Peanut Cookery and Uses

By the 1830s peanuts had entered mainstream cooking and recipes featuring them began to appear in cookbooks. Peanut cookery probably was introduced into Philadelphia by French Creole refugees, who had settled there after escaping the 1791 slave insurrection in Haiti. Recipes for peanut cakes and other peanut dishes were featured in cookbooks a few decades later. Eliza Leslie’s Directions for Cookery (1837), for instance, included a recipe for “Cocoa-nut Maccaroons” with peanuts. Subsequently, similar recipes were published by many other authors. The first cookbook printed in the South that contained peanut recipes was Sarah Rutledge’s Carolina Housewife (1847). Her peanut soup recipe likely derived from African culinary traditions.