SMALL BATCH | HANDCRAFTED | FAMILY OWNED AND OPERATED | MADE IN THE USA
Two Brothers Nut Butters
Gourmet Nut Butters Made With A Purpose
Two Brothers Nut Butters
Gourmet Nut Butters Made With A Purpose
Where the Heck did Peanut butter come from?
Peanut Butter and Dr. Kellogg's Sanitarium
An American, doctor, nutritionist and cereal pioneer John Harvey Kellogg, who filed a patent for a proto-peanut butter in 1895. Kellogg’s “food compound” involved boiling nuts and grinding them into an easily digestible paste for patients at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, a spa for all kinds of ailments. The original patent didn’t specify what type of nut to use, and Kellogg experimented with almonds as well as peanuts, which had the virtue of being cheaper. While modern peanut butter enthusiasts would likely find Kellogg’s compound bland, Kellogg called it “the most delicious nut butter you ever tasted in your life.”
A Seventh-Day Adventist, Kellogg endorsed a plant-based diet and promoted peanut butter as a healthy alternative to meat, which he saw as a digestive irritant. His efforts and his elite clientele, which included Amelia Earhart, Jhon Rockefeller and Henry Ford, helped establish peanut butter as a delicacy. As early as 1896, Good Housekeeping encouraged women to make their own with a meat grinder, and suggested pairing the spread with bread.
The nation’s food scientists are nothing if not ingenious, and peanut butter posed a slippery problem that cried out for a solution by the turn of the century. Manufacturers sold tubs of peanut butter to local grocers, and advised them to stir frequently with a wooden paddle, according to Andrew Smith, a food historian. Without regular effort, the oil would separate out and spoil. Then, in 1921, a Californian named Joseph Rosefield filed a patent for applying a chemical process called partial hydrogenation to peanut butter, a method by which the main naturally occurring oil in peanut butter, which is liquid at room temperature, is converted into an oil that’s solid or semisolid at room temperature and thus remains blended, the practice had been used to make substitutes for butter and lard, like Crisco, but Rosefield was the first to apply it to peanut butter.
This more stable spread could be shipped across the country, stocked in warehouses and left on shelves, clearing the way for the national brands we all know today. The only invention that did more than hydrogenation to cement peanut butter in the hearts (and mouths) of America’s youth was sliced bread, introduced by a St. Louis baker in the late 1920s which made it easy for kids to construct their own PB&Js.
Rosefield went on to found Skippy, which debuted crunchy peanut butter and wide-mouth jars in the 1930s. In World War II, tins of Skippy were shipped with service members overseas, while the return of meat rationing at home again led civilians to peanut butter.
In this century, the average American kid eats some 1,500 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches before graduating from high school. -Smithsonian Magazine
