Well, not an ode exactly, since I’m not dishing out poetry. But this is, for sure, a tribute to the Great American Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich. Ta da!
Some of us are going to unpack a vast array of gustatory delights from hampers and coolers. I will not. I get restless, impatient, antsy, just sitting around, so I like to hike or walk or trudge or plod, depending on the terrain, my mood and that old fitness thing. Eventually hikers get hungry. They need food, which gravity will have lured to the bottom of the day pack, under the rain gear and wallet and first aid requisites and tissues for you know what—and so the rooting around begins.
The Gorp Gobble
A car picnic quite naturally invites excess. But I’m absolutely astounded by what my fellow trekkers/hikers load themselves down with in the way of food on the trail. First of all, they gobble gorp or bite off chaws of energy bars with every other step, lest they be unable to perform as relentlessly as some fuzzy, pink, long-eared, drum-beating, Madison Ave. creature that keeps going and going and going. Picture it. These extremely well-nourished Americans are traversing a mere ten miles (or much less) of far from life-threatening terrain and they’re afraid they’ll collapse. Happily they aren’t faced with a real world death march. Corregidor? The Navaho or the Cherokee Long Marches during our Manifest Destiny phase?But hey! Any excuse to satisfy the munchies. As with energy bars: high profit, industrial-chemical-estate-launched assaults on taste buds and intelligence. Or gorp—love the word, not so the mix. Nuts: mmm-mmm good and good for you. Raisins: nutritious and tolerable, eating-wise, to my mind. Chocolate chips: more! more! But when micro-bits of one tasty tidbit sluff off onto the others? Not entirely serendipitous.
Le Picnique
So what do these people who are hardly under-nourished pull out of their day packs when we settle ourselves on some pelvis-cradling rocks for lunch? This: gourmet take-out with snap-top plastic containers. Curried chicken salad. Tabbouli with hummus and pita. Salade niçoise or russe —or equally complicated delicacies from home and not mere leftovers either. All in containers that’ll have to be schlepped out—along with the requisite dirty spoons and knives, whether plastic or civilized.Now I like an elegant picnic once in a while, but on the trail give me good old PB&J. First of all, the makings are always available so I don’t have to think ahead, make lists, shop. Second, I’m always amazed, once I’ve taken that first bite, to discover once again that the Great American Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich is worth bragging about. Third, it’s indestructible on a hot day. Fourth, it’s easy to handle. Just wrap it in waxed paper, pop it into a baggie and throw it into the pack. Fifth, there's almost nothing to pack out. Finally, it’s real food. It gives me protein, non-artery-clogging oils, salt to replace what I’m sweating out. What's more, I’m supplied with plenty of energy and I’m stuffed enough to keep the afternoon hungries away.
I’m not the only one who likes PB&J on the trail. When I’m alone up toward the treeline, the gray jays zoom in, hoping to snatch a beakful right out of my hand. If I throw a morsel into the scrub, at least two of them are likely to fight over it. Then they’ll hop back for more, if the last bite hasn’t disappeared into my own gullet. Being with jays is almost as amusing as another New Mexico bird-watching pastime: observing hummingbirds as they compete for feeder access. Small isn’t necessarily nice.
What It Takes
Now a quick and easy but superduper PB&J sandwich doesn’t just happen. The larder has to be kept stocked with the right supplies. First of all: good bread. I buy big loaves of the best bread in town, have it sliced and keep it in the freezer. Usually I can choose from several varieties. The bread in the photo is from a crusty round of what’s often called farmer’s bread. I don’t grind my own peanuts, but the peanut butter I like is nothing but peanuts and a little salt. It’s not homogenized either. I have to mix in the oil when I open the jar, and then I have to store the jar upside down, to keep the oil well distributed. But this PB tastes like honest-to-god, freshly roasted peanuts. After I spread it, I always lick the knife. It’s that good.
Finally, there’s the jelly part, which for me consists of jam that I buy at the Farmer’s Market. My favorite is Heidi’s raspberry jam. The raspberry flavor is intense. The sweetness isn’t cloying. Nor have the seeds been removed, so there’s texture. A little tongue massage, for free, and if a toothpick’s required from time to time, discreet’s the word. It’s a small price to pay for the world’s best raspberry jam, which also comes in three slightly more exotic guises: raspberry ginger jam, raspberry chili jam, and an absolutely inspired triplet that I stock up on. Raspberry chili ginger jam. Some guests present a bottle of wine to the hostess when they’re invited for dinner. I take raspberry chili ginger jam. It’s that good.I have another favorite jam vendor. The Montoyas make jam from every conceivable fruit–or almost: apricot, sour cherry, choke cherry, plum, you name it. The apricots and sour cherries aren’t native to New Mexico, but they are so much at home here that people with trees in their yards can’t keep up with the yield. Even the birds can’t keep up. In late spring, our sidewalks are smeared with a fermenting mash that we’re so used to we walk right through it. As for the choke cherries, their flavor has a hint of wild grapes, and the stone is surrounded by so little flesh that they’re never sold as fruit. Either you pull them off the bush, suck off the fruit and spit the pits, like kids defying civilization, as you’re threading your way through the bosque—or you buy the jam.
With all these splendid jams to choose from and more—like quince, peach, strawberry with or without rhubarb, there’s no way a PB&J sandwich has to be boring or ordinary. That’s why, in one jam version or another, I often take one along for another kind of picnic: the otherwise dread meal on the plane.
Another Way
Which brings me to my concept of the ideal, more-or-less elegant picnic fare. Depending on what you keep on hand as a matter of course, this one involves a bit more thought, but there’s little prep time involved, the absolutely bedrock condition for picnicking, so far as I’m concerned. So here it is: cheese, baguette, wine. And fruit. As to cheeses, four will do nicely: one soft and/or smelly, one blue, one hard or cheddary, one goat. In fact, the possibilities are endless and can verge on the exotic, but if you, like me, usually have cheese on hand and keep some kind of good crusty bread in the freezer, this combo too can be thrown together in minutes. What’s more, if you forgo the heavy bottle of wine, any combination of cheese and bread makes a superb lunch for hikers. My favorite is a slab of brie on that hunk of baguette, which is also one of my favorite lunches at 38,000 feet.This strong if not quite violent antipathy to putting in hard labor to produce a picnic for Labor Day or any other outdoor meal goes way back to my childhood, part of which was spent in Maryland. My family belonged to a swimming club on the Chesapeake Bay. We drove there every weekend, two hours each way, and every weekend we’d be surrounded by families who loaded up their picnic tables with gargantuan feasts. The pièce de résistance would always be the fried chicken—Maryland friend chicken, of course—which someone, as in someone’s mother, would have prepared at home the night before. She would also have prepared the potato salad and the slaw and she would have readied the crab cakes, too, for cooking on the grill.
Ah yes. The grilling! The smell of the smoke and the even worse smell of the starter would waft our way. So would the inevitable arguments over whether the coals were ready and later whether the hamburgers or crab cakes or hot dogs were ready. Or underdone. Or overcooked. And finally there would be the cakes or pies to sigh over, as full stomachs were patted. All in all, a very big production. So far as I could see, the women never had time for fun, and the men were too stuffed to move, especially after washing it all down with much beer.
The Family Consensus
Early on I was envious of these well-fed families. I wanted to know why we couldn’t bring fried chicken. And apple pie. My wily mother agreed that we could. Then she invited me to help her prepare the requisites for that evidently standard picnic feast among Marylanders. “Me?” I asked. “You and me,” Mother said, sweetly. My sister had prudently disappeared. And that was the end of that, which was just fine with my father. Result: the next Sunday, as usual, we filled the hamper—and not a huge one—with the unexciting ham and cheese sandwiches, a far from gigantic bag of potato chips, some cookies and fruit. And no alcohol—which meant dad had endless energy to play in the water with his daughters, and my mother, who was no shirker of housework at home, was able to relax and swim and search for exotic shells along the beach without having to slave for it, for hours, the night before.Labor-less. That’s my idea of Labor Day, on the trail or at the beach. My mother and I disagreed about many things, but not about this.