National Peanut Butter Cookie Day

Now I know why I was craving peanut butter today.

It happens to be National Peanut Butter Cookie Day.

I started wondering where the idea of peanut butter came from and turns out that the Aztec and Inca Indians mashed roasted peanuts to make a paste thus creating peanut butter.

I started researching different Peanut Butter Cookie Recipes and discovered an old book published in 1917 by none other than George Washington Carver, How to Grow the Peanut: 105 ways of preparing it for human consumption. Inside the book are several published Peanut Butter recipes.

He lists 14 things about peanut butter:

1. Like all other members of the pod-bearing family, they enrich the soil.
2. They are easily and cheaply grown.
3. For man, the nuts possess a wider range of food values than any other legume.
4. The nutritive value of the hay as a stock food compares favorably with that of the cowpea.
5. They are easy to plant, easy to grow, and easy to harvest.
6. The great food-and-forage value of the peanut will increase in proportion to the rapidity with which we make it a real study. This will increase consumption, and therefore, must increase production.
7. In this county, two crops per year of the Spanish variety can be raised.
8. The peanut exerts a dietetic or a medicinal effect upon the human system that is very desirable.
9. I doubt if there is another foodstuff’ that can be so universally eaten, in some form, by every individual.
10. Pork fattened from peanuts and hardened off’ with a little corn just before killing, is almost if not quite equal to the famous Redgravy hams or the world-renowned Beech-nut breakfast bacon.
11. The nuts yield a high percentage of oil of superior quality.
12. The clean cake, after the oil has been removed, is very high in muscle-building properties (protein), and the ease with which the meal blends in with the flour, meal, etc., makes it of special value to bakers, confectioners, candy-makers, and ice cream factories.
13. Peanut oil is one of the best known vegetable oils.
14. A pound of peanuts contains a little more of the body-building nutrients than a pound of sirloin steak, while the heat and energy producing nutrients it has more than twice as much.

So enjoy the day and make Peanut Butter Cookies.