Because peanut butter is always in season.
My passionate feelings about peanut butter probably stemmed from my frustration about what the khaki goop represented in relation to my place in the country. You see, everyone around me behaved as though peanut butter were the defining American food.
To reject peanut butter was to reject the United States. Growing up I felt somehow that I had to develop a taste for it or else nobody would believe that I belonged here, that my mother was indeed an American citizen, and that, by extension, I was born a U.S. citizen.“Oddly enough, though I love peanut butter in all its guises, I don't care for peanut butter cookies. Go figure!”My little brother adored peanut butter. He was also the one sibling who’d habitually deny his Peruvian heritage in small ways, here and there. First, he had the luxury of inheriting the auburn hair and freckles of my mom’s Irish ancestors along with receiving a Celtic first name. My first name was a dead giveaway that I wasn’t from here. Add my distaste for peanut butter to that, and it seemed as if my cultural identity were predetermined. I couldn’t identify as anything but Hispanic, which is what I did for most of my life. As I grew older, I started to gain a better appreciation for different flavors and textures . But peanut butter was still the exception. I’d refuse even the beloved peanut butter cookie, no matter how much I cared for whomever baked it, and I wouldn’t go near a peanut butter cup or buckeye. When I moved in with my husband, I noticed that he always kept a jar of peanut butter in the pantry. After all, he was born in Wisconsin, raised in Kansas, and both of his parents were bona fide Americans. He wasn’twith peanut butter, but he did like to indulge in it every now and again, and considered it a pantry staple, like sugar, flour, and eggs. If bologna, American cheese, and Miracle Whip were like the lords of culinary hell, then peanut butter was the Dark Lord himself. I tried to develop a taste for it. At one point I thought to myself: Maybe I’d like it more if I gave it a savory treatment. I marched to the kitchen, determined to overcome my aversion. Once I tried dressing it up with Sriracha, another time spicy Haitian pickled cabbage. Nope. At its best, peanut butter was still little more than edible to me. Little did I know then that an unexpected illness would change my relationship to this spread forever. A year ago, I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. I had really disregarded my health up to that point and never exercised. I started going to the gym and cut out almost all sugars from my diet. After nearly a month of not eating any sort of sweet or dessert , peanut butter started to seem appealing, especially considering that the natural variety was low in sugar and high in protein and fiber. Late one night, I decided to mix a spoonful of peanut butter with a little bit of sugar-free sweetener. It was like taking a sip of cold water on a hot day. I poured in a few tablespoons of cream and stirred vigorously to create a sort of mousse that tasted heavenly, especially after not having had dessert for months. Before too long, my husband noticed that the peanut butter in our pantry started disappearing almost as soon as he’d replenish his stash.Thanks in part to peanut butter, I was able to stick to my low-glycemic diet and get my hemoglobin A1C and glucose levels back to normal. I was eventually allowed to go back to a regular diet—but my peanut butter habit was here to stay. The only difference was that now I could experiment with other additions that were previously off limits to me: maple syrup, honey, molasses, raisins, dates. I found myself daydreaming of recipes for peanut butter desserts I wanted to try. But there was a problem: Too many of the recipes I encountered were a little too basic for my tastes and one-dimensional. It was hard to find an elegant take on the peanut butter dessert, one that appreciated the spread for what it was, but also transformed it. Despite my newfound love of peanut butter, I could never be content with mixing it with whipped topping and dumping the concoction on some crushed sandwich cookies.I still consider myself a novice baker, so I opted for an easy graham cracker crust to start. As for the filling, in all my experimenting, I found that the combination of peanut butter, molasses, raisins, and roasted nuts gave me the most pleasure, and I really wanted to incorporate those elements into this pie.
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