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Peanut Butter and Pickle
1/2 cup peanut butter 1/2 cup chopped pickle 1/4 cup hot water Cream peanut butter and water together and add chopped pickle.
A two-minute sandwich filling from the era when peanut butter was sold stiff and unstabilized. The hot water is not optional padding — it is what turns a paste into something spreadable.
- Why the hot waterMuch peanut butter of the period was simply ground nuts and salt, with no added oil or emulsifier, and it set up dense in the jar; stabilized brands only began appearing from the late 1920s. A quarter cup of hot water beaten in loosens it to spreading consistency. With modern commercial peanut butter, start with two tablespoons and add more only if the mixture still drags on the bread.
- Which peanut butterNatural, stir-in-the-oil peanut butter behaves closest to what the recipe assumes. Sweetened supermarket brands will make the filling taste like candy against the vinegar in the pickle.
- Which pickle"Pickle" in an American cookbook of this period usually means cucumber pickle, sweet or sour. Sweet pickle gives the more familiar flavor; dill gives a sharper, saltier sandwich. Drain the chop well or the filling will weep into the bread.
- Order of operationsCream the peanut butter and water smooth before the pickle goes in. Adding the pickle first traps lumps of stiff butter that will not break down without overworking the chop to mush.
- YieldAbout a cup and a quarter once the pickle is drained, enough to fill four to five sandwiches generously. It is best used the day it is made; the pickle continues to release liquid overnight.
- BreadSoft white sandwich bread suits a spread this thick. A firmer whole-grain loaf will fight the filling rather than carry it.
Peanut butter went from a health-food curiosity of the 1890s to a pantry staple by the First World War, and the sandwich-filling chapters of interwar American cookbooks show cooks working out what to do with it beyond bread and jelly. Combinations with bacon, raisins, dates, olives, and — as here — chopped pickle were all standard suggestions, valued because peanut butter was cheap, kept without refrigeration, and counted as a protein in an era of tightening food budgets. The peanut-butter-and-pickle sandwich is often said to be a Depression-era invention, though it appears in print earlier than that. It survives as folk cookery, and is usually associated with the American Midwest and South, though its distribution is not well documented; the pairing is less eccentric than it reads: fat and salt against acid and crunch is the same logic that puts pickle on a hamburger.