Are you guys. We've gone a little nutty with this topic, but there's so much more to talk about.
Yes, we're nuts about peanuts.
My name is Evel Longoria and I am Myra and welcome to Hungry for History, a podcast that explores are past and present through food.
On every episode, we'll talk about the history of some of our favorite dishes, ingredients, and beverages from our culture.
So make yourself at home. Even so, you grew up with some Mexican idioms, right, because I don't. I don't have any Mexican I don't have any detols that mentioned peanut in it. Do you?
I have just one even ever heard that?
Like it means peanuts to.
Me, Like it doesn't matter.
It's a matter which is which is ironic, right, because peanuts are an essential ingredient in Mexican cooking and marlaise and and Santa Mata.
And they're filled with protein vitamins.
But it's small and cheap and synonymous with something kind of unimportant.
So it's like small. That's why, speaking of idioms, you know, he's a nut job. You're a nut You're so nutty. I'm nuts about him. He makes me nuts. The peanut gallery. Like there are so many idioms in English, like so many the nut can be a crazy person, a testicle, a person's physical head. How did the nut become so important in our English language? Right?
And even like an exclamation like, oh my god, that's nuts. It's so funny.
So I love food related idioms, so it's you know. Some of them referred to the physical description of the nut as is hard round out herself with something valuable inside, like like the brain and the skull, like if you're nuts about somebody, they're like embedded in your head. But according to some sources, this definition days back to the eighteenth century, like early seventeen eighty five we see this reference.
And then it was in a newspaper comic, right the first time nuts were seen as like crazy.
A comic strip named Mutt and Jeff and in nineteen oh eight, so super early to be off one's nut meant to be separated from your head. And then if something is nutty it developed from that as like something is you know, silly or crazy or eccentric.
Oh this one, I love the peanut gallery Like all right, U hush peanut gallery, Like I used actually used this one a lot and I love that it comes for the vaudeville era because the cheapest seats or the gallery were filled by the poor members of the audience who were stereotyped as like unruly or like they were the hecklers, and they would throw peanuts because it was like the cheap snack sold at theaters. And then in the segregated South,
these seats were largely occupied by black patrons. So this phrase of like the peanut gallery, it was a phrase that gained cultural recognition even though it's had offensive origins. It became less obvious because it was used in a children's program How Toy Doty in the nineteen forties and fifties, and the show featured this boisterous studio audience of children known as the penut gallery. So today it's used to
describe a group of people offering unsolicited comments. I do not care what you have to contribute to this conversation, you peanut gallery. But understanding its historical roots, there are so many horrible phrases that we don't realize how really dark origins, like crack the whip when you want somebody to like, let's go, guys, crack the whip. We've got to get going that I have such an allergic reaction when I hear that, because I think people don't realize
where it comes from. It's important to being mindful of the origins.
To know what we're saying.
So, okay, we left off the last episode with Mexico, so let's give a recup on how the peanut got to the US.
So Portuguese conquers. It took it from Brazil to Africa and the fifteen hundreds, and they rapidly spread across the continent, you know, so much so the botanists mistakenly believed that they were native to Africa, and then enslaved West Africans carried peanuts to North America and we actually see the first recorded peanut were you know, referenced in sixteen ninety
in Charleston. And so initially the peanuts were grown mainly for animal feed, but enslaved Africans began cultivated them to supplement their meager food rations, and they became integral to Southern food traditions. They were often grown and garden plots tended by enslaved people for their own you know, sustenance, and up until the American Revolution, peanuts were cultivated primarily by African Americans in their own garden patches for their families.
Well, so there were such sustenance, like it was such an easy way to get nutrition.
And so for many years they were dismissed as animal fodder or poor people's food. But then after the Civil War they started gating wider acceptance because soldiers on both sides they needed them for nutrition. They relied on them for energy and protein. But they also really liked them.
They're fun to eat. I will say that they are.
They are there's something very I don't know, they're festive about it.
But the soldiers this makes sense because they would provide energy and protein for them, right. And then after the Civil War, what happened? How did they stay and demand?
They just you know, soldiers really liked them. And then they started becoming popular everywhere. The South started shipping more and more peanuts to the North as urban demand for peanuts and these growing cities, they just sort of boomed like people wanted peanuts. And then we slowly start seeing peanut based recipes in cookbooks for white you know, elite, And one of the earliest was Sarah Rutledge, this woman
who wrote Carolina Housewife in eighteen forty seven. She has a ground nut soup, and ground nuts is what the peanut was called in Africa, and it was beaten peanuts simmered with a pint of oysters and Chile.
Oh wow, Chile, says a seed pepper or two, so a chilo o some sort of Chile. And then we did mention the last episode. By the eighteen eighties, like the late eighteen hundred, streetcart vendors and traveling circuses were offering these hot roasted peanuts to fair goers and audience members across America. So then that kept it alive as.
Well, right, and street vendors.
That's a really important part of the story of the peanut everywhere really, because they were sold in mes amarkets as well. But in the US there's street vendors have always had their finger on the pulse, right, They know what people want and they get instant feedback.
Yeah no. And so when these American cities experienced all this rapid growth of like mass migration in the late eighteen hundreds nineteen hundreds, it feels like this created a market that needed a convenient and affordable street snack, especially in places like New York City or Chicago and things like that. So I always think, you know, all good things, at least good food come from immigrant communities, right totally.
And a lot of these immigrants who didn't have, you know, weren't proficient in the English language, or didn't have a capital to start, you know, a business, they turned to push cart vending to survive because the startup costs for a simple cart and a sac of peanuts were really, really low, and so peanut vending became a.
Very viable option for a lot of people.
And this trade provided this entry point into entrepreneurship in these bustling American cities.
So we can't talk about peanuts without mentioning George Washington Carver.
George Washington Carver born around eighteen sixty five, nobody really knows exactly, and he rose from this sickly orphaned child he was born in a Missouri farm to become one of America's most influential scientists and educators. He transformed agriculture and the perception of peanuts in the US to a really important product. So this guy was born in a one room cabin in Missouri on a farm owned by these German immigrants, Moses and Susan Carver. His mother had
been enslaved. We don't know who his father was. And when he was a child, George and his mom were kidnapped and taken to Arkansas, and he was eventually returned when Moses Carver traded a horse for him. He never saw his mother again. It's this crazy story, like crazy story, but he was educated. He earned a Masters of Agriculture in eighteen ninety six and started working at the Tuskegee
Institute in Alabama as head of the agricultural department. So Carver he saw that tobacco and cotton farming had just exhausted southern soils. So he started teaching poor farmers to grow peanuts and sweet potatoes to improve the soil. You know this like monoculture never really works, So to improve soil and to earn a living. And in nineteen fifteen he published a bulletin on peanuts. And this is at a time that the boil weavil had devastated Alabama's cotton crops.
If farmers couldn't sell the peanuts that they had grown, at least they could just eat them, right, and they had a nutritious food source. And so his research identified over three hundred uses for peanuts, including like oils and dyes and soaps and like even peanut based sausages. And so he promoted agricultural sustainability and economic independence, helping black farmers shift away from exploitive cotton farming while elevating the
reputation demand for peanuts. And so his legacy is one you know, of science and education and innovation, and he helped bring peanuts to the mainstream.
So it was his research and agricultural efforts that really put peanuts on the big stage in the US exactly. Well, then by the twentieth century, peanuts were everywhere. They weren't on the margins anymore. They were in mainstream and mostly in the vaudeville and music halls. So if there was any type of entertainment, somebody was selling peanuts. And the cheapest seats were famously filled with the patrons eating peanuts and throwing peanuts at performers, and it kind of cemented
the snacks association with like mass entertainment. So then cinema exploded in you know, around the nineteen twenties, and movie theaters began selling peanuts with popcorn and candy because they were very inexpensive concessions, and so then they were a fixture in theaters by the nineteen twenties. So so interesting that peanuts became this like standard fair at anything entertainment
and especially at baseball games and festivals. And this was thanks to improved harvesting technology that allowed for mass production and distribution. So I knew something had to happen totally, and something had to happen with like industrial mass production of peanuts because they became they were everywhere.
They were everywhere circuses, the circus peanuts, and like elephants eat peanuts, that was a total circus thing. Elephants don't naturally eat peanuts, they eat grasses.
But it's like give it a peanut, all right. So when does peanut butter come into the picture. I know it has something to do with doctor Kellogg.
So we established in part one the peanut butter or peanuts have been part of pre Hispanic diets for centuries and they were ground into paste. But peanut butter got this boost thanks to this vegetarian doctor named John Harvey Kellogg.
In eighteen ninety five, he patented this food compound which was basically peanut butter and he designed for his patients at his Battle Creek Sanitarium, and he launched this health focused adventure creating plant based alternatives to meat, and one of its stars was something called protos, which was a peanut and wheat meat substitute. And this helped American see peanuts as this protein packed, easy to digest food even
those who could not to meat. And it was advertised as a food for the toothless, which is so old, which is not at all appetizing.
John Kellog was really about this kind of vegetarian, plant based alternative.
And people This is in the late eighteen hundreds, they started telling people like magazines like Good Housekeeping telling readers to make their own peanut butter with a meat grinder. And then in the nineteen hundreds, of former Kellogg employees, a guy named Joseph Lambert invented machines to roast and grite peanuts, and this made peanut butter cheap and wildly
available around the country. And then the Saint Louis World's Fair in nineteen oh four was a turning point because people tasted it along with peanut bread ale and roasted peanuts and other health foods. It's always a world's fair, that always always, it always is the world always a turning point, always and it's always either the Chicago one, the or the Saint Louis one or the London one,
like it's always the turning point of something. And they had these advertisements that boasted the ten cents worth of peanuts pecks six times the energy of a porter House steak. Interesting, and then during the Great Depression, the peanut butter, because it was so cheap, it became a lunch box favorite.
Peanut butter and jelly sandwich, which emerged around this time because during World War One, meat rationing made peanut butter basically the protein alternative, and then this meatless mondays became popular. I can't believe that that became popular in World War One so long ago, but during this time or a little after the war, families began pairing peanut butter with
these sweet fruit spreads. And then sliced bread was invented in nineteen twenty eight, and that revolutionized sandwiches because they you could do it quick and easy. You could assemble this quick and easy. And then at the same time, Joseph Rosefield pioneered partial hydra enation, which created this like creamy, shelf stable peanut butter that could be shipped nationwide, and that paved the way for Skippy peanut butter and Peter Pan peanut butter, which if I eat peanut butter, I'm
usually I'm usually eating Skippy. Really, yeah, I don't know which one's better by because there's there's Skippy, Jiffy, Peter Pan. I don't like the sweet lies. I like the salt sells one like it.
I like you, Yeah, I like I don't like this sweet one.
World War two, again, peanut butter was included in soldier rations uh and Skippy Skippy was actually included in the peeb and Jay sandwiches that then became a staple and kitchens across the US. Ninety percent of US households enjoy peanut butter and jelly sandwiches sandwiches. Wasn't it Elvis's favorite peanut butter and banana? Elvis's favorite sandwich? Yeah, I was banana.
Peanut butter and banana.
You're right. Well, since it's Halloween, let's talk a little bit about the history of some of our favorite peanut based candies. Yes, I well, this is the only way I need a peanut is if it's in a candy chocolate bar, sugar chocolate coated. Like, I'm not eating it by itself. I'm just not doing it.
But I'm like the opposite. But I do like goobers.
So, oh, what's a goober?
Oh my god, you've never had goobers in movie theaters. It's usually the snack that I get in movie theaters.
Nope, you've never had the goobers.
They have them in all of the movie theaters in La. Yeah, it's basically an eminem without the candy coating. So it's the original movie candy. So movie theaters they were booming in the nineteen twenties, and it was there were popcorns so it opp and nuts and these goobers. They were easy to share, perfect for snacking in the dark. And it was this combo of chocolate and crunchy peanut butters. This combo was very novel and in algent. But just
to backtruck a little bit. In eighteen ninety four, Milton Hershey a caramel maker from Lancaster, Pennsylvana, and he bought a chocolate making machine and created the Hershey's Chocolate Company and peanuts were not among the ingredients in his early candy wars, but he kind of opened the path to this sort of chocolate and peanut combo. And so this Goober was originally the original candy, and the name Goober made it memorable because it's kind of fun to say.
And the word comes from the Goula word goober, which means peanuts. So you see this African connection. And then there's a Baby Ruth, Baby Ruth. I do like a Baby Ruth.
Where does that? What? Movies that Baby Ruth?
I don't know.
Goonies, of course, the goonies. I love that baby. This one is one of my favorite candies because it's like peanut caramel nougat bar. It coded in chocolate I did. What I didn't know was that in nineteen twenty one, the Curtis Candy Company repackaged and rebranded a one called Candy Cake, and they launched it as Baby Ruth. So it was called something else before it was called Baby
Ruth and Curtis Candy Company. Curtis claimed that the name came from Ruth Cleveland, the daughter of President Grover Cleveland, who had died in nineteen oh four, and at the same time, Baseball's Babe Ruth was becoming America's biggest sports star. So many historians view this as a legal marketing ploy, and it allowed Curtis to avoid paying baseball legend Babe Ruth for the use of his name while still benefiting
from the public's like mental association with him. And so when Babe Ruth tried to launch his own candy bar, Curtis sued him for trademark infringement and one snicky Oh my God, Baby Ruth was one of the earliest examples of clever branding and marketing in US candy history because it wasn't just sold as a sweet, it was like also marketed as fuel, like an energy bar for working Americans. Can you imagine no Baby Ruth today, Like eat this,
it's an energy bar. No. No, So by the late nineteen twenties, Baby Ruth was the number one five cent candy bar in America. There's more important ones. We got to get to the more important ones. Peanut butter cups, Reese's Pieces, peanut em and M's right which I have quit about those. I have a question about those. But let's talk about the peanut peanut butter cup. Because when was this born, This brilliant invention.
The peanut butter cup.
That's probably my favorite peanut butter can't because I don't love me candies, but I do love to be Reese's
peanut butter bar. So it was born in nineteen twenty eight in Pennsylvania in a basement kitchen by a man named Harry Burnette Reese, who was a former dairy farmer who worked for Milton Hershey and Hershey Pennsylvania, and so in nineteen twenty eight he left the Hershey's dairy farm to start his own candy business, and among them were penny cups, these little chocolate cups filled with sweet peanut butter.
And this combo was an instant hit, and by the nineteen thirties, Reese's peanut butter cups became his signature candy. They were really inexpensive, they were totally indulgent, and this was at a time when the Great Depression made people crave these affordable luxuries.
And so he kind of found a niche.
He created a niche, and by nineteen sixty sixty three, the Hershey Chocolate Company acquired Reese's business for twenty three point five million dollars, and it was this kind of balance of sal d, sweet, creamy, crunchy, and it was there was nothing like this, and it was.
Packaged individually, and so they felt like shareable and personal.
And it's still one of the most popular candies in the US, inspiring lots of spin offs, including Reese's Pieces, which was made popular during an et the movie ET when Elliott lures Et out of hiding, leaving a trail of Reese's Pieces.
Wait, so did you know that? Originally Steven Spielberg wanted Eminem's.
Yes, I did know this, and they declined yes, oh my god. But after the movie was released, sales of Reese's Pieces skyrocketed, and the et that the product placement is cited as one of the most successful product placements in history.
It's fascinating.
It's so yeah.
I can't think of Recent's Pieces without thinking about ET.
I saw this argument on the TikTok or Instagram, one of those places. And the peanut Eminem, which was invented by Forrest Mars, which was the side of the Mars Chocolate Empire. Founder. He got this idea from seeing soldiers eating chocolate pellets coated and sugar during the Spanish Civil War and this kind of prevented the chocolate from melting. So the original Eminem's were plain chocolate with a candy shell designed to survive the heat and transport, and that
was nineteen forty one. In nineteen fifty four, peanut m and ms were introduced as a new variety, and then it became the brand's top seller. But I saw this argument on the Instagram or the TikTok where somebody said the peanuts are the original, and this wife was like, no, the original is just the chocolate, and he's like no,
and this husband and wife were fighting about it. So just to let you guys know, the original m and ms were plain chocolate, and peanut m and ms were introduced almost fifteen years later, but it is the top seller. I would like to settle this argument.
Once and for our.
So we went a little nutty on this topic. But who knew this small and mighty peanut had so many stories to tell?
Are you a convert?
Now?
Do you love peanuts?
I don't like peanuts by themselves, but I will say I love our peanut peanut based candy history. I'll eat a peanut butter and jelly I'll eat a peanut butter and jelly sandal like I will say, I sometimes do crab it, but I didn't go as nutty on this topic as you. Next week, what are we talking about?
Next week? We're talking about our favorite condiment, mustard. Plus I'm putting even to the test. Does she know her mustards?
I do know my mustard because I just got back from France, from Dijon and learned all about mutad. So leave us a message on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your iHeartRadio app. We love hearing from you. We'll see you next week. Goodbye. Hungary for History is a Hyphenite media production in partnership with Iheart'smikultura podcast network.
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