ISSUE 71, PEANUTS, Part 4: Peanut Pie
Peanut Pie
Two decades before Texas created the Pecan Pie in the 1880s, Virginia had devised the peanut pie. Some of you will claim this is a false analogy, since the pecan is an authentic nut plucked from a tree, while the pecan is a subterranean legume. Mere botheration. In the public perception of the 19th century the peanut was a nut—it is included in the Bible of nut cookery, Almeda Lambert’s Guide to Nut Cookery (1899) and in law was subject to the regulations in trade that nuts were. In an April 1865 report by a Clevelander about gastronomy in Petersburg Hotels in the last month of the Civil War, the observer noted about the Gunther House: “Here’s our bill of fare: Peanut Soup, Vegetables, Asparagus and Peanuts, Pastry Peanut Pie, Dessert Peanuts in the Shell,” [“From Petersburg,” Cleveland Leader (April 24, 1865), 3.] There is no indication of how that peanut pie was instructed, but since there was no cane sugar in general circulation then, it was surely sweetened with sorghum.
Peanut Pie prior to the 1920s was no one thing. There were custard pies with parched peanut toppings that paraded as peanut pies—much on the model of the 19th-century hickory nut pies. There were sugar pies with meringue toppings festooned with peanuts. And there was the classic gooey peanut pie—a pie much like a pecan pie except with parched peanuts as the crown. In every pie, no matter what form, the peanuts were parched, some whole, some fragmented, and some ground to particles.
The gooey pie was a version of the old southern cane syrup pies with a baked peanut topping:
Mississippi Cane Syrup Pie Daily Herald of Biloxi, January 9, 1923
I cup Mississipi Cane Syrup
¼ cup butter
4 eggs
Juice of 1 lemon
Mix all together and bake in pie tin lined with pastry.
When the First World War broke out in Europe numbers of gastronomic experimenters in the United States sought to find less costly and less wheat-centric kinds of baking. They reckoned the country would soon join the fray. Peanut flour was one of the ingredients that came to the fore, and with it the first formulae for pastry crusts made of peanut flour:
Peanut Pie Crust Miami Herald, March 21, 1915, 2-11.
Two cups flou
Two tablespoons lard.
Three-fourths cup of ground peanuts.
One-half teaspoon salt.
Chop lard into flour and slat, add peanuts and enough ice water to make a very stiff paste. Use for bottom crust for fruit, custard, or lemon pies.
It is a matter of interest that despite the fact that South Carolina can claim priority in the cultivation of peanuts, when it published recipes for peanut pies during the 20th century, it dutifully noted that these were Virginia creations. The version presented here was the classic form of the peanut pie for much of the 20th century. From the Anderson Independent, February 17, 1949: