Have you ever eaten a peanut butter and pickle sandwich?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have. Mine are open-faced, topped with bread-and-butter-pickles. My mom had seen them described in an old Heinz cookbook. There even is a Wikipedia page on the Peanut Butter and Pickle Sandwich.

 

At the public library I recently found New York Times book critic Dwight Garner’s 2023 book The Upstairs Delicatessen. It is subtitled On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading. On page 101 he discusses on the peanut butter and pickle sandwich:

 

“Most days, I eat lunch at home. I make do with what’s in the house. Usually that means a sandwich – two pieces of bread, blank canvases, pale Mark Rothko slabs. I can be as geeky as the next person with the jamon iberico, or with the writer Julia Reed’s mother’s tuna salad, but I’m also on the record as being perhaps America’s most ardent consumer of the peanut butter and pickle sandwich.

 

It's a sandwich that my father bequeathed to me, the thrifty one that got him through law school. I wrote about the combination in 2012 for the Times food section. I called the sandwich the stay-at-home writer’s friend, there for you when nothing else was in the icebox. My essay prompted so much grossing out on social media, then in newspapers worldwide, that I fear that when I die, should I merit even a tiny obituary, the sandwich will be mentioned near the top (‘Dwight Garner, Literary Critic and Champion of Gross Sandwich Dies at 87’). I’ve always assumed that the PB&P was a West Virginia thing, but I’ve been unable to prove it. Neither has Emily Hilliard, the former state folklorist, who tried harder than I did. The sandwich appeared om lunch-counter menus during the Depression and in extension-service cookbooks in the 1930s and ‘40s in recipes that generally called for a few spoonfuls of pickle relish.”  

 

Mr. Garner’s 2012 Times article mentions that Kinsey Millhone, the fictional private investigator in the alphabet series of mysteries by Sue Grafton (all but the letter Z), is probably America’s best-known devotee.

 

Back on May 16, 2011 I blogged about Is arachibutyrophobia for real? That is a phobia of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth. I mentioned the pickles as a remedy.

 

An image of a sandwich was modified from this one at Wikimedia Commons.