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Peanut Butter and Pickle
½ cup peanut butter
I/4 cup hot water
½ cup chopped pickle
Cream peanut butter and water together and add chopped pickle.
A three-ingredient sandwich spread that depends entirely on the peanut butter of its day. A few adjustments make it behave the way the original intended.
- Why the hot waterEarly commercial and home-ground peanut butters were stiff, unstabilized and prone to seizing. Hot water loosens the paste into a spreadable cream. Modern smooth peanut butter needs far less — start with a tablespoon or two and add only until it spreads without tearing bread.
- Choose an unsweetened butterPeriod peanut butter was typically just ground peanuts and salt. A sweetened supermarket brand fights the vinegar in the pickle; natural or old-fashioned styles suit this far better.
- What kind of pickleUnspecified in the original. A cucumber pickle is the likeliest reading, and a sour or dill one suits the spread better than a sweet one; sweet pickle makes the filling closer to a relish sandwich.
- Drain the pickleChop the pickle and press it in a sieve or squeeze it in a towel before mixing. Wet pickle plus water makes a filling that soaks through bread within an hour.
- Mixing orderCream the butter and water to a smooth emulsion first, then fold in the pickle. Adding the pickle early keeps the paste from coming together.
- YieldAbout a cup and a quarter of filling, enough for four to six sandwiches on standard sliced bread. It keeps two or three days covered in the refrigerator, though the pickle continues to weep.
Peanut butter reached American tables in the 1890s as a soft, digestible protein promoted by sanitarium and health-food circles, and by the 1910s and 1920s it had settled into the sandwich sections of general household cookbooks — often paired with something sharp or crunchy rather than with jelly, which became the standard partner later. Combinations with pickle, watercress, chopped olive, celery or bacon appear across cookbooks and magazine columns of the period, and peanut butter and pickle seems to have persisted as a lunchbox filling into the mid-twentieth century. Butterick, whose business was patterns and women's magazines, published compilations of this kind, and the recipe's brevity assumes a reader who already had peanut butter and pickles on hand.