Creamy and Crunchy: An Informal History of Peanut Butter, the All-American Food / Jon Krampner

The Aussies have their vegemite, the Europeans their nutella, but the sandwich spread that unequivocally and perhaps uniquely defines the American palate is peanut butter. This book tells you all you need to know about peanut butter from its humble origins (no, George Washington Carver was not its inventor) to the consolidation of the triumvirate of national brands: Jiffy, Skippy, and Peter Pan.

Did you know that peanut butter tastes more flavorful when made from Spanish, Valencia, or Virginia peanuts and not the less tasty (but easier to process) florunners? A major “improvement” in peanut butter production was eliminating the oil separation which still characterizes natural brands. Unfortunately for the consumer, the solution to a creamy, more stable spread was adding partially hydrogenated oil, this being the poster child for trans-fats, the nutritional bad boy in recent years. (The U.S. government calls standard grocery store peanut butter trans-fat free because it contains less than 0.5g of trans fats per serving, but it does contain trans-fat. And who eats a recommended serving?) A manufacturer added chocolate to peanut butter in the early 1900s, but the marriage was not a success—an idea before its time. The peanut butter industry is almost obsessively secretive about its production lines, though one wonders with recent salmonella contamination of a national brand if this is less a concern about industrial espionage and more about meeting health codes. Plumpy'nut is a fortified peanut paste that is a major tool in fighting malnutrition and starvation in developing nations. Peanut butter is manufactured not just for use as a sandwich spread, it is used in such popular confections as ice cream, cookies, cookie mixes, sauces, Reeses pieces and Reeses cups in all sizes and permutations!

This kind of nonfiction history can be fascinating, and all the more so in Georgia, where peanuts may outshine peaches as a cash crop.

Comments

Here we are / Graham Swift

This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.

So Much for That / Lionel Shriver

This novel comes from the 2005 Orange Prize winning author of We Need to Talk About Kevin , a disturbing book in which a parent with ambivalent feelings towards motherhood deals with the aftermath of a Columbine-style school killing perpetrated by her son. Lionel Shriver has said that she prefers to create characters that are hard to love, and So Much for That certainly contains some flinty characters, who although they may be hard to love, are nevertheless very believable. The topic this time is healthcare in America. Shep is all ready to launch into an exotic early retirement on the island of Pemba off the eastern coast of Africa, but when his wife reveals a diagnosis of mesothelioma, he must hold on to his job to maintain family health coverage to see her through her devastating illness. His work colleague and friend, Jackson, experiences a medical dilemma completely of his own doing, which proves to be his un doing. Jackson's daughter suffers from an unusual genetic disorde...

Murder in Passy, An Aimée Leduc Investigation / Cara Black

If you like your mysteries set in European locales, here’s a Parisian detective series that is sure to please. Aimée Leduc is a private eye, born of a French career detective and an absentee American mother (brief hints of angst over this in this installment). She’s appeared in about ten adventures, always set in iconic Parisian neighborhoods : Murder in the Marais, Murder in the Bastille, Murder in Montmartre, and Murder in the Latin Quarter , to name a few. In Murder in Passy (Paris’s tony XVIe arrondissement), Aimée finds herself mixed up in a murderous intrigue involving the French arm of the Basque nationalist movement. The final chase involves the kidnapping of a Spanish princess, a secret torture chamber used by the Gestapo in WWII, and a rooftop escape. The author sprinkles enough French words into the dialogue to either annoy you or make you feel your French 101 was not for nothing— Zut alors! très chic, c’est parfait, désolé, c’est tout! Oh, and Aimée’s frequent stop...

Peachy Reads

Search This Blog