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Peanut Butter Soup (Start with a tablespoon)
Start with a tablespoon of chopped onion mixed with another of chopped pimiento and 1/2 cup of thinly sliced celery. Boil these tender in 1/2 cup of water, then stir in 1 cup of good peanut butter and 3 of milk thickened with 1 tablespoon of flour. Sweeten with 1 teaspoon of sugar, let everything simmer together 2 minutes and you've got something!
With peanut butter alone you can work wonders, but there's no need limiting your culinary scope to goobers, which aren't really nuts anyway, but a kind of pea. So let's get along to walnuts, which have always been second to the double-jointed knock-kneed circus peanut in popularity.
A camp soup built on pantry staples, written in a breezy shorthand that leaves a few quantities to be read from context. It comes together in about fifteen minutes on one burner.
- Reading the measures"3 of milk" means 3 cups, carrying over from the cup measure just before it. The finished pot is roughly five cups, enough for four as a starter or three as a meal.
- Peanut butter mattersThe peanut butter assumed here was likely little more than ground roasted peanuts, perhaps with salt. Natural, unsweetened peanut butter gives the closest result; a modern sweetened, stabilized brand will make the soup cloying, in which case drop the teaspoon of sugar.
- The hinge: no boilingOnce the peanut butter and milk are in, keep the pot at a bare simmer and stir. Hard boiling tends to drive the oil out of the peanut butter and can curdle the milk, giving an oily, grainy pot.
- Handle the flour properlyWhisk the tablespoon of flour into a little of the cold milk first, then add the rest. Tipping dry flour into hot liquid gives lumps that no amount of simmering will smooth out.
- Two minutes is not enough for flourA raw-flour edge lingers at two minutes. Give the thickened milk five to eight minutes at a simmer before the peanut butter goes in, and the pasty taste disappears.
- Season itNo salt is called for, which suggests a salted peanut butter was assumed. Taste at the end and correct with salt and black pepper; a squeeze of lemon or a shot of hot sauce sharpens what is otherwise a very soft-flavored bowl.
- PimientoCanned pimientos, sold in small jars, are sweet red peppers already roasted and peeled. A few tablespoons of jarred roasted red pepper, chopped, is the same thing.
- Over a fireWatch the bottom -- milk scorches easily. Keep the heat low and stir the bottom of the pot regularly.
Peanut soup is one of the older savory uses of the groundnut in American cooking, generally traced to West African groundnut stews carried into the South, where thickened peanut soups became a fixture of Virginia and Carolina tables long before commercial peanut butter existed. This version is a shortcut on that idea: it uses the jarred product, which had become a cheap grocery staple by the early twentieth century and kept without refrigeration. The author's aside is botanically sound if loosely put -- the peanut is a legume, closer kin to peas and beans than to walnuts or pecans -- and "goober" is generally held to come into English from a Bantu word for the nut (Kikongo nguba).