A Love Affair With Southern Cooking_ Recipes and Recollections - Jean Anderson [203]
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GEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER (1864–1943)
He’s been called “The Father of Peanut Butter” but that doesn’t begin to cover the contributions made by this “poor insignificant black boy,” as he once described himself.
Born toward the end of the Civil War near Diamond Grove, Missouri, Carver is said to have been kidnapped along with his mother and sister by Confederate night raiders. His master, Moses Carver, paid to have them returned, but only baby George was found.
Always sickly and thus spared the toil of hardier slaves, young George was allowed to wander field and forest studying the wild plants. With the abolition of slavery, the Carvers took the child in, raised him as their own son, and encouraged his intellectual curiosity.
Earning a high school diploma was nearly impossible for a freed slave, but Carver succeeded by bouncing from school to school in Missouri and Kansas. College followed, first Simpson in Indianola, Iowa, for music and art, then Iowa State for undergraduate and graduate degrees in agricultural research. At both schools, he was the first black student.
In 1896, Booker T. Washington lured Carver to Alabama to teach and conduct research at Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute. He stayed until his death nearly fifty years later.
It was here that Carver’s “peanut obsession” began. Determined to help farmers decimated by the boll weevil and spent land, Carver championed peanuts as a way to replenish the soil’s nitrogen. He also advocated crop rotation. But old ways die hard.
That’s when Carver set out to prove how lucrative peanuts could be. Over time, he developed more than 300 uses for the lowly legume—everything from peanut butter to cooking oils and candies. And these were merely the “edibles.”
His 1925 extension bulletin How to Grow the Peanut and 105 Ways of Preparing It for Human Consumption begins, “Of all the money crops grown by Macon County farmers, perhaps there are none more promising than the peanut in its several varieties and their almost limitless possibilities.” Among the booklet’s 105 peanut recipes are soups, breads, pies and puddings, cakes, cookies, and candies, even ice creams.
By now Carver had become famous, dispensing advice to presidents (Calvin Coolidge and both Roosevelts) as well as to world leaders as disparate as Henry Ford, Mahatma Gandhi, and the Crown Prince of Sweden, who studied with Carver for three weeks.
In 1942, Franklin D. Roosevelt bestowed the Roosevelt Medal of Outstanding Contribution to Southern Agriculture upon Carver, and a year later he budgeted $30,000 for the George Washington Carver National Monument near Carver’s Missouri birthplace. Carver half-dollars were minted between 1951 and 1954 and commemorative stamps were issued in his honor in 1948 and again in 1998.
And still the accolades come, some sixty years after George Washington Carver’s death.
No, “The Father of Peanut Butter” definitely doesn’t cover it.
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MARTHA WHITE FLOUR
Unlike Betty Crocker, Martha White wasn’t a made-up icon. She was the pretty three-year-old daughter of Richard Lindsey, Sr., who founded Nashville’s Royal Flour Mill in 1899.
The Martha White logo (a picture of little Martha in a round frame) was reserved for Lindsey’s finest flour. Milled of low-gluten wheat, it was the cotton-soft flour Southerners depended upon for biscuits and cakes of delicate crumb.
When Tennessean Cohen Williams sold the family farm and bought the old Royal Flour Mill in 1941, he changed the company’s name to Martha White, the better to build the brand. He also created the slogan—“Goodness gracious, it’s good!”—which, by 1945, was appearing on every bag of flour and cornmeal that came out of his mill.
In another canny move, Williams made Martha White the official sponsor of Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry in 1948. It still is, although the company itself has since been gobbled up by a succession of conglomerates, from Pillsbury to Smucker’s.
Originally available only around Nashville, and then only in