a love letter to peanut butter

Dear peanut butter,

How is it even possible that I have not yet written this letter?  Peanut butter is quite probably the longest sensual love of my life. I bet I could create a timeline of peanut butter varieties, guises, mixes, types, and recipes over my the last 50 years.  What if I were to draw this like the earth history timeline I drew on a long, thin roll of paper during elementary school – eons and epochs and many forgotten names of divisions of geological time periods, along with tiny stick dinosaurs, surely a pterodactyl, crocodiles, birds, mammals, extinctions, and right up to the tiny sliver of time (no wider than a matchstick) that humans occupied at the tail end.

Let me try:

– PB&J (as a kid, strawberry, now apricot, or plum, or elderberry jelly made by monks)
– PB plus honey (with or without bread) and a dash of salt
– PB and banana (always reeking and brown in my lunchbox, delicious)
- fresh ground from my Nanny Bea’s farmer’s market in La Brea, California (along with Swedish fish candy)
– PB, raisin Ezekiel bread, poblano, arugula, apple, sprout sandwiches (key for all road trips)
– Tofu and broccoli in peanut (butter) sauce
– Tiger carrot soup (since 1996)
–  Am I dreaming this or is there a Ben & Jerry’s PB and pretzel ice cream?
–  Scooped out of the jar with my finger, straight up, and popped into my mouth
–  Reese’s peanut butter cups, and now peanut butter M&M’s
– Tiny peanut butter and jellies on saltines for dessert or after dance (or the one I haven’t tried yet:  Melissa’s grilled PB&J)

–  PB, jalapeño burgers (from my dad’s repertoire, not my own)
– the chewy, perfect edge crunch, fork-tined PB cookies I sent my dad for his 82nd birthday

Peanut butter is my go-to for craving, nutrition, comfort, desire, need. PB predates my chocolate addiction by years, and coffee by decades. No other nut butter can hold a candle to it.  I’ll take peanut butter salted, unsalted, creamy, chunky, natural or not, though I did go through a no Skippy phase. I’m fine with that now, and with any other kind of peanut butter that crosses my path. Oh those tiny PB to-go packs at the Holiday Inn Express breakfast!  Perhaps the kind I like least now is fresh ground from H-E-B.  Funny, it doesn’t have the same mouth feel or deep, oily peanut taste.  

Then there is my dad and my shared love for peanut butter – his has been longer than mine, I imagine, but I always win out in volume. In just three days, when I tag along on my parents’ vacations, I can polish off a jar of Trader Joe’s chunky while he eats perhaps two teaspoonfuls on his daily half of a banana. My dad refrigerates PB, I don’t. He loves unsalted chunky, whereas lately I prefer lightly salted creamy. There’s something about the mouth feel of pure silk rolling around between my tongue and palate, the slight tinge of salt accent accentuating the deep nutty taste. I would guess this is is akin to umami, like meat and mushrooms – so satisfying.

When I travel outside of the US, the first mouthful of peanut butter when I get home is pure heaven. PB tastes like home, my home. In Mexico, when the kids were little and peanut butter could not be found in any stores, I made my own, grinding peanuts in the Cuisinart.  It was a stop-gap measure during those years until I could get back to Trader Joe’s, or H-E-B or my newly discovered Michigan brand Koeze, mmmmmm.

What would I take to a desert island? Peanut butter. 

What would be my last meal request? Peanut butter.  

What do I wake up to nearly every morning? Peanut butter. 

Midnight snack, between meal treat, hiking food, picnic, travel pack? Peanut butter.

On a muffin, a cupcake, celery, apple? Peanut butter.

On sourdough? Whole wheat? Crackers? Graham crackers? Peanut butter.

And how could I have forget a warm toasted bagel with melty peanut butter?  (My dad used to love this before he cut back on bread carbs. To this day, the scent of slightly burned toast and the scrape-scrape-scrape sound of the knife shaving off the blackened crumbs brings to mind my dad in the kitchen fixing a before-school breakfast). I carry on this tradition of scraping off the burned bits, perhaps once every two weeks or so, before anointing the rescued bread first with butter and then with peanut butter.

There is rarely a time, and only by oversight, that I do not have PB within arm’s reach at my house.  Peanut butter is the permanent fixture on my grocery list.

Oh, peeling back the foil top from a new jar (stored upside down, like my dad does, in the pantry), seeing the oil pool around the heaps of light brown, sticking in the knife to mix it up, adding a pinch of salt, cleaning the knife with my thumb and forefinger afterwards, drawing the blade through and leaving behind the folds of PB that I lick straight from my fingers. Nothing like it.

Yes, peanut butter sometimes gets gobbed up in my throat, like in that sad Lyle Lovett song, and I have to slow down and drink something warm to melt the lump.  But for the most part, my love for peanut butter is as smooth and satisfying as peanut butter itself.