April 2nd is National Peanut Butter and Jelly Day, because why wouldn’t a sandwich have a holiday? We’ve discovered a few things you might not know about every kid’s favorite sandwich and its mind-blowing collection of ingredients.
• The first reference to the PB&J was in the Boston Cooking-School Magazine of Culinary Science and Domestic Economics in 1901. HomeEc4Lyfe!
• PB&J started off as a classy sandwich until the ingredient prices dropped low enough that poor people could eat them. There goes the neighborhood.
• Alinea, a three-star Michelin restaurant in Chicago, once had it’s own version of a PB&J on the $250 tasting menu. It was a single peeled grape coated with peanut butter and wrapped in the thinnest toast wafer.
• The average kid will eat 1,500 PB&Js before graduating high school. Don’t be average; be exceptional!
• Frozen, crust-less sandwiches are patented by Smuckers under the name Uncrustables, and it all began with PB&J in 1998. People actually buy them, too. The full line did $125 million in sales in 2012.
• Goober, peanut butter and jelly in one jar, somehow still exists.
• The World’s Largest PB&J Sandwich weighed 1,342 pounds and was made in Grand Saline, TX. No brown bag was built to carry it though.
• However your grandma made them for you as a child is, in fact, the best way to do it.
• The Girl Scouts use 230,000 pounds of peanut butter per week to bake Do-si-dos and Tagalongs. The real question is, with which bourbon should you pair those?
• About 1 billion pounds of fruit spread are produced each year in the U.S.
• Long before Family Guy did it, the Peanut Butter Jelly Time dancing banana meme appeared on the always forgotten show Ed. If you can name one actor from that show, you win a PB&J sandwich.