Peanuts, anyone?
It seems like every other product you find at the grocery
store these days contains a label warning of manufacture at a facility where
peanuts may be used. That’s because so many young children are allergic to
peanuts.
Back when I was growing up on a farm on the Callahan County
side of Scranton, Texas, the term “peanut allergy” would have been a sacrilege.
The peanut was our cash crop, determining our financial status for the next 12
months, and everyone – young and old – consumed peanuts.
I was exposed to peanuts very early in life. Among my
earliest memories as a little boy are those of following my dad to the field,
where he would pull up sample peanut plants to determine if the crop was ready
for harvesting. My dad, a second generation peanut grower on the family farm,
would break open the shells even if the nuts were immature, giving me a taste.
The peanuts were harvested – usually in October – by a
“combine,” a mechanized machine pulled by a tractor. The combine separated the
nuts (in the shells) from the remainder of the plant with the peanuts routed to
a sacking device and the plant remains deposited on the ground to be baled as
hay at a later time.
The burlap sacks containing the peanuts were often stacked
on a frame to allow the nuts to dry (to get a higher grade when sold) or to
wait for better prices at the peanut mill. This was a great time for me. I
would make at least a daily visit to the bags of peanuts, looking for holes big
enough to squeeze out some peanuts. If there were no holes, I’d pull out my pocket
knife and make a hole. (Every little farm boy had a pocket knife in those days.)
Our farm was at the western edge of a section of the Cross
Timbers region of Texas that produced peanuts. In addition to a small slice of
Callahan County, that area included Comanche, Eastland and Erath Counties.
Peanuts were grown based on an acreage amount allocated by the federal
government. In the period after World War II through the 1950s the peanut
allotment was extremely important to the financial life of the small farms of
the region.
Although our farm sold most of each year’s peanut harvest,
several sacks were saved for personal use. My dad’s siblings and their families
received portions, and we shared our personal stock with friends and other
relatives. After a long drought forced my dad to quit farming, we continued to gets
sacks of personal peanuts from the renters using our peanut allotment.
The Shrader family tended to use the peanuts to make what
they called “parched” peanuts, roasting them in the shell in the oven. My
grandfather did the “parching” for his family. When I learned to cook from my
mother, I discovered he was actually burning the peanuts. Those I cooked were
better. Our family would make peanut brittle, too. Of course, there was peanut
butter from the store, when the first commercial brands required remixing the
oil with the butter.
After Sue and I married, my mother started making peanut
patties as a Christmas candy. Peanut patties were much more labor intensive
than either brittle or parched peanuts, but oh, so good! Mother would made
double batches, but hide them to keep us from eating too many when we first
arrived for the Christmas holidays. A company in Columbus, Texas, Kay Klauber Candies, makes a peanut
patty today almost as good as those made by my mother.
The peanut industry in Callahan, Comanche, Eastland and
Erath Counties was so large that a peanut shelling plant was located in the
tiny community of Gorman in Eastland County in 1940. Peanuts were shipped in
and out by rail and by truck. Until a few years ago, shelled peanuts could be
purchased by the five-pound box at the Birdsong plant there. For many years, a
tiny retail store situated on Texas Hwy 6 in Gorman sold raw, shelled peanuts
and many confections using peanuts.
The peanut produced in the Cross Timbers region in my youth
was the Spanish peanut. Used for candies and other cooking, it is arguably the
best-tasting peanut. One of the most successful peanut farmers in our area was
W.B. Starr, who settled an area east of Scranton. In the 1950s researchers at
Texas A&M University introduced an improved variety of the Spanish peanut,
naming it the “Starr Peanut” in honor of Mr. Starr.
During the Great Depression, the federal government promoted
farming practices that included terracing to conserve water, crop rotation and
the planting of American Vetch to hold the soil and fix nitrogen. The farmers eventually
abandoned those procedures to get as much production as possible from the
allotted acreage. A significant amount of the surface sand blew away because
there was no cover crop for some parts of the year.
This overuse of the land, plus a need for greater financial
investment and changes in federal peanut allotment rules resulted in the
decline of the peanut industry in the western Cross Timbers region. Much of
Texas peanut farming moved to the South Plains and westward to New Mexico,
where there was ground water for irrigation. Today this Cross Timbers dryland is
used for raising cattle and growing Coastal Bermuda for grazing and hay.
The Spanish peanuts we find on store shelves today don’t
taste as good as those once grown in my area of Texas. Perhaps it’s my age or
just maybe there was some secret ingredient in the soil that made those peanuts
taste better. Regardless, I haven’t cut back on my consumption of peanut butter
spread on Premium Saltine crackers.
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