Peanut Butter and Jelly

a love story

It’s not what you think. This is not a story of love between peanut butter and jelly. Although they certainly have a long and successful relationship that should not be overlooked.

No, this is a story about MY love for peanut butter and jelly. Let me start by telling you about my favorite peanut butter and jelly sandwich of all time. It happened last year. A summer romance.

I was having lunch with a co-worker one day and we got to talking about foods we like. I declared that peanut butter and jelly was hands down one of my favorites but that, as a teacher, I didn’t have it very often.

“What do you mean?” my colleague asked. I explained that as a general rule I didn’t bring peanut butter anything to school in case some part of it came in contact with a student who had a severe peanut allergy. And then I got so used to not having them, that I didn’t even make PB&J on weekends or vacations very often. But that didn’t mean I didn’t love them.

The conversation moved on to other foods that were less important to me and I forgot about it until the next day, when the same co-worker announced that he had something for me. I was surprised, and curious. We were conversationally friendly, but had not reached a gift giving level of acquaintance yet.

He removed from his collection of lunch foods a Ziploc bag with, you guessed it, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and put it on the table in front of me.

I lit up with excitement. I grinned. I salivated. I said “thank you.”

There were a lot of great things about this sandwich. First, it was a completely unexpected and extremely thoughtful gift. Again, as a teacher at the time, my days were mostly filled with complaints and things gone awry, not so many thoughtful gifts. So that hit it home for me. But there was more.

The Ziploc bag was not new. It had been washed and reused a few times over, as was indicated by the fading white label and lettering. I had great appreciation for this since I also wash and reuse my plastic bags, so it was nice to see another person implementing the same plastic-saving philosophy.

Next came the sandwich. The bread was store bought. Some sort of wheat, with oats, a split top and it was very soft and chewy looking. It was a large pair of rectangles that took up most of the space in the bag. Between the pieces of bread was peanut butter of unknown brand or texture, but I was specifically told that the jam was homemade strawberry. Homemade? 

While using homemade anything in my neck of the woods isn’t uncommon, it still makes things special. My PB&J just scored another point. But then we had an interesting dichotomy. 

This large, lovely, gift-given sandwich had all of these wonderful things going for it, but it had a major flaw in the world of sandwich presentation. It had been squished. Something much bigger and harder had shared some space in the lunch collection with the sandwich during travel and my PB&J gift had a big crease down the middle and was sort of scrunched on one side and the homemade strawberry jam was bleeding through. 

However, by now, I was so smitten with my sandwich that I saw none of these things as flaws, and instead saw them as enhancements to something that was so uniformly perfect, that the custom bread squishing only made it better. 

I didn’t wait. It was 8:30 in the morning and I gently opened the bag, extracted the sandwich from where the jelly and peanut butter were attaching it to the walls of the plastic and slowly tore off a corner. I put it in my mouth and chewed slowly.

It was smooth peanut butter. And the homemade strawberry jam exploded with sweetness. The bread was still soft and chewy and all of the flavors and textures swirled around in my brain as I tried to separate them and identify them. I gave up, tore off another piece and just enjoyed it. 

Although that was not the only peanut butter and jelly sandwich he brought me that summer, it still remains my favorite. Thanks again, Justin.

Outside of teaching, which prevented me from eating peanut butter and jelly more often, I’ve been enjoying it for a long time. I like all kinds of peanut butter, mostly berry type jams and jellies and just about any kind of bread. Sometimes I use alternatives if I’m out of bread, such as whole wheat wraps. Or Saltines! A smear of peanut butter and a dab of jelly on a Saltine cracker makes a wonderful open-faced salty, crunchy PB&J snack.

I’ve even learned a thing or two about peanut butter and jelly sandwiches from other people. Such as making the sandwich, then putting the whole thing in the microwave for 10 seconds. My Uncle Gus taught us this when we were kids. He insisted that it warmed the whole thing and elevated the sandwich to a new experience level. Us kids were in total disbelief, until we tried it. He was right.

Last fall, as I watched a friend eat his own PB&J, I noticed that he had a lot of peanut butter compared to jelly in his sandwich. Upon closer inspection, I realized that he’d put peanut butter on BOTH sides of the bread and put the jelly in the middle. “It’s so the jelly doesn’t bleed through the bread,” he explained. Brilliant. And not the only time I’ve heard about that trick.

Sometimes, as kids, when making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, we’d put butter on both pieces of bread, then the peanut butter on one slice and jelly on the other. The fat in the butter prevented the jelly from bleeding through. It also contributed highly to an improved flavor of the sandwich.

Finally, I’d like to mention a memorable product from my childhood. Goober Grape. Smucker’s figured out that if you put the peanut butter AND the jelly in the same jar, it was a lot less work to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. We loved this concept, and relished in it often as we ate many a Goober Grape PB&J when we were kids.

I went looking for Goober Grape as I was thinking about this article. Not only do they still have the version with grape jelly, but now there is one with strawberry as well. I decided I should try it again. I stuck with what I remembered and bought the grape flavor, brought it home, sliced a fresh loaf of white bread open and made a sandwich. It’s a lot sweeter than I remember, but still makes for an excellent sandwich. I’m kind of excited to have a jar of Goober Grape kicking around the house again. Though, it probably won’t last that long. Especially if I make an extra sandwich to give to someone at work.