When was chunky peanut butter invented

In , Dr. John Harvey Kellogg of the cereal company patented the process of making peanut butter with steamed nuts. In , C. Sumner introduced peanut butter to Americans at the St. Louis World's Fair the same fair that introduced the ice cream cone. The first reference to peanut butter joining with jelly in sandwich matrimony was in a recipe by Julia Chandler Davis in the Boston Cooking School magazine. During the early s, peanut butter was an expensive delicacy, served in upscale tearooms.

One place even had a peanut butter and pimento sandwich. As the price of peanut butter fell due to commercialization, the food moved down the economic class ladder and became an everyday treat for everyone. When sliced bread was invented in , the peanut butter and jelly sandwich became a kids' favorite because they could make it themselves. So why are peanut butter and jelly so good together? Smith points out that peanut butter is a "relatively neutral platform providing a nutty taste and a sticky texture that [binds] together various ingredients.

All you need is some soft bread to complete the taste perfection. You probably know that Jimmy Carter was a peanut farmer before he became a U. But he wasn't the first. Way back in the s, Thomas Jefferson grew varieties of more than 70 different species of vegetables, including the peanut, at his home in Monticello.

Peanuts are considered legumes , botanically speaking. By , when Skippy and Jif released their latest peanut butter innovation—squeezable tubes—nearly 90 percent of American households reported consuming peanut butter. In a small, three-month study of health care workers in New Haven, everyone who reported a severe loss of smell using the peanut butter test later tested positive.

No American is more closely associated with peanuts than George Washington Carver, who developed hundreds of uses for them, from Worcestershire sauce to shaving cream to paper. Born enslaved in Missouri around and trained in Iowa as a botanist, Carver took over the agriculture department at the Tuskegee Institute, in Alabama, in His hope was to aid black farmers, most of whom were cotton sharecroppers trapped in perpetual debt to white plantation owners.

So Carver began experimenting with plants like peanuts and sweet potatoes, which could replenish the nitrogen that cotton leached and, grown discreetly, could also help farmers feed their families. In classes and at conferences and county fairs, Carver showed often packed crowds how to raise these crops. Since his death in , many of the practices Carver advocated—organic fertilizer, reusing food waste, crop rotation—have become crucial to the sustainable agriculture movement.

However, modern peanut butter, its process of production and the equipment used to make it, can be credited to at least three inventors. In Marcellus Gilmore Edson of Canada patented peanut paste, the finished product from milling roasted peanuts between two heated surfaces. In Dr. He marketed it as a nutritious protein substitute for people who could hardly chew on solid food. In , Dr. Ambrose Straub of St.

Louis, Missouri , patented a peanut-butter-making machine.