Make the Bread, Buy the Butter - Jennifer Reese [2]
I took a bite. The jelly was gelatinous and supersweet, as in a jelly donut, one of my favorite foods. I loved it. The second bite was less delightful—a bit cloying and yet oddly desiccated. By the third bite, I was done. This was a stupid little sandwich.
“It’s like the peanut butter is a solid mass,” said Isabel, then twelve years old, plucking out a flat shard of tan paste and holding it up for inspection. “Look, it’s a thing.”
The homemade peanut butter and jelly sandwich, on the other hand, was luscious and sloppy and extravagant and fresh, and it easily carried the day. If this is the best Smucker’s can do, I thought, civilization is safe.
I assumed that the Uncrustables would turn out to be a bargain. Isn’t the whole point of industrial food that it is cheap? Well, cheap to make, maybe, but not all that cheap to buy. This fact has repeatedly taken me by surprise, though it probably shouldn’t have. Inferior mass-produced food often costs more—and sometimes quite a bit more—than homemade food. The homemade sandwich cost fifty-one cents and was roughly twice the size of the wee Uncrustable, which priced out at sixty-three cents.
There is market research that answers the question of who buys these expensive sandwiches when it is so easy and inexpensive to make one at home. Just to show how loaded this subject of food can be, how much socioeconomic and gender baggage we attach to the shopping and production of what we eat, I’ll describe the “research” that I performed in my own brain while standing in my kitchen. Who buys Uncrustables? I saw a woman in a peach velour tracksuit with a Kate Gosselin haircut loading up her cart at a big-box supermarket. She appeared pouty and spoiled and indolent, someone who would recline on the sofa watching Real Housewives and eating fat-free bonbons rather than make her kids’ sandwiches. A mother who buys Uncrustables: bad mother.
Then I tried to picture a man buying a box of Uncrustables. He came to me just as instantly and fully formed. A widower, he pushed a cart through the IGA after a long day of honest toil, perhaps in the construction trade. He wore a rumpled flannel shirt and looked a lot like Aidan Quinn. He was noble and long-suffering, a devoted dad, out there shopping for his kids’ food when he deserved to put his feet up and crack open a cold one. He needed to meet a really nice woman, someone just like me, except single.
I thought this. I was appalled at myself.
PEANUT BUTTER
Until I actually did it, I thought you had to be compulsive and controlling to grind your own peanut butter. But it turns out to be almost as worthwhile as making your own PB&Js. (Though not quite.) Home-ground peanut butter is nubbly, rich, intensely peanutty. Mass-market brands like Jif and Skippy have been sweetened and homogenized to the point where they resemble peanut-flavored Crisco. I still love Jif and will almost surely buy it again, but homemade is better next time you have seven minutes to spare.
Make it or buy it? Make it.
Hassle: Scant
Cost comparison: Per cup, homemade peanut butter is 80 percent the price of Jif.
1 pound unsalted roasted peanuts, shelled and skinned
2 tablespoons oil (preferably peanut)
Salt
1. Put the peanuts and oil in a food processor or blender and grind until you have a creamy paste. Add more oil if necessary to thin. Make this peanut butter a little thinner than you think it should be, as it will firm up a lot in the refrigerator.
2. Salt to taste. Store in a jar in the refrigerator for several months.
Makes 2 cups
Now what about the bread? What about the jelly? What about all of it?
A few caveats before we get started. First, although, like most people, I think about money, I’ve always been able to clothe my children and pay the mortgage and if I couldn’t, whether I bought or made crème fraîche—or bread, to use a less absurd example—would make