The unlikely history of peanut butter and jelly

What I am trying to get at is that, I’ve been thinking a lot about peanut butter lately, and in particular that simple American classic, the peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

If you delve into the history of this bizarre little sandwich, you don’t actually come up with much. That’s because it hasn’t been around for a very long time. No one actually knows where the concept originates from, but it’s believed that it started gaining popularity around the 1940s with the first written account of one only going back to a 1901 cookbook.

And yet people are so weirdly passionate about how they take their PB&J. Everyone has an answer to how the sandwich should be cut, what type of jelly you should use or whether or not crustlessness is essential to the sandwich experience. People are constantly trying to reinvent it in new ways: deep fried, with bacon, between two donuts. It’s hard to go a week without hearing about one. So how did this all American treasure come to be?

As it turns out, peanut butter was once considered a delicacy. This is in contrast with today where it’s mostly just a thing college students eat when they can’t afford unprocessed proteins. (Yeah, Mom, I totally have a balanced diet.) Turns out the term, “fine food” really just means, “expensive food.” As soon as peanuts and their butters started being produced on a mass scale for the general public, no one really cared to eat it in fancy New York restaurants.

And while it may have been the end for peanut butter’s high rolling life, it would soon come to meet jelly.

But before then, America would go through it’s Great Depression. Peanut butter, which was dirt cheap at that time, became a common staple in the American household. People would spread it on their newly invented pre-sliced bread and eat it as a filling, cheap meal. Who knew that I had so much in common with Depression-era Americans? But how did jelly come into this equation?

Jelly, which has been around basically forever, as historians say, didn’t really meet its match until that classic romantic comedy backdrop: World War II. Included in soldiers’ rations packs were bread, peanut butter (which had become cheap enough for America to send to her soldiers) and of course jelly. I think you see where I am going with this.

Surprisingly no one at the time decided to chart the popularity of this sandwich, as everyone was likely unaware that it was about to become an integral part of American culture and one day be sung about by an internet banana much to the disappointment of everyone listening.

So it is actually unclear when peanut butter and jelly became a common sight, but it is theorized that men and women returning home from the front lines brought the idea back with them.

Since that time, however, few children have grown up without getting at least one of these classic sandwiches in their lunch boxes. Of course, the mystery still remains as to why the PB&J specifically has become such a staple of American culture. They are up there with apple pie and hot dogs for the things that I think of when someone says, “American food.”

An egg salad sandwich could never inspire quite so much nostalgia the way a PB&J can. I can safely say that I have never gotten in an argument over any other sandwich. But if I see you, walking around like it’s no big deal, eating peanut butter with strawberry jam, I will have no choice but to tell you that you’re wrong.