Peanut Butter

Peanut butter is a spread made by grinding dry-roasted peanuts, commonly with salt and sometimes sweeteners or stabilizing emulsifiers added for texture, produced by roasting shelled and blanched peanuts before grinding them through progressively finer mills. Though pastes of ground peanuts were made by the Aztec and Inca civilizations long before, the modern commercial product dates to the late nineteenth century, when Marcellus Gilmore Edson patented a method for producing it in 1884; Joseph Rosefield later developed the process that kept smooth peanut butter from separating and also created the chunky variety in the 1920s. Beyond sandwiches, it is used in breakfast dishes, baked goods, sauces, and smoothies, and the United States remains the world's leading exporter and per-capita consumer of the spread.