The Elder Statesman

By BILL DUNCAN
The View From Here

My oldest daughter has just returned to Oregon after several weeks visiting with my family in the Deep South. She brought back with her a Southern delicacy that you’d have to have grown up in the South to appreciate — boiled peanuts.

They are sort of like grits to the non-Southerner, but once you have tasted these two delicacies

you will understand why grits is on every breakfast menu in the South and why there are boiled peanut stands on every street corner in most Southern cities. Boiled peanuts are a traditional snack food for Southerners.

From May through November roadside stands, some fancy permanent structures, others little more than makeshift woodsheds, offer fresh boiled peanuts for sale.

Admittedly, it is an acquired taste, but boiled peanuts are nothing like roasted peanuts. The flavor is entirely different. Boiled peanuts begin as raw nuts, sometimes called green peanuts, although they are not green in color, that are boiled in salty water for up to seven hours in giant cauldrons over a hot fire.

The boiling causes the peanut to taken on a legume flavor. No one really knows why Southerners started boiling peanuts, but history does know that this one crop, the peanut, literally saved farming in the South, by putting back nutrients into the soil that were depleted by growing too much cotton.

It was the genius of Dr. George Washington Carver, a black scientist, who ushered in a new era in agriculture in the South by encouraging farmers to plant sweet potatoes, soybeans and peanuts to restore the farmland.

The idea worked, but there was no market for a bumper crop of peanuts. The story goes that Carver locked himself in his laboratory and emerged with over 300 products that could be made from the lowly peanut.

I have read the litany of those peanut based products, but for me, the most important product is the boiled peanut.

Boiling peanuts more than likely came about because peanuts were available during a time when Union Gen. William T. Sherman marched through Georgia during the Civil War and split the Confederacy in two, causing near starvation for the people cut off from supplies. The Confederate army used peanuts as a high protein nutritional source to feed its troops. Confederate soldiers would even grind the peanuts to make ersatz coffee.

The peanut is a native plant of South America, Central America and Mexico. It grows well in the tropical climate of the South. Of course most Americans are familiar with the peanut itself, whether in the form of peanut butter or roasted peanuts. Boiled peanuts are not so familiar outside of the South.

Boiled peanuts became the official state snack food of South Carolina in 2006 when Gov. Mark Sanford signed into law, H.4585, declaring boiled peanuts as “truly a Southern delicacy worthy of designation as the official state snack food.”

Elsewhere in the South it is just simply a staple, since the peanut is not a nut but a member of the legume family, although it remains a nut in the culinary sense. It derives its name from the word “pea” which is the edible seed. It has been described as a “pea in a nutshell,” therefore earning the name peanut. As it matures, the plant flowers like a pea, but develops the edible portion underground.

I have successfully grown peanuts in my garden, but never too successfully. Unlike okra, another Southern specialty I grow in my garden fro a readily available supply of seeds, but raw peanuts to plant or even to boil, are hard to find.

Right now, I am enjoying the bagful my daughter brought me from Florida.

(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, Oregon 97470)

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 4th, 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Column. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.