A Love Affair With Southern Cooking_ Recipes and Recollections - Jean Anderson [52]
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TIDEWATER PEANUT SOUP
MAKES 6 SERVINGS
Peanut soup, it’s said, was one of George Washington’s favorites, not surprising given the fact that Mount Vernon was in Tidewater Virginia—“peanut country.” These underground legumes grow equally well in Tidewater North Carolina, so peanut soup has long been a specialty there, too. In the old days, cooks would shell the peanuts, roast them, mash them to paste, then simmer them into soup. This modern version takes advantage of peanut butter; use your favorite brand.
2 tablespoons butter or bacon drippings (I prefer the latter)
1 large yellow onion, coarsely chopped
1 large celery rib, trimmed and coarsely chopped
1 large ripe tomato, peeled, cored, and coarsely chopped, or ½ cup tomato sauce
½ teaspoon crumbled leaf thyme
½ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg or ¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg
½ teaspoon salt, or to taste
¼ teaspoon black pepper, or to taste
¼ teaspoon ground hot red pepper (cayenne)
2½ cups chicken broth
1 cup firmly packed creamy-style peanut butter
¾ cup milk
¾ cup half-and-half
2 tablespoons medium-dry sherry, tawny
¾ cup firmly packed sour cream beaten until smooth with ¼ cup milk (topping)
2 tablespoons finely snipped fresh chives (garnish)
1. Melt the butter in a large, heavy, nonreactive saucepan over moderately high heat. Add the onion and celery and cook for 6 to 8 minutes, stirring occasionally, until lightly browned.
2. Add the tomato, thyme, nutmeg, salt, black pepper, and cayenne; reduce the heat to moderate and cook and stir for 1 to 2 minutes. Mix in the broth and peanut butter and cook uncovered for 10 minutes. Set off the heat and cool for 15 minutes.
3. Purée the mixture in two batches in a food processor or electric blender until smooth. Return to the saucepan, add the milk and half-and-half, set over moderate heat, and bring just to serving temperature, stirring often. Remove from the heat, stir in the sherry, then taste for salt and pepper and adjust as needed.
4. Serve hot, topping each portion with a drift of the sour cream mixture and a scattering of chives. Or, if you prefer, chill well and serve cold.
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PEANUTS
Where did peanuts originate? Some say Bolivia, others Peru, and still others Brazil. When in doubt about the life history of plants, I turn to a source I trust: Economic Botany (1952) by Harvard professor Albert Hill.
“The peanut,” Hill writes, “is a native of South America but was early carried to the Old World tropics by the Portuguese explorers and is now grown extensively in India, East and West Africa, China, and Indonesia.”
“Portuguese” is the clue here. Following the lead of Prince Henry the Navigator, explorer Pedro Alvarez Cabral claimed Brazil for Portugal in 1500, which suggests that peanuts may be indigenous to that equatorial country. However, jars of them have also been found in the Incan graves of Peru. Were peanuts carried from Brazil to Peru? Or vice versa? Or did they grow in both places simultaneously?
Most culinary historians agree, however, that African slaves, believing peanuts to possess souls, brought them to Virginia from the Congo. Nguba, they called them (now Anglicized into “goober”). Slaves planted peanuts throughout the South, in the beginning for their own use. Virginia’s first commercial crop was harvested as silage in Sussex County in the 1840s, North Carolina’s some thirty years earlier around Wilmington.
During the Civil War, the Blues and Grays both subsisted upon peanuts. The Yanks developed a taste for the curious groundnuts that had to be dug and carried some of them home. Soon after, cries of “Hot Roasted Peanuts” rang through the stands of P. T. Barnum’s circuses.
Only in the early twentieth century, however, did peanuts became a major cash crop. The