Peanut-Butter Addict Tells All

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE
Of the editorial page staff
Published by the StarTribune
October 28, 1961


   IF YOUNG enough to go trick-or-treating, I'd count it a good evening's work if I got nothing more than a slice of bread plastered with butter and peanut butter. This combination, washed down with milk, has served me well as long as I can remember. If eaten just before bedtime, it gets one through very nicely until breakfast.
   My youngest is a peanut butter fiend, too, and so were his older brother and sister. But I always was more the purist than they. Whereas they defiled peanut butter with jelly for sandwiches, I've never even cared much for plain peanut butter when it was imprisoned between two pieces of bread. I want it spread thick and I want it straight up.

   HOWEVER, I don't like peanut butter all the time. It is repugnant in the morning. Some odd balls enjoy it on toast at the start of the day. None of my brood ever had this revolting habit and I'm humbly grateful. The odor of it at that hour rocks me.
   Also, unless plagued by starvation, I can walk away from a platter of peanut-butter cookies without effort. The same goes for peanut butter candy. I hope to be spared any such goodies during the holidays.
   But if forced to limit my intake to a dozen items of food from now until the finish, I'd include peanut butter. I couldn't live comfortably without it, particularly before going to bed. Ordinarily I spread it on bread but for really fast refueling eat it direct from the jar.

   I WAS an even greater addict years ago, before the food processors got in their licks and made peanut butter smooth and creamy so it would spread prettily for television. Slaves of modernity claim that this has improved it. I say it hasn't and deplore the fact that today's small-fry is largely unaware of just how good peanut butter can be when left alone and not put through the homogenizer.
   There's little current demand for old-fashioned, pre-Madison avenue peanut butter but in my estimate the spread popular today compares about as favorably with the original article as cultured buttermilk does to the kind we used to get from the churn.

   FOR YEARS I've implored my wife--for Pere sake--to buy some peanut butter with a quarter of an inch of oil on top. Supported by my son, who rates my tastes as Neanderthal, she's resisted, saying our grocer had more brains than to stock it and that if she did get some she'd have to throw it away when it was half gone because it would get dry and hard as a rock.
   I admit that the oil has to be worked in with practically every using, whereas the homogenized article will remain pliant until the next presidential election. But must even our salivary glands be sacrificed on the altar of convenience and easy spreading?

IN a small-town store the other day I chanced upon a jar of old-style peanut butter. It was comparable to seeing a barrel of pickles, a round of cheese and a bunch of bananas hanging from a rope.
   I pounced on it with a glad cry, took my treasure home and, at the first opportunity, plastered a generous potion on a slab of bread, poured a beaker of milk, and went to work.
   Here was big-league eating. Here was time flung backward. Here was the unglamorous, unrefined article. As I intermittently ate and cleared the roof of my mouth, I recaptured a flash of childhood. I was a boy again, sitting beside the kitchen range or stretched under the old cottonwood out back, having a snack in a blissful yesterday.


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