Project America: The peanut butter and jelly sandwich
Posted by Ruth on July 18th, 2010
Welcome to the first instalment of Project America: my ongoing quest to finally experience first-hand all the quintessentially American pastimes I grew up watching on TV in Australia.
As I’ve mentioned, I’m doing an internship at a local alt-weekly here called Willamette Week (which is going swimmingly, thanksforasking). The folks there are awesome, and have introduced me to heaps of great people, places, bands, restaurants and ideas. They also share my fetishisation of good (and so-bad-it’s-good) food, and the topic of things we’ve been putting into our mouths, or would like to be putting into our mouths, comes up a lot.
The other week, we were discussing peanut butter. Specifically: why peanut butter is one of the greatest foods on earth, and as such, why hasn’t it taken off in Australia as more than just something you put on toast? Over here, they stick PB in everything — chocolate, doughnuts, milkshakes, ice-cream, oatmeal, cookies, pretzels — and I can’t understand why someone hasn’t made a squillion dollars flogging this stuff to Aussies yet. Peanut butter combines all the greatest flavours on Earth — salty, fatty, creamy, nutty — into a magical goo that pretty much improves everything it touches.
“Yeah, like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches!” one of my workmates said. Ew, no. Peanut butter and jelly is gross and it is just not something Australians eat. Certainly I had never eaten one.
My workmates were shocked and insisted I had to try one. I said sure, but warned them that, despite my love of peanut butter, there was no way I was going to enjoy it. I don’t like American bread. I don’t like jam (except on scones, of course, but jam on scones is just a law of nature). I don’t even like sandwiches all that much.
But it is my mission to try the best and worst of America, and you can’t get much more American than a PB&J. According to some dubious statistics on Wikipedia, the average American will eat 1500 of them before they reach adulthood. They were in all the American books, TV shows and movies I consumed as a kid.
So a few days later, when my workmate offered me some of his (yes, full-grown adults here eat them too), I accepted the challenge.
My mind was officially blown.
Sweet, salty, nutty, creamy and crunchy all at once. The magical powers of peanut butter are so strong that they transform evil jam from the cheap and nasty foodstuff forced upon you in soggy sandwiches at school camps to a delightful, fruity treat and the perfect accompaniment to the crack that is peanuts in goo form.
I’ve been keeping an online diary at the paper about moving to Portland and America, pissing off charming readers with my pithy commentary and witty observations about their city and culture. Last week, I wrote about that peanut butter and jelly sandwich. But I took a bit of artistic license: I hadn’t actually eaten a whole one myself — just a few bites of my colleagues’.
So for my first Project America mission, I decided to eat my first, own, entire PB&J.
And where does one find a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in Portland? Why at the peanut butter and jelly cart, of course!
Yes, there is an entire food cart dedicated to nothing but this sandwich. Well, that is underselling it a bit: they do about a dozen variations on the classic dish, from a spicy Thai version with orange marmalade, Sriracha sauce and basil to a breakfast version including apple wood smoked bacon and maple syrup.
The lady who runs the cart was lovely and man does she love peanut butter and jelly. We chatted for ages about different types of nut butters and berries and the best bakeries in Portland. I told her about the amazing walnut butter I found at the farmers market last week and she insisted I try a whole spoonful of her home-made almond butter (sensational). She was super, super excited to be making my very first PB&J. I was very tempted by that spicy Thai — and the lady gave it a hard sell — but it was my mission to eat an American PB&J and insisted that I wanted something classic.
I chose their home-made peanut butter (made from organic Valencia peanuts, which she reckons are better than the more commonly used Runner variety. I didn’t even know there was different types of peanuts. Now I do.) There was a pretty extensive line-up of locally-made jams: strawberry, cranberry, blueberry, peach, black cherry… but I deferred slightly from the traditional and went with marionberry (remember them? They’re the local giant mutant blackberries I wrote about last week). She slathered each on a piece of challah bread and stuck them on the barbie (or “grill”, as they say. I’m going to dedicate a whole post to the tricky issue of “barbeque” as a noun versus a verb here. It will be more interesting than it sounds, I swear, and will likely involve me eating deep-fried jalapeño peppers).
I don’t know if grilled PB&J is entirely authentic. I’m guessing that’s not what American kids have in their sack lunches, but I imagine it’s the after-school snack version (much like the cheese and tinned-spaghetti jaffles I lived on during my university years). Also: warm, melty peanut butter. Yes, please.
A few minutes of grilling and $4 (plus tip. I’m still getting the hang of that) later and it was all mine.
Holy crap, you guys. Just look at that hot buttered brown gold oozing its way around real chunks of berry. After savouring the first few bites, I demolished this in about ten seconds flat.
Then I felt sick. But it was so good, I came this close to buying another.
So chalk one up for multiculturalism. I know most non-Americans think this is gross, but don’t knock it ’til you try it. Seriously, crack out some Kraft PB, IXL and Tip Top* and chuck it in your jaffle maker. You can thank me later.
*I jest, of course. Don’t waste your time with such cheap ingredients. Invest in some freshly-ground hippie nut butter without any colours or flavourings, steal some home-made jam from your Nan (or someone else’s if you don’t have one) — Nans always have home-made jam in the cupboard; for the scones, you see — and some soft, freshly baked bread (though I loved the challah, your chances of procuring it in Australia are directly proportional to your proximity to Jews. Brioche, perhaps. Not sourdough)
