A few days ago my husband, the physics major, taught me a new trick: how to tell if an egg is hard-boiled without cracking it open. It’s hard to believe I’ve gotten this far in my life without knowing this.
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🎧Pea-nut, peanut butter, and jelly.🎧 Barney sang it, and so do the Boy Scouts. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are, after all, a Made in America sandwich.
Growing grapes last year led to me making my first batch of grape jelly, the thought of which brought me back to my childhood, and an Internet rabbit hole of learning the history of the PB&J sandwich. Portions of this history of the PB&J sandwich were first described in another post I wrote, How to Make Grape Jelly (and grow the grapes).
1843: Horticulturist, Ephraim Wales Bull, chose a wild grapevine that thrived in his backyard, to begin work on cultivating a purple grape that would grow well in harsh New England weather.
1854: After many years of research, Bull developed a cultivar he liked and named it the Concord grape after his hometown of Concord, MA. He sold his vines for $5 each and made a small fortune as Concord grapes became a popular strain. Since plant varieties were not patent-protected at the time, nurserymen were free to grow and sell their own plants made with cuttings from his original vine and Bull died a poor man. Here is a good story about it. His gravestone read: “Ephraim Wales Bull, the Originator of the Concord grape . . . He Sowed Others Reaped.” I digress.
1869: Dentist and clergyman, Dr. Thomas Welch, sought to create a non-alcoholic communion wine for his parishioners using the newly popular Concord grape. In his home kitchen, Dr. Welch prepared a batch of grape juice, bottled it, and using the new sterilization technique developed by Louis Pasteur, he pasteur-ized it. Pasteurization killed the yeast which would have created fermentation. Welch marketed the juice as “Dr. Welch’s Unfermented Wine.” Grape juice became popular for years to come with the ongoing Temperance Movement and later with Prohibition.
1880: Dr. Ambrose Straub, another physician, who, in an attempt to get calories into his elderly patients who were unable to chew meat, started crushing peanuts into a nutritious peanut paste. Now, the Aztecs made a peanut paste hundreds of years before, but it was Straub who ran with the idea of a peanut butter product. Oh, and George Washington Carver, the famous botanist, and inventor, he was responsible for encouraging sharecroppers to grow alternative crops to cotton, such as peanuts and soybeans. Carver then went onto to invent and demonstrate hundreds of uses for peanuts to help increase demand for the product. He is considered by many to be the father of the peanut industry.
1893: Dr. Straub attended the Chicago World’s Fair to hawk his peanut paste for medicinal uses. Concurrently, Dr. Thomas Welch’s son, Dr. Charles Welch, brought his new product, Welch’s Grape Juice, to the Fair to introduce it to the masses. Thousands of people sampled these two new products. Little did Drs. Straub and Welch know that together, their products would one day lead to the most popular sandwich in America.
1901: Ms. Julia Davis Chandler, a writer for The Boston Cooking-School Magazine of Culinary Science and Domestic Economics, may have been the first person to introduce the peanut butter and jelly sandwich to the nation. She wrote, “For variety, some day try making little sandwiches, or bread fingers, of three very thin layers of bread and two layers of filling, one of peanut paste, whatever brand you prefer, and currant or crabapple jelly for the other. The combination is delicious, and as far as I know, original.” Imagine PB&J as an elegant tea sandwich.
1903: Dr. Straub invented the peanut mill and took out a patenton it. He sold all commercial rights to the peanut spread to Mr. George Bayle, owner of Bayle Food Products, who became the first commercial vendor of peanut butter. Straub continued to perfect his grinding mills. Mr. Bayle took his “peanut butter” product to the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904 and sold out in three days.
1918: The Welch family developed a grape jam spread and called it Grapelade. 100% of their initial production was bought by the military for WW1 soldiers’ meal rations. After the war, the soldiers, now civilians, requested more grape jam for home use and in 1923, Welch’s introduced Concord Grape Jelly to meet that increased post-war demand.
1928: “The best thing since sliced bread.” Otto Frederick Rohwedder, an engineer from Davenport, Iowa, invented the bread-slicing machine that automated the production of pre-sliced bread in commercial bakeries.
1930: Wonder Bread started selling the sliced bread commercially. This surely helped lead to the rise of sandwich-making in the American household.
1929-1939: During The Great Depression, PB&J sandwiches were commonplace in school lunch boxes. Jelly was sweet and wet and was the perfect companion to help peanut butter not stick to the roof of the mouth. It also wouldn’t spoil unrefrigerated in a lunchbox, another bonus. More importantly, the sandwiches were nutritious, and children liked them. With the automated production of peanut butter, jelly, and pre-sliced bread, the PB&J sandwich was on its way to becoming a very popular sandwich.
1941-1945: During WW2, at least half of Welch’s production of grape juice and jelly were earmarked for the military and hospitals. Both peanut butter and jelly were part of the U.S. soldier’s meal rations. Soldiers came to rely on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for meals in the field. Take a look at this video created by Steve1989, who reviews MRE’s and Rations on YouTube. This one on RCI (Ration, Combat, Individual) rations from the Korean War shows you what it was like to eat peanut butter and jelly while in the field.
Squirm alert: it is almost impossible to watch this video without wanting to yell at the kid and tell him not to eat that jelly!
Post War: Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches became even more popular as thousands of soldiers returned to civilian life and continued to want PB&J sandwiches.
1962: I’ll close with this memorable Welch’s Grape Jelly ad featuring The Flintstones, a cartoon that was popular on Saturday mornings during the Sixties when I was growing up.
Afterschool snack for my six brothers in the Seventies. Nice memories!
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Last April, I wrote a story about the gorgeous yellow fields of canola that were growing along I-24 in Cadiz, Kentucky. You can read all about it and see the photos here.
This is Part 2 of that story. The part where after seeing a dramatic increase in the number of yellow fields from the year before, I called the plant manager at the local AgStrong Canola and Sunflower Seed Processing Plant that I had read about in the paper and asked, What gives? Why are we suddenly seeing so much yellow? When he started to explain, I realized I had a lot to learn and asked if I could drive over to meet him and get a tour of the plant. An hour later Mark Dallas was giving my husband and me a tour. Not exactly the way I thought my day would turn out, but I do love a good backroads detour.
As background information, can-o-l-a oil, or “Canada-oil-low-acid,” is made from crushed canola seeds. These seeds are about the size of poppy seeds. Even having seen how canola oil is extracted from these seeds, I still shake my head in disbelief that anything that small, even in huge numbers, could produce something as useful as cooking oil.
A very short botany lesson about plant reproduction:
Flowers have one job, and one job only: to induce reproduction. To that end, flowers that are fertilized will make seeds. Those seeds will make new plants. That the plants grow and produce tasty fruits and vegetables that we like to eat, is bonus. Botanically speaking, those fruits of the plants are actually ripened ovaries full of seeds waiting to be planted. The flesh of fruit is sweet so animals will eat it and disperse the seeds in their travels. Tree nuts work in the same way; Mother Nature is counting on squirrels to bury nuts and thereby assure they will sprout and there will be more trees in the future.
Back to canola flowers and seeds. Like winter wheat, canola is planted in the fall, sprouts, goes dormant in the winter, and perks up again in early spring. It flowers in mid-April, and the seed pods are harvested in mid-June. Farmers like to grow winter wheat and canola because then they can double-crop their fields, meaning there is time left in the warm summer months to raise another crop, such as soybeans, in that same field. By comparison, in most northern climates, there’s only time to grow one crop like wheat or canola.
The photo on the left was taken from a stem of canola flowers on April 17th. The photo on the right was taken on June 12th, just a few days before the pods were harvested by the combines I wrote about in this article.
You may have seen similar seed pods develop in your own gardens if you ever let broccoli or bok choi plants flower and “go to seed.” If you look closely at the flowers below, you can see the early development of seed pods. They look like little spikes. Canola is in the same Brassica family as bok choi and broccoli.
The next photos are of fully mature canola seed pods that I dissected at home to release the seeds within. You can see how small these seeds are. It’s amazing to think cooking oil is extracted from them.
AgStrong contracts with local, family-owned, farms to plant nonGMO canola seeds in their fields. NonGMO means the seed’s genetic material has not been manipulated in a laboratory through genetic engineering to make it more disease or insect resistant. A few other tidbits I learned about growing canola: canola has a 5-6 inch tap route which acts as a natural tiller in the soil, and canola brings in $8.10/bushel compared to wheat’s $5.25/bushel.
Here is a photo of the canola oil processing plant in Trenton, KY.
It takes a lot of seeds to make canola oil and these fifty-foot silos are full of them.
This is what the inside of one of those silos looks like.
The first stop on the tour was the long silver cylindrical oven used to warm the seeds to no more than 120º. Warming the seeds made them easier to press. The low oven temperature kept the process in the category of cold-pressed. The blue conveyor belt brought the warmed seeds to a machine that cracked the hard outer shells.
Next stop was the seed crusher. This was where the magic happened. This machine crushed the seeds and expelled the golden canola oil into the blue well. The oil will still need to go to an offsite refinery before it can be bottled.
Here’s a video of the mechanical magic happening:
Here was the residual seed meal as it dropped onto a conveyor belt.
This meal was delivered to the green machine for a second pressing to remove the last traces of oil. At this plant, there are no chemical solvents, like hexane, used to extract these last drops of oil. That’s where the expression “all natural expeller press” comes from.
Here’s the residual meal as it came off the conveyor belt after the last of the oil had been pressed from it. The meal is used to feed livestock.
This is the transport room. It’s where the seeds, collected from farmers, are gathered and delivered to the silos for storage. And later, after pressing, where the extracted oil is weighed and distributed, via trucks, to be delivered to Georgia for the final refining process and …
bottling. You can find Agstrong’s Solio Canola Oil at Whole Foods stores.
But the story doesn’t end there. As a volunteer chef and Board member of The Nashville Food Project my antennae is always up for opportunities for food donation and food recovery. Canola and olive oil are two expensive staples we use in abundance at TNFP. I asked if Agstrong would consider partnering with us and donating their locally grown and manufactured Solio oil to TNFP, which they have graciously done. Here was the Plant Manger, Mark Dallas, donating a 35-pound container of oil to TNFP, on the spot.
And that’s how this one little detour ended up providing cooking oil for TNFP whose mission is “Bringing people together to grow, cook, and share nourishing food with the goals of cultivating community and alleviating hunger in our city.”
The story, however, didn’t end there, either. I happened to “pull” a few young canola plants from the side of the road last April to plant in my vegetable garden, so I could watch and learn how these plants matured to the seed stage. Once the plants produced seed pods and dried out, I was pleasantly surprised to walk out to my garden one day and see my chickens poking their heads through the chicken wire and eating the canola seeds.
It looks like Agstrong’s byproduct of meal for livestock was a winner.
I’ll leave you with a video of my chickens enjoying canola seed pods:
Faced with the choices below of sources for cooked pumpkin purée to use in a pie, which one would you choose?
I chose the big one. No-brainer. More pumpkin flesh, more purée. I’ve got a lot of baking to do. I’m smart. NOT. There is more intense and earthy pumpkin flavor in the small “pie” pumpkin than in the biggest pumpkin you’ve ever brought home from a pumpkin patch. And, by the way, the flavor in the canned purée may equal that of the little two-pounder.
How much work was it to roast the big pumpkin to find this out the hard way?
I can barely talk about it so pictures will have to do.
All that work, and when I used the purée in my Mom’s Pumpkin Pie, a pie that always delivers, it barely tasted like pumpkin, the flavor was that vapid. Additionally, the pie left a chalky aftertaste in my mouth that only I detected, but it was enough to make me throw the rest of the pie in the compost.
The next morning, I went to Trader Joe’s and bought two pie pumpkins and a can of pumpkin purée. Note: each of these items was a $1.99, so there was no monetary benefit to making this a DIY project. The only benefit was quelling my curiosity about what went wrong flavorwise.
Roasting Pie Pumpkins
I followed the directions on the label and cooked the pumpkins at 350º for 1½ hours.
I scooped out the flesh. I didn’t even need to purée it; it was so ready to use. Figure on two cups of purée per two-pound pie pumpkin.
Here’s the thing I didn’t know about pumpkin purée. It’s not sweet and tasty on its own. Having never stuck my finger into a can of purée before, this surprised me. I thought I was familiar with the taste of pumpkin from eating it in desserts, but they are sweetened with sugar and flavored by vanilla and spices. I remember a similar thing happened the first time I tasted natural unsweetened cocoa. I was expecting to taste the chocolate of a candy bar and instead what I tasted was bitter and harsh. The pumpkin surprise factor wasn’t nearly as extreme, but you get the idea.
So, will I ever cook a big pumpkin for purée again? Not likely.
Will I ever roast a small pie pumpkin again? Perhaps, when I have grandchildren and want to show them where pumpkin purée comes from.
Will I go back to buying canned pumpkin? Yes, for sure!
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@judyschickens 