Tastes of Home

ProetryPlace  Blog 64

Tastes of Home

    When I consider those several accomplishments that I can claim for a lifetime now exceeding 80 years duration, few loom as large as having acquired a taste for boiled peanuts.

    Almost 40 million metric tons of peanuts are grown and consumed worldwide annually. These legumes are known variously as earthnuts, monkey nuts, groundnuts, peanuts or goober peas. The practice of boiling them, as opposed to roasting, salting, mashing or frying, is limited almost entirely to the southern United States. In Georgia, boiled peanut stands proliferate on both rural roadsides and in urban settings, like pretzel vendors in Philadelphia, Nathan’s hotdogs in New York City, or brat-stands on downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin street corners.

    I first encountered boiled peanuts on an autumn apple-gathering expedition with my family into the north-Georgia mountains shortly after our move to the south.

    That was 1983, the year when I accepted a move into my company’s new science, technology and engineering center in Roswell, Georgia. Although I was ready to undertake new challenges in a new work location after 20 years in the serene and scenic Fox River Valley of northeastern Wisconsin, I was not prepared for the culture shock of our first venture into the Deep South.

    For the first year or two after our move, I understood only one word in three spoken by the Georgia natives. It was not long, however, before our children were acquiring the accents and vernacular of their new home and friends and, somewhat to our dismay, integrating expressions such as “I’m fixin’ to leave now,” or “See y’all later!” into their speech.

    Eventually we all came to understand most of the native dialect and acquired a taste for previously unknown southern customs and delicacies, but our first exposure to boiled peanuts would not have foretold that happening.

    The sight and smell of smoke rising into the cool, clear autumn air had prompted us to stop at the roadside marketplace surrounded by golden pumpkins, a variety of squashes, roots and greens and large bins of fresh apples.

    “What are you brewing?” I asked the old woman tending a big, black caldron suspended over a blazing open wood fire.

    “Biled p’nits,” she answered and showed a wide smile lacking several teeth.

    “Biled peanuts?”

    “Uh-huh.”

    “You mean you are boiling peanuts? What on earth for? May I take a look?”

    She obligingly lifted the lid, and I peered into the depths of the darkly mysterious steaming liquid. She scooped a small sample of hot nuts out of the vat and offered them, “Here, have a taste. Kerful, they’re hot!”

    I hesitated. “Do you eat the shell and all?”

    She glanced at me with a raised eyebrow and a slow shake of her head. “No. Peel ‘em.”

    I doled out one each to my wife and our two kids, and we proceeded to remove the soft peas from the soggy darkened shell. No crack or crunch like the peanuts I was used to, but in a moment, I had freed four peas from their pod and popped them in my mouth.

    Foul act. I wanted to exclaim, “That’s disgusting!” but I did not know how to remove the offending taste from my mouth graciously and swallowed it along with the words. Our children were not so sensitive and ran off to spit out the unfamiliar taste and sensation of soft, hot peanuts.

    What compelled us to try this salty, soggy southern delicacy again after this first experience will remain a mystery, but we did. Year after year on our annual apple-gathering trip to the stretch of Highway 52 that runs between Ellijay and Dahlonega, we sampled the boiled nuts.

    At first, one small bag served the entire family. After a few years, our taste buds accommodated the new experience, and soon we were seeking out boiled peanut stands,

each of us consuming our own bagfuls, hot sticky brine running off our fingers and faces as we shucked and sucked each wonderful mouthful.

    Now, after calling Georgia home for more than 30 years, we have learned to enjoy a considerable spectrum of new tastes and textures that at first may have been equally as

repulsive as our first taste of boiled peanuts. Grits (plain, buttered or cheesy), fried green tomatoes, sausage balls, fried catfish, cornbread dressing, boiled greens of several

varieties (improved by occasional bacon bits and liberal doses of Louisiana Hot Sauce), biscuits and “gravy” (white, pasty flour and water mixture with a healthy shot of black pepper), black-eyed peas, country ham (salt-cured to heart-stopping, mouth-puckering goodness) Coke and Goo-Goo Bars (not so much) and sweet, creamy-nutty pecan pie.

    I still cannot distinguish one variety of green from another or tell you if I am eating field peas, black-eyed peas, or some other pea-ilk, but I am as comfortable now with these many tastes of the south as any of the favorite “Yankee” dishes of my childhood.

    My dad sometimes offered the wisdom that, “Home is where you hang your hat.”         Tastes of home are always the best tastes. Now we hang our hats in Georgia, even though we still love those Wisconsin brats and cheese curds.

Richard Allen Anderson     28 September 2014