Transcription
As is widely known, the most perfect sandwich in the history of mankind is the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but is it always so perfect? Well, when I make the first recipe for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich from 1901, I'll find out. So thank you to Wondrium for sponsoring this video, because I'm investigating the origins of the PB&J this time on Tasting History. So I suspect this video is going to get a very different reaction in different parts of the world, because while making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich here in America is practically a national pastime, in some parts of the world it's virtually unheard of. In many countries, peanut butter itself is hard to come by, and some people consider the peanut butter and jelly sandwich to be an abomination, and I weep for those people, but perhaps I can win them over with this from "The Boston Cooking School Magazine," 1901. "For variety, try some day making little sandwiches or bread fingers with three layers of very thin bread and two layers of filling, one of peanut paste, any brand you like, and another of currant or quince jelly. This combination is delicious, and, as far as I know, original." So simple, yet so brilliant. It's so simple that there isn't actually a lot to make, but I'm going to show you how to make the bread that was most commonly used for sandwiches at the turn of the century, Pullman bread. But I'm not going to make the jelly or the peanut butter from scratch, because currants and quinces are hard to come by where I live, and peanut butter from this time was just you would put peanuts into a coffee grinder or a meat grinder, and I tried grinding some peanuts with my hand-cranked coffee grinder, and I'm pretty sure I ruined the coffee grinder forever. Fortunately, Whole Foods near me allows you to get freshly ground peanut butter, just using peanuts as the recipe calls for. Its tough texture is reminiscent of peanut butter from the past, when they were also called goobers, and I actually recently discovered why peanuts were once called goobers while watching a course on my sponsor Wondrium today. The series is called "The History of Food Culture and Cooking," and it's presented by food historian and friend of the channel Ken Albala, and this was actually one of the first courses I listened to when I first got into food history. All courses on Wondrium are taught by experts in their fields, and in the field of culinary history, there is no one more expert than Ken Albala. He takes you through the entire history of food, from hunter-gatherers to the big business of today, and in a later episode, he talks about peanuts, and how they originated in South America, then made their way to West Africa, where they were known as ginba. Then during the Atlantic slave trade, they made their way to North America, and ginba became guba or goober. Every course on Wondrium is filled with fascinating tidbits, whether it's covering history or travel, culture, architecture, business, or literature, so if you want to start learning right away, sign up for a free trial at wondrium.com/tastinghistory or just visit the link in the description when you use that link for your free trial of Wondrium. Now, with peanut butter and jelly, let's get to the Pullman bread. I'm going to use a recipe from "The Baker's Bread" by Paul Richards, written in 1906, and for that you'll need: one and two-thirds cups or 400 milliliters of water, 2 teaspoons of active dry yeast, 6 tablespoons or 85 grams of lard or butter, 3 tablespoons or 35 grams of sugar, 5 cups or 600 grams of bread flour, and two and a quarter teaspoons of salt. So first, you're going to add your yeast and sugar to the water and let it proof for a few minutes, then add your flour, salt, lard or butter, and begin to mix these ingredients together until they form a shaggy dough. Then turn it out onto a lightly floured surface and begin to knead until you have a smooth, soft dough. It's a pretty sticky dough, so you might need to add a little more flour, but don't add more than you need. I promise it'll start to firm up as you knead it. After about 15 minutes of kneading by hand or about 5 to 7 minutes in a machine, place the dough into a lightly greased bowl and cover with a damp towel. Let it rise until it's soft and puffy, about an hour and a half, and while it's rising, you can pull out your Pullman bread pan. And this is it, and this is what really makes a Pullman a Pullman. Other names for this bread are pain de mi, pain Anglais, or just sandwich bread, but Pullman was the most common name for bread at the time, and even today I think when you see it, it's usually referred to as a Pullman tin. This bread is said to be named after the Pullman train cars that it was supplied to. Pullman train cars were super luxurious train cars in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and I'm sure that's true, but I like to think it's because the tin looks a little bit like a train car. Choo choo. But Pullman bread is really special because when it's baked here, it's baked with the lid on, so there's very little crust, so it's almost square, and there's very little crust, so it's perfect for tea sandwiches, which are small and they're going to cut the crust off anyway. So it's really like the original Uncrustables, but you don't have to freeze them. So butter the inside of your Pullman bread pan. Mine is 13 inches long, but they do make them smaller. If you do use a smaller size, you'll just need to reduce the amount of dough that ultimately goes into the pan. After buttering, punch down the dough and turn it out onto the counter, and stretch it into a large rectangle that's just a little bit wider than your pan. Then roll it up into a log and pinch the seam together. Then tuck each end into itself, fold it over the seam, and pinch the dough together. Then place the dough seam side down into the pan, tuck it into the corners nicely, and then cover it with plastic wrap and let the dough rise again. This time you want it to rise until it's almost to the top of the pan. This will depend on temperature and everything, but about an hour should get it there. Then remove the plastic wrap, slide the lid onto the pan over the dough, and place it into a 350 degree Fahrenheit or 175 degree Celsius oven for 20 minutes, then remove, take off the lid, and place it back into the oven for another 10 to just 20 minutes to let the top brown just a little bit. You just want this bread to be done, and you can tell when it's done by inserting a thermometer that reads 190 degrees. As soon as it's done, remove it from the oven and place it on a wire rack to cool completely. You can't cut bread when it's hot, so be patient, and make sure you subscribe to Tasting History so you can hear about the origins of the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. So the story of the PB&J is really the story of three ingredients: peanut butter, jelly, and sliced bread, and of those three ingredients, the origin of peanut butter is undoubtedly the most interesting. Peanuts were grown throughout the Inca Empire in South America, and in the early 16th century, a Spanish soldier and poet, Garcilaso de la Vega, encountered the Incas and peanuts, which were then called "inchic," and he decisively mixed legumes saying, "If eaten raw, they cause headaches, but if roasted, they are delicious and beneficial. Made with honey, they make a very good marzipan." So at least as early as the 1500s, peanuts were being ground and mixed with honey, not exactly peanut butter, but close, and it sounds delicious. So much so that the Spanish and Portuguese made sure to bring peanuts back to Europe and Northwestern Africa, and it was in Africa that peanuts became a staple of many dishes, so it's no wonder that they followed the Atlantic slave trade back to the West, arriving in North America with enslaved Africans in the 1700s. Were they ground into a paste yet? Perhaps, we don't know, because like so much of history, it wasn't accurately recorded, so it's a little bit lost. It's not until the late 19th century that we have any more written records of peanuts being ground into a paste. Now George Washington Carver is often credited as the inventor of peanut butter, but peanut butter was not one of the 300 uses he prescribed for peanuts. It's actually thanks to a Canadian, Marcellus Edson, who patented a machine specifically for grinding peanuts in 1884, but what really made the food popular was an American, John Harvey Kellogg of the Kellogg Cereal Company. Now Kellogg had some rather unorthodox views on food, and I really need to do a whole episode on him, but one of his ideas was-- he was a vegetarian and advocated for vegetarianism, which in itself isn't that strange, but his reasoning was that meat was an aphrodisiac... which is a little, a little different, so he substituted meat with other foods, including peanuts, but he found that "when swallowed in small pieces, they are almost undigested. Experiments by the German government have shown that even very small nut particles can pass through the digestive tract entirely unchanged. The chewing of nuts should be so thorough that it becomes a creamy pulp before it is swallowed." Sorry, but for someone obsessed with not having sex, his writings are rather suggestive, don't you think? Anyway, people found it difficult to determine if they were crushing nuts with their teeth to the point of digestibility as he said. So he said, "This difficulty can be overcome by crushing or grinding the nuts in a suitable mill, making a paste, or so-called nut butter." A suitable mill, and he patented it, and not long after, this peanut butter was being spread on bread. In 1896, The Washington Post raved, "Have you eaten the latest dish? I say latest, because this dish, with Welsh rarebit at midnight, is the latest and best sandwich. You have fresh bread and perfect butter. Then you have some freshly roasted peanuts--it's the fashion to roast them yourself--ground fine in a coffee mill... Next you mix the ground nuts with a little sherry or old port into a paste, spread it on the upper bread, and there you have the sandwich that everyone is eating... If you want to follow the fashion set by the wives of cabinet members, you must eat peanut sandwiches." So no jelly yet, but it does include sherry or port, which makes me lament the lack of alcoholic sandwiches on today's menus. Perhaps I'll add a little gin to my tuna salad next time. Probably not. <_< But as the peanut butter and wine sandwich never really took off, it was overshadowed by the flavor combination of peanuts and less fermented fruit. In the same year, 1896, Fannie Farmer suggested making sandwiches with fig jam and chopped peanuts. Not peanut butter, but not surprisingly, just five years later, in the magazine of the school she ran, they finally introduced the first recipe for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, which is what we're making today. But even with a recipe, the sandwich didn't really take off. For one thing, peanut butter at the time was very tough. It wasn't smooth, it wasn't even thick, it was just kind of like almond butter that's often served today, and I guess quince and currant jelly weren't that appealing. Then there was the extra effort of having to cut your own bread... exhausting. But soon there would be a tribute solution to all three of those problems. First, the bread. Otto Frederick Rohwedder of Davenport, Iowa, first realized that cutting your own bread was for suckers, so after a few failed attempts, including a fire in 1912 that destroyed his prototype, he finally introduced a fully functional bread slicer in 1928. Some companies started using it, but many of them thought it was a gimmick and frankly not that smart, because once you cut bread, it goes stale very quickly, so why would anyone want it? But it turned out that pre-sliced bread sold much faster than unsliced bread, and so did the stuff on top, like jam and jelly, so they sold more bread, jam, and jelly, and the thing took off. It was quickly hailed as "the greatest advancement in the baking industry since the wrapping of bread." It was considered so great that we still use the phrase "it's the best thing since sliced bread" to this day, so who knew that for centuries, cutting your own bread was the reason for humanity's stagnation. Now as for the jam or jelly part of the sandwich well, those have been made for thousands of years, and the way they're made has changed very little. But during World War I, Welch's Grape Juice Company, known for what they hailed as "the national drink," became popular in a country that was increasingly obsessed with the temperance movement, and mind you, Prohibition would start in a few years, they released a new product called Grapelade. They said it was neither jam nor jelly, but a form of jam and jelly. It was basically grape jelly, and at first it was only offered to troops fighting in Europe, but when they came home, they came home with grape juice. There's actually a Grapelade advertisement that says "Thanks to Welch's Grapelade, the armistice." Yes, it's great that the death and destruction of World War I was finally over, but you also got Grapelade, and that was followed by Peachlade, Plumlade, and Fruitlade, which was a mixture of grape and raspberry. World War I also helped to popularize peanut butter, because there was a meat shortage, so as John Harvey Kellogg had been touting for years, they substituted protein at home with peanuts. Then in 1921, Joseph Rosefield of California applied the process of partial hydrogenation to peanut butter. This allowed it to remain creamy at room temperature, rather than separating into oil and solids. To this day, fans of Laura Scudder's are still a scourge everywhere. This process was first used by Derby's Peter Pan peanut butter, and they were now able to whip peanut butter into a smooth consistency, rather than the gritty consistency of peanuts in a meat grinder. Then in 1932, Rosefield founded his own peanut butter company, Skippy, and developed my favorite crunchy peanut butter style. But it was smooth peanut butter that really took off, and in recipes like the peanut butter and tomato soup that I made for a Great Depression-era school lunch, it became a favorite of schoolchildren. But its pairing with jelly still hadn't caught on in the school system, and it wouldn't for a few more years. First, the peanuts had to go to war. During World War II, peanut butter became a common item in American soldiers' mess kits. Another common item in the mess kit was Welch's grape juice, so soldiers put peanut butter and grape juice between two slices of bread. This wasn't the first time, but that's when it really caught on, so when they came home, they still had this craving. A craving that I know very well. That's because like flat feet or a receding hairline, they passed it down to their children. By the 1950s, when moms didn't want to cook or kids had to fend for themselves, the peanut butter and jelly sandwich had actually become a staple for children, and the peanut butter and jelly companies made sure that the sandwich made its way into every school cafeteria in the country. In fact, when I was a kid, if you forgot your lunch or for some reason didn't eat lunch at school, they would give you a peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich, served between two slightly squished slices of white bread, and kept at a temperature just above freezing, so it was really firm, and I miss that sandwich so much, I've been chasing it for 30 years, and still haven't really found it, but maybe this 1901 recipe will get me a little closer. So, once your bread has cooled, slice it thinly. You'll need three slices for each sandwich, spread peanut butter on one. Then spread jelly on another, and stack them together, then top with another slice, and then cut it into finger sandwiches, and there you have it. Here we are, the first PB & J. So I've made two here, I have one with currant jelly and one with quince jelly, and I'm very curious about the quince jelly because usually quince fruit is very much like pie, so I'm going to start with that. [Chewing] First, she says to serve these with tea. No, these need to be served with milk. They're fantastic, you know it's a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, you need something-- to wash it down. Also, while I like the idea of three-layer bread, I think only two slices of bread is better, unless it's toasted, which is actually what I usually like to do. I like to do crunchy peanut butter, grape or strawberry jelly, and toasted sourdough. The toasting just makes it a little less sticky, but the jelly, the quince jelly isn't as tart as I thought it would be. Of course, I'm sure they added a lot of sugar, because the only ingredients are quince and sugar, and a little bit of pectin. So it's sweet, but you still get a little bit of tartness, like a raspberry or something. Let's move on to the current jam. [Chomp x2] So I do prefer that one. It's sweeter, and the jam flavor comes through better than the peanut butter, even though it's just ground peanuts here, there's a very strong flavor. I find it to be more intense than you get with something like Skippy or whatever. It's just peanut in your face, but yeah, so I prefer this one over this one. Both are very good, and I would actually take out the second piece of bread, but as for the bread, it's very soft and dense in texture, because it was baked with the lid on, and that's what makes it so good for sandwiches. There are no holes that really fall through. Perfect. Yes, even if it's not my favorite food, the peanut butter and jelly sandwich is still one of them. I know it's simple, but there's something about it, it evokes memories. I don't know. Next week I'll be signing copies of Tasting History recipes in New York City, so if you already have a copy or need one, please come to the Kitchen Arts & Letters at 5 PM on Tuesday, May 30th, and I'd love to see you. I'll put the details in the description, and I'll see you next time on Tasting History.