The go-to of childhood food, peanut butter, and jam sandwich is so popular you would think these two ingredients never excluded each other. In fact, one could almost feel entitled to believe that peanut butter was invented for jam and vice versa.
But jelly, jam or fruit preserve made from any one fruit or a combination of fruits has been prepared for centuries. And peanut butter has been around for a long time too, longer than what most people know.
The creation of peanut butter
George Washington Carver is often credited as the inventor of peanut butter. However, the origins of peanut butter can be traced further back in time, to the Aztecs and the ancient Inca people. It’s not sure if they were the first to discover it, but that’s about as far back in time as historical evidence goes.
So we know for sure that peanut butter already existed 8000 years ago, except it has been reinvented time and time again by different people including George Carver. The man was truly a great inventor. He discovered that peanuts and other foods including pecans and sweet potatoes can be used to make an array of products.
- From peanuts, he made cloth dyes and leather dyes, insulating boards, wood stains and peanut flours, various types of each product.
- From sweet potatoes, he made candy, molasses, and library paste, also various types of each.
Overall Carver’s inventions add up to more than three hundred for peanuts alone.
The invention of jam and jelly
Both jam and jelly are fruit preserves, but the two products are not the same thing. Jam is made from whole fruits while jelly is made using the juice of the fruits.
Theoretically, there’s no difference between fruit spread and jam, although people often consider that fruit spreads are made with larger fruit chunks, and that jam has smaller-crushed fruit.
Historically fruit preserves date back to the first century. They are mentioned in the ancient book Art of Cooking (De Re Coquinaria) that compiles various cookery recipes and is the oldest cookbook currently known to man.
The jam was made heating soft fruit with sugar and honey. That was the standard recipe back then. The food didn’t really kick off until pasteurization was discovered in the eighteenth century.
Peanut butter and jam together
It’s rather surprising considering how far back both peanut butter and jam go that no one ever thought of pairing these up sooner. It appears that the first reference to peanut butter and jam sandwich is from 1901 and belongs to Julia Davis Chandler who published a recipe in the Boston Cooking-School Magazine of Culinary Science and Domestic Economics.
But still, it took years before peanut butter and jam got together successfully. In the 1920s peanut butter was still food only a handful of people could afford, and it hadn’t yet become an all-popular item.
With the appearance of commercial brands of creamy butter and the discovery of pre-sliced bread, things changed, and one of the first to popularize the combination of peanut butter and jam were soldiers during World War II.