Boiled Peanuts

My two previous posts give a skewed idea of my usual food preoccupations, and this post is going to skew it even further. I’m going to talk about a controversial delicacy that inspires either rapture or revulsion: boiled peanuts.

There are a few reasons for my current fixation on Southern food: It’s summer, which means the Southern dish I crave the most—fried okra—is in season; I haven’t been home for a while; and I recently got The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook. The Lee brothers write for The New York Times, their cookbook won the James Beard Award, and their names pop up in food publications all the time. I knew they were from Charleston, South Carolina, but it wasn’t until I got the cookbook that I discovered they were not really Southerners. They are Yankee transplants, the children of academics. In other words, carpetbaggers.

I almost put the book down right then, but the title of Chapter 2—Boiled Peanuts, Grazes, and Hors d’Ouevres—beckoned. I hadn’t had boiled peanuts in ages, and it had never occurred to me that they were something you could make at home. Boiled peanuts, as far as I knew, came only from roadside stands with hand-lettered signs, where someone wearing overalls tends a giant black kettle and for a dollar will sell you a paper bag full of boiled peanuts and their salty, delicious peanut juice. Boiled peanuts are wet and you have to eat them fast before the paper bag disintegrates. When I was little, we used to get them all the time on the way to Lake Lanier. Even my sister, who did not like nuts of any kind, loved boiled peanuts.

There are a lot of things in the South that you can’t get in California, like good barbecue, Varsity chili dogs, and yes, boiled peanuts. And boiled peanuts are getting hard to find even in the South these days, at least around Atlanta. That is why the Lee Bros. are my new favorite cookbook authors: they taught me how to make boiled peanuts in the crock pot.

It’s incredibly easy: combine peanuts, water, and salt, come back 10 hours later. The hardest part was finding raw peanuts (tip: Asian markets are your best bet. I got mine at the Manila Market at Mission and Alemany, where they also had okra for much cheaper than I’ve ever seen at the farmers market, which led me to ponder the connections between Southern food and Asian food, a topic for another time).

To have a crock pot full of boiled peanuts in your household of one is an embarrassment of riches. It is a persuasive argument for the pleasures of living alone: you don’t have to share and you don’t have to worry about grossing anyone out when you slurp the briny liquid from the shells.

Boiled peanuts in the Crock Pot
paraphrased from The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook, by Matt Lee and Ted Lee.

Combine 2 lb raw peanuts, 3 qt water, and 1/3 cup salt in a large crock pot. Set to high and cook for 10 to 12 hours. After 5 hours, taste the liquid and adjust salt if necessary, adding a teaspoon at a time if liquid isn’t salty enough (NB: salt is the key ingredient. Don’t be afraid to use a heavy hand). If liquid is too salty, the instructions are too complicated to repeat here. You’ll have to consult the Lee brothers.