fill up before the main course. If we go somewhere where I can take something home, it's not a problem. But I can remember how hard it was to refuse food in some of the visits in the south. Especially dessert - a child refusing dessert must obviously ill, the poor little thing! I've had nice relatives send me and my grandmother home with something wrapped up for me to eat later. Which gives me warm fuzzy memories when I think back on it. Especially now that my grandparents are both gone.
Excuse me, I need to go whip up some Kraft mac and cheese now. And then maybe call my mom and give her my love.
*********************
Footnotes!
* Wow, check this out:
Peter Pan Peanut Butter:
"The first patent for peanut butter was issued in the late 1800s. However, peanut butter as it's known today began with Joseph L. Rosefield, who earned a patent for shelf-stable peanut butter in which the oil does not separate from the peanut butter. Launched in 1928, Peter Pan was one of the first brands to sell this style of peanut butter."
Oh I knew the part about Carver not being the actual inventor of peanut butter. I'm talking about the oil not separating. If you've ever eaten peanut butter with the oil separating (you have to keep mixing it up to use it) you'll appreciate how great that is.
Peanut butter - it's really all about science. And damn cool. Remember that.
** I had no idea that
Kool Aid can be used as a dye!
Wikipedia rocks.
*** I have no idea if people actually eat squid eyes. I do know that the eye of a
giant squid is supposed to be the size of a dinner plate, so...yeek. But I'd still rather try a spoonful of that than aspic.
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