But he devotes only a single page to the practice of boiling peanuts, and that page is shared with a discussion of eating raw peanuts. Most accounts make vague assertions that boiled peanuts originated during the Civil War as cheap necessity grub before darting off quickly to discuss how they're cooked today. Perhaps they should dig a little deeper. If they did, they'd realize the history of the boiled peanut isn't about some convenient cheap food.
Rather, boiled peanuts spanned the whole range of Southern society, from the West African slaves who actually invented the dish to the white cooks who then ran with the idea as party food. Once you start looking seriously into the matter, it becomes clear that the peanut encapsulates not one but three of the most pernicious myths that are rampant in popular histories of Southern food:. A capsule history at the website for the Columbia, South Carolina Convention and Visitors Board sums up the typical line: "It is said that during times of war when soldiers were in need of nutrition with high protein and without cooking facilities, they boiled peanuts over campfires.
They discovered that these peanuts would not spoil for several days. The What's Cooking America page on the history of boiled peanuts, an oft-cited source in skimpily researched articles, places it squarely in the Civil War, too. Sherman to led his troops on their march through Georgia. Sherman's march, the story goes, cut off Confederate supply lines, so soldiers turned to peanuts, "an important nutritional source.
Since cooking facilities were scarce, soldiers roasted the peanuts over campfires or boiled them. Some accounts do note in passing that peanuts were brought to the South by African slaves, but apparently the plants just lingered around somewhere until some resourceful Confederates i. Such Civil War tales, as best as I can tell, have it pretty much completely backwards. Boiled peanuts, like so many other iconic Southern foods, begin with black Southerners, not whites. We may not know the names of the first people to boil peanuts in the South, but we certainly know they weren't Confederate soldiers.
Like okra , black-eyed peas , and so many other Southern staples, the peanut came to the region by way of the African diaspora, and for this reason piecing together its history can be challenging.
Since enslaved West Africans and their American-born descendants made up over half the population of some Southern colonies, the peanut became a dietary staple in areas such as South Carolina.
But only a few glimpses of African food was captured in written sources, since before the Civil War, the writers of such histories were almost always white. The challenge is confounded by the fact that Americans didn't settle firmly on the term "peanuts" until the late 19th century. Before then, they were referred to by various names including ground nuts, ground peas, pindars, and goobers, a term derived from the Angolan word nguba. Peanuts arrived on Southern shores via a circuitous route.
The plant originated in South America, and the Portuguese took it to Africa around , just after they first came into contact with it in Brazil. The legume peanuts are peas that look like nuts, not the other way around spread quickly across Africa, for it was very similar to the indigenous groundnut—an African staple—but with a higher oil content, and it was easier to cultivate. The legumes made their way to the British Colonies in the South and the Caribbean on slave ships, which were frequently provisioned with peanuts for the deadly Middle Passage.
By , Gardner's Dictionary noted that "all the settlements in America abound with it; but many persons who reside in that Country affirm, they were originally brought by the Slaves from Africa there. In , a white planter named George Brownrigg from Edenton, North Carolina sent a sample of peanuts to his brother in London, who was a member of the Royal Society.
They are therefore cultivated by them in the little parcels of land set apart for their use by their masters. Up until the American Revolution, peanuts were cultivated primarily by African Americans in their own garden patches for their own families' use. At some point the peanut made its way into the diet of the European minority, too. As early as , George Brownrigg and other planters were raising peanuts to feed to livestock and were experimenting with pressing the oil from them, which, the Royal Society correspondent noted, is "clear, lasts a long time, may be obtained at low price—could be a substitute for expensive imported olive oil.
But peanuts were more than just a snack food. In , physician and author Francis Peyre Porcher noted that, "The ground-nut is cultivated to some extent in South Carolina, and great use is made of it on the plantations as an article of food. By this point, traditional West African preparations had made their way onto the dining room tables of white elites, too. Magnificent Magnesium Magnesium is one of the seven major essential minerals that help make up our body. You must be logged in to view this item.
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Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Featured Video. Save It Print. Prep Time 5 mins. Cook Time 2 hrs 30 mins. Total Time 2 hrs 35 mins. Servings 16 servings. Yield 1 pound. The difference between raw and green depends on the time of year.
When a new crop of peanuts is ready, some are dehydrated to last longer. These are raw peanuts, and can be eaten year-round. However, green peanuts are only available during a small portion of the year.
Green peanut season usually lasts from the end of July to late November.
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