48 Fun Facts About Peanut Butter

Before they are ground into peanut butter, how are the peanuts usually prepared?

Dry roasting comes first at modern plants. One early health-spa recipe boiled the nuts instead, and today's peanut butter fans would likely find that version bland.

Despite its name, what is a peanut botanically?

A legume, like peas and beans: bacteria in its root nodules put nitrogen back into the soil, which is why farmers rotate peanuts with hungrier crops such as cotton.

Which civilisations are credited with the earliest form of peanut butter?

The Aztecs and Incas both ground peanuts into a paste, centuries before the spread was reinvented and first patented in the 1880s.

Marcellus Gilmore Edson, who patented an early peanut butter in the US in 1884, was a chemist from which country?

Canada: Edson, a Montreal chemist, meant his peanut paste to be mixed with sugar to make candy, and there is no evidence it was ever sold as a spread.

Which cereal pioneer and sanitarium doctor patented a peanut paste in the 1890s for patients unable to chew?

John Harvey Kellogg served it at his Battle Creek Sanitarium, so peanut butter began life as a health food for wealthy spa guests before it became a cheap staple.

Which famous American is often wrongly credited with inventing peanut butter?

George Washington Carver urged Southern farmers to grow peanuts and devised hundreds of uses for them, but the spread had been patented several times before his famous peanut bulletin came out in 1916.

Which process did Joseph Rosefield apply to peanut butter in the 1920s to stop its oil separating?

Hydrogenation turns some of the oil semi-solid so it stays blended. The stable spread could be shipped across the country and left on shelves, which cleared the way for the first national brands.

Which peanut butter brand, launched in 1932, is credited with the first 'chunky' style?

Skippy's founder stirred fragments of crushed peanuts back into his smooth spread to create the chunky style, and he also gave the brand the wide-mouth jar that became standard.

Procter & Gamble's Jif tasted sweeter than its 1950s rivals because its recipe added sugar and what?

Molasses and sugar sweetened Jif, and recipe changes like these set off a 12-year fight with regulators, settled in 1971 by a rule that peanut butter must be 90 per cent peanuts.

Why was peanut butter barred from using that name in Dutch shops in the 1940s?

'Butter' was dairy-only under the Dutch Butter Act, a rule aimed at margarine makers; the Dutch call the spread pindakaas, literally 'peanut cheese'.

Which US state grows about half of all American peanuts?

Georgia grows roughly half of America's peanuts, and its best-known grower, Jimmy Carter, left the Navy to take over his family's peanut business before he entered politics.

The early-2000s internet meme 'Peanut Butter Jelly Time' starred a pixelated dancing what?

Banana: the 2002 Flash loop set a dancing banana to a novelty rap by Miami's Buckwheat Boyz, and it spread so far that sitcoms and Family Guy went on to reference it.

Plumpy'Nut, a peanut paste eaten straight from the sachet, changed famine relief because starving children no longer had to be treated where?

In hospital: older treatments were milk powders that staff had to mix with clean water, while the paste needs no water or cooking, so parents can feed it to a child at home.

Which peanut-butter-flavoured corn puff, a favourite of Israeli babies, is linked to Israel's low rate of peanut allergy?

Bamba is fed to Israeli infants so widely that a 2008 study found them about one-tenth as likely to have a peanut allergy as Jewish children in Britain, which prompted trials of feeding peanut early.

Peanut butter is prized for its protein, but about half its weight is which nutrient?

Fat makes up about 51 per cent of smooth peanut butter, more than twice its protein, which is why a 100-gram serving packs roughly 600 calories.

The classic children's snack 'ants on a log' is celery filled with peanut butter and dotted with what?

Raisins are the ants. Girl Scout cookbooks printed the peanut-butter celery stick from 1946 with no raisins at all, and the name only turns up in print in 1959.

Which 1920s invention is credited with turning the peanut butter and jelly sandwich into a children's staple?

Sliced bread, sold from 1928, let children assemble the sandwich themselves; its first printed recipe, in a 1901 Boston cooking magazine, had been a dainty tea sandwich for the well-off.

Which company sells the frozen crustless peanut butter and jelly sandwiches called Uncrustables?

Smucker's bought the idea from two Midwestern inventors, then spent years trying to use their patent on a crustless sandwich to stop a small Michigan grocer selling its own.

America's striped peanut-butter-and-jelly jar, sold since 1968, is named after which Southern word for peanut?

Goober is thought to come from nguba, a Central African word for peanut that arrived with enslaved people; rival names such as pindar and earthnut have all but died out.

Elvis Presley's 'Fool's Gold Loaf' was a hollowed-out loaf filled with peanut butter, jelly and a pound of what?

Bacon: one night in 1976 Elvis flew his friends from Memphis to Denver on his private jet just to eat the loaves, then flew straight home again.

A 'fluffernutter' pairs peanut butter with what other spread?

Marshmallow creme and peanut butter were first paired in print during World War I, as the 'Liberty Sandwich'; the fluffernutter name only arrived with a 1960 advertising campaign for the spread.

The fluffernutter has been proposed as the official state sandwich of which New England state?

Massachusetts lawmakers took it up after a state senator tried in 2006 to limit how often schools could serve the sandwich, and a colleague hit back with a bill to honour it.

H. B. Reese created his peanut butter cups in 1928 after working on the dairy farms of which chocolate company?

Hershey went on to supply all the chocolate coating for his cups, and Reese traded on the link by printing 'Made in Chocolate Town' on every pack.

Reese's peanut butter cups were first sold one at a time under what name, reflecting their price?

Penny Cups cost one cent each; when wartime rationing bit in 1942, Reese dropped every other sweet he made and produced nothing but the cups.

Reese's Pieces became hugely popular after appearing in which 1982 film?

E.T. is coaxed out of hiding with a trail of the sweets; the makers of M&M's had turned the film down, and sales of Reese's Pieces shot up within two weeks of its release.

Which company launched the peanut-shaped Nutter Butter cookie in 1969?

Nabisco's cookie became a blood-drive tradition in the southern United States: when the Red Cross there dropped it to save money in 1995, donors threatened to stop giving until it was reinstated.

Peter Pan peanut butter took its name in 1928 from a character created by which author?

J. M. Barrie's hero named the first peanut butter to dominate nationwide; when its owners tried to cut their inventor's licence fee in 1932, he walked out and launched a rival that overtook it.

Which sugar substitute, found in some peanut butters, is dangerous for dogs?

Xylitol is harmless to people but triggers a rush of insulin in dogs, so their blood sugar can crash within an hour; vets say to check the label of anything sold as sugar-free.

Jif's factory in Lexington, Kentucky, is billed as what?

World's largest PB plant: the Lexington factory turns out more peanut butter than any other, and it grew from a local brand called Big Top that Procter & Gamble bought in 1955 and reworked.

What prize did schoolboy Antonio Gentile win in 1916 for the drawing that became Mr. Peanut?

Five dollars was the prize, but the company's founder befriended the family and went on to pay Antonio's way through college and medical school.

The peanut plant is native to which continent?

South America is its home, and peanuts reached the United States the long way round: Portuguese traders carried them to Africa, and they crossed the Atlantic again with the slave trade.

Why did Carl Linnaeus give the peanut the species name 'hypogaea'?

Its pods form underground, and 'hypogaea' is Greek for 'under the earth': once a flower is fertilised, its stalk bends down and pushes the young pod into the soil to ripen.

What British nickname for the peanut references an animal?

Monkey nut was one of many rival names for the crop; peanut won out in the United States and most of the others faded there, but Britons kept this one, mostly for nuts sold in the shell.

A famous 1916 farm bulletin from the Tuskegee Institute promised what about the peanut?

105 ways of preparing it, recipes included, were part of a drive to get Southern farmers growing and eating a crop that restored soil worn out by cotton.

A Tuskegee professor's celebrated 1921 testimony before Congress backed which measure?

A tariff on imported peanuts: given ten minutes, he so charmed the committee with peanut milk, coffee and face cream that it kept extending his time, and Congress went on to put a duty on imported peanuts.

Which poison, made by a mould that grows on badly stored peanuts, do food regulators test for?

Aflatoxin came to light in 1960, when mouldy peanut meal killed some 100,000 young turkeys on English farms in an outbreak first labelled 'Turkey X disease'.

In the American South, a popular roadside snack is peanuts prepared how?

Boiled in briny water, freshly dug 'green' peanuts turn soft and salty; South Carolina made them its official state snack in 2006, in a law adding that schools need not serve them.

Enterprise, Alabama, put up a monument in 1919 to which cotton pest, for pushing its farmers into peanuts?

The boll weevil wrecked the town's cotton, forcing farmers to switch to peanuts, which paid so well that citizens hailed the beetle as a 'herald of prosperity'.

Which drug, carried in an auto-injector, is the emergency treatment for a severe peanut-allergy reaction?

Epinephrine is the same substance as the body's own adrenaline, and a severe reaction can turn dangerous within minutes, which is why people with the allergy are told to keep an injector with them.

In the 1985 cult film 'The Peanut Butter Solution', a boy smears on a magic peanut butter mixture to cure what?

His baldness: a fright makes Michael's hair fall out overnight, and the ghosts' recipe works far too well, growing hair so fast that a villain kidnaps him to make paintbrushes from it.

The buckeye, a peanut butter ball dipped in chocolate, is named after the state tree of which US state?

Ohio's state tree drops a glossy brown nut with a pale 'eye', and the sweet copies it by leaving a circle of peanut butter showing; unlike the candy, the real nut is poisonous.

During World War I, the US government urged Americans to eat peanut butter in place of what?

Meat was being saved for the war effort, so officials promoted weekly 'meatless' days with peanuts high on the menu, and Americans turned to the spread in its place.

Gado-gado, a vegetable salad drenched in peanut sauce, is one of the official national dishes of which country?

Indonesia's tourism ministry picked gado-gado as one of five national dishes in 2018, alongside satay, the grilled skewers that are also served with peanut sauce.

In 2022 the maker of Jif recalled its peanut butter over fears of which contaminant?

Salmonella was traced to the brand's factory in Kentucky, and the recall rippled outwards as other companies pulled chocolates and snack packs they had made with its peanut butter.

Peanut butter was shown off to huge crowds at the 1904 World's Fair, held in which American city?

St. Louis hosted the fair, where a concession stand sold the little-known spread to visitors; the same summer the city staged the first Olympic Games held in the United States.

Which candy bar with a crisp peanut butter centre did Bart Simpson advertise from 1988 to 2001?

Butterfinger gave Bart his warning 'Nobody better lay a finger on my Butterfinger!', and Matt Groening later said the ads' success helped persuade Fox to order the half-hour series.

In the 2019 film 'The Peanut Butter Falcon', Zak runs away from a care home to become what?

A pro wrestler is Zak's dream, and the directors built the film around its star, Zack Gottsagen, after meeting him at a camp for actors with disabilities.

A firm 'peanut cheese' called pinda-dokkunnu was recorded in 1783 in which Dutch colony?

Suriname's pinda-dokkunnu was a solid block of ground peanuts, cut and served like cheese, and the Dutch word for peanut butter, pindakaas, still means 'peanut cheese'.