Vegetable Oils

At first, the only oil regularly available to colonial Americans was olive oil. Yet only in the most elite enclaves within the Spanish colonies was this expensive import used for cooking. In the English and French settlements, it was reserved almost exclusively for salad dressings.

This would only change with the advent of new processing methods in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Among the first new oils to come to market was peanut oil. George Brownrigg developed a process for extracting “a well tasted” oil from peanuts in North Carolina around 1768, and the oil came to be used as a substitute for olive oil, at least in the South. Due to its low price, it was often used as an adulterant in much more expensive olive oil. By the 1840s, peanut oil was used in the southern states as a cooking fat in its own right, but by the end of the Civil War peanut oil production had ceased. Grocers had to turn to Europe to stock their shelves with peanut oil. It wasn’t until World War I that government efforts lit a fire under the domestic peanut industry, resulting in an improved oil used not only for cooking and the manufacture of other compound fats but also for numberless industrial uses. In 1930, the Planters Peanuts Company harnessed its considerable marketing acumen to promote its own brand of oil, resulting in today’s familiar packaging.