Putting peanut butter and jelly to the test

By By Robert St. John / food columnist
April 30, 2003
Robert St. John is the executive chef/owner of the Purple Parrot Caf and Crescent City Grill in Hattiesburg and Meridian. He can be reached at robert@nsrg.com or at (601) 264-0672.
Have we finally taken this convenience thing too far?
While watching television with my family, I saw a commercial advertising pre-made, frozen and crust-less peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. They are sold by the bagful and can be found in the freezer section of your local grocery store.
Firstly, anyone who would freeze a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is probably not a good American and is cruel to defenseless animals and old people. Secondly … well, I don't have a secondly, but the firstly should suffice.
How could they do this to my sacred pbj?
In our local grocery store, I see boxes of precooked waffles, frozen french toast, bags of pancakes, boil-in-the-bag scrambled eggs and precooked bacon. Children's breakfasts are already pre-made and frozen. Are we now moving to lunch and to the last bastion of school cafeteria pleasure the peanut butter and jelly sandwich?
How time-consuming is it to prepare a peanut butter and jelly sandwich? Baking companies already make crust-less bread. One could buy that variety and save the 10 seconds it takes to cut crusts off.
There is a company that makes peanut butter slices that look like Kraft cheese singles. If you were in a huge peanut butter sandwich crisis, you could slap on a slice and save another seven seconds of spreading time.
Skippy even makes peanut butter that is squeezed out of a toothpaste tube. This would save five more seconds and there would be no need to buy any more Colgate.
Comfort food
There is much talk of "comfort food" these days. Comfort food for a third-grader is a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
I had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich almost every day for six years. I ate triple-deckers. My mom invented the three-layer sandwich years before McDonald's ever came up with the Big Mac.
In the pbj world, you are either smooth or chunky. I am a smooth guy; my brother was a chunky guy. It's like boxers or jockeys, one doesn't vacillate.
Jif is my peanut butter of choice. I have eaten Peter Pan on occasion, but found it to be bitter. In emergency situations, I have eaten Skippy, but I think their product name is silly and will only resort to that variety in a peanut-butter-and-jelly-sandwich emergency.
Jelly is another story. The criteria by which I select jelly has changed over the years. Early on, I was only interested in the jelly jar glass that the jelly came in. I had a full collection of Archies jelly jar glasses.
My mother was a Bama woman, it was her religion. Once my jelly jar days waned, and my interests progressed to prizes in the bottom of cereal boxes, I ate Bama jelly because that is what she bought.
The only appropriate jelly for a pbj sandwich is strawberry or grape. One time, my grandmother was out of grape jelly and used orange marmalade. It is culinary blasphemy to put orange marmalade on a 6-year-old's peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Food phobias
Arachibutyrophobia is the fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth. In the big world of phobias, I would imagine arachibutyrophobia is not a bad phobia to have. I have speaklikeanidiotaphobia. It is the fear of having to say the word arachibutyrophobia in public.
Marmaladaphobia is the fear of anything but strawberry or grape jelly on your pbj. Lamgonnabarfaphobia is the phobia of having to eat peanut butter that comes in prepackaged slices.
The original idea for this column was to follow my oft-used formula of focusing on a single topic or ingredient and then using my 750-word allotment to rip it to shreds.
To prepare for this, I conducted a scientific peanut butter survey in my home kitchen, using a highly trained and professional staff: my wife, my daughter, our babysitter and myself.
We would determine the best peanut butter on the market. As I stated earlier, I am a Jif man and always have been. We blind-tested eight peanut butters: Jif, Peter Pan, Skippy, something swirled with jelly called Goober Grape, Skippy in the toothpaste tube, the peanut butter slices, a generic brand and Reese's.
The results: Reese's won the taste test, the peanut butter in the toothpaste tube wasn't so bad and the swirled stuff was good. We gave the peanut butter slices to the dog. The dog, in turn, gave the peanut butter slices to the cat, which quickly used the peanut butter slices as a litter box.
We also taste-tested the pre-made pbj sandwiches and they weren't half bad. Once again, column humor loses out to culinary progress.