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Peanut Butter
Nuts are found indigestible chiefly because of the impossibility of grinding them fine enough with the teeth. The value of nut butters is therefore obvious.
Almost any kind of nut will make good butter, but peanuts are perhaps the best and the most generally available. Pound freshly roasted nuts in a mortar or put them through a chopper, using the knife designed especially for the making of nut butters. Season with salt and add a little olive oil if desired. In most cases the oil from the nuts is sufficient to moisten the butter.
A method rather than a formula: roasted nuts, salt, and enough of their own oil to bind. The only real obstacle is the grinding, and a food processor solves it.
- The hinge: grind past the crumb stagePeanuts pass through a dry, sandy phase that looks like failure, then suddenly slacken into butter as the oil is released. In a food processor this takes 5 to 10 minutes of running, scraping down the sides two or three times. Stopping early is the usual mistake.
- "A chopper" and the nut butter knifeThis means a hand-cranked table grinder clamped to the counter; the recipe's "knife designed especially for the making of nut butters" was an attachment sold for the purpose. A food processor is a direct substitute; a blender works but needs more scraping and a little added oil.
- Freshly roasted mattersWarm nuts give up their oil more readily than cold ones. The recipe gives no roasting directions; for raw shelled peanuts, 350F for 12 to 15 minutes until fragrant and just coloured works, and grind them while still warm.
- SkinsThe papery red skins are harmless but make the butter speckled and faintly bitter. Rub the warm roasted nuts between your palms or in a towel and winnow the skins off before grinding.
- Salt and oil, in numbersThe recipe gives none. About 1/2 teaspoon salt per 2 cups of peanuts suits most palates, and a tablespoon of neutral or peanut oil will loosen the butter if it stays stiff. Olive oil, as suggested here, is assertive; use it only if you want its flavour.
- YieldTwo cups of roasted peanuts (roughly 10 oz) yield about a cup of butter.
- StorageThere is nothing in this but nuts and salt, so it separates and it goes rancid. Keep it refrigerated in a sealed jar, stir the oil back in before use, and finish it within two or three weeks.
Nut butters entered American cooking through the health-reform kitchens of the late nineteenth century, where they were valued as a source of protein and fat for people eating little or no flesh. The grinding of nuts into paste is far older than the American version, but the commercial product is generally traced to the sanitarium and vegetarian-food movements of the 1890s, and mills advertised as "nut butter mills" were sold for home use well into the 1920s. The opening claim, that nuts are indigestible only because teeth cannot reduce them finely enough, was a standard argument of that literature; the underlying observation is sound enough, in that grinding does make the fat and protein more accessible. The instructions assume the reader owns a mortar or a clamp-on chopper, which tells you that peanut butter was still something a household might reasonably expect to make rather than buy.