Taking Peanut Out Of Its Shell

Pity the peanut! Maligned by gourmets, relegated to little more than a snack food in common practice and misunderstood by gastronomes for centuries, the peanut has taken about as much abuse as a good food should. It's time to give the goober its due and debunk the legion of myths that surround it.

MYTH 1. Peanuts are nuts. This is true only in the broadest, most superficial sense. Botanically, peanuts are legumes, a large family of plants with the unique ability to fix nitrogen from the air and infuse the soil with it. (Most plants remove nitrogen from soil.) The family of legumes include lentils, beans, alfalfa and peas. Hence, the first part of the peanut's name describes it more accurately than the second part.

Of all legumes, peanuts provide the most protein for the least amount of money; 26 percent of its weight is protein, exceeded only by soybeans at 36 percent, but soybeans cost more to produce per acre. In Africa, it gives the highest protein yield per acre of any food crop, making it a chief protein source in East and West Africa. This leads us to our next myth.

MYTH 2. Peanuts are native to Africa and were brought to America by way of the African slave trade. Again, there are grains of truth in this story, but only a few. Peanuts actually are native to South America. Some authorities trace the peanut to Brazil, but older evidence points to Peru, where traces of peanuts have been found in mummy tombs and pictures of peanuts appear on Chimu pottery, from a civilization that predates the Incas.

Black slaves did give the peanut its nickname "goober" from the African word nguba, referring to other foods native to Africa that also grow underground. Although now there are peanuts aplenty in Africa and nguba is the African word for peanut, there were no peanuts in Africa until Portuguese traders brought them from Brazil and planted them on the West African coast to provide a cheap food source for captive natives waiting for transport to the New World.

The earliest substantiated evidence of peanuts being grown in this country is from Thomas Jefferson, who introduced them as a crop at Monticello just before 1800.