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Peanut Butter Soup
4 TABLESPOONS FAT 4 TABLESPOONS FLOUR 1/2 QUART MILK SALT 1/3 CUP PEANUT BUTTER Make a white sauce of all ingredients except the peanut butter, which you stir in last and cook only a few minutes. Be sure to get an honest peanut butter, containing all the oil pressed from the nuts; or make your own by putting fresh roasted peanuts through grinder a couple of times. Many peanut butters are adulterated with cotton seed oil after the rich peanut oil is run off to be sold separately at a higher price.
In cooking anything with oily nuts, the flavor is snappier if they're not cooked to death.
A thick béchamel enriched with peanut butter, written for camp cooking where a single pot and a few shelf-stable ingredients do the work. The proportions make a very heavy sauce, so read the milk quantity before you start.
- Half a quartThat is 2 cups (about 475 ml) of milk. With 4 tablespoons each of fat and flour, the result is a stiff soup closer to a sauce; thin with another cup of milk or light stock if you want something spoonable.
- "Fat"Unspecified, so use whatever is at hand: butter, bacon drippings, or oil. Butter gives the cleanest flavor against the peanut; bacon fat gives a smokier soup.
- Honest peanut butterThe warning still applies, though the adulterant has changed. Look for a grind whose only ingredients are peanuts and salt. Stabilized supermarket brands carry palm or rapeseed oil and added sugar, which will read as sweet in a savory soup.
- The hingeStir the peanut butter in off the heat or over the barest flame. Peanut oil turns flat and slightly scorched with prolonged cooking, and the emulsion can break and go grainy. Two or three minutes of warming is enough.
- SaltNone is specified. Start with about half a teaspoon, then taste after the peanut butter goes in, since natural peanut butters vary from unsalted to fairly salty.
- RouxCook the flour in the fat for a minute or two before the milk goes in, but keep it pale. A browned roux fights the peanut rather than supporting it.
- YieldRoughly two and a half cups as written, serving two as a main or four as a first course. A squeeze of lemon or a shot of hot sauce at the table cuts the richness.
Peanut butter soup in American cookbooks is often linked to West African groundnut stews, where pounded peanuts thicken and enrich a broth; the peanut and that method of thickening reached North America by way of the transatlantic slave trade, though the line from those stews to a milk-based cream soup is a general resemblance rather than a documented descent. Commercial peanut butter was cheap and comparatively shelf-stable, and packed a great deal of fat and protein into a small jar. The complaint about cottonseed oil reflects a practice reported at the time: the more valuable peanut oil pressed out and sold separately, with cheaper oil blended back into the paste.