All I Really Want to Eat is Peanut Butter and Jelly

The Constant, Reliable Sandwich is My Jam

A version of my ideal PB&J: chunky peanut butter spread on a toasted English muffin so the peanut butter melts into the nooks and crannies, topped with wild blueberry jam. I did a better job with the proportions on the left, was a little too jam-heavy on the right. Photo by me — I need to work on my food photography skills.

I would not turn down nachos and pizza or burritos and mac and cheese, but all I really want to eat is peanut butter and jelly. Give me two slices of bread, some peanut butter and some jam, and I am happy.

I have graduated from my childhood PB&Js, made on white Wonder® bread, with Skippy® peanut butter and Welch’s™ grape jelly, but only slightly. Every once in a while, my mom would imprint a smiley face onto the bread slices, and we would unwrap the aluminum foil and find this token of her love. Eventually, she stopped buying Wonder bread, replacing it with supposedly-healthier low-calorie oatmeal or whole-grain bread, but it did not change the way I felt about PB&J.

I was in college when I realized the depth of jelly options, and its superior cousin, jam. There was a small convenience store in our food hall which sold Smucker’s low-sugar strawberry jam; sure, it was a color that was not found in nature, but I was undeterred. Opening that first jar of jam showed me what I was missing, and I used to eat it straight from the jar. It is lying to say I used to do that; after suffering one too many disappointing breakfast surprises, my husband now buys only my least favorite flavors, orange and raspberry.

After college, I realized that it is also perfectly acceptable to eat peanut butter straight from the jar. I do not care about the type of nut butter — peanut, almond and cashew are equally delicious — but do not waste my time with seed butter. In a pinch, when the cravings are strong but our supply is not, I have even made my own, throwing a handful of nuts into the immersion blender. If I am feeling virtuous, I will buy the all-natural versions, but we all know that is a bit like eating chalk. In the end, I am a kid with a sugar tooth at heart, and my heart belongs to chunky sugary blended peanut butter; it does not have a long shelf life in our cupboard.

My father and little brother have eaten PB&J every weekday since the pandemic began. My mom invented her own variation, splitting a banana in half and spreading peanut butter on both sides. I love her dearly, but I do not like watching her eat this. I hardly ate any PB&J in the first lockdown; I was much more ambitious and adventurous, creating weekly menus for lunch and dinner and testing my the limits of my cooking (and intestines) with jackfruit tacos and beetroot burgers.

In this lockdown, I have stopped craving food. I am craving comfort and family. I pick up handfuls of citrus fruit at the market; they remind me of the boxes of grapefruit I used to sell to raise money for swimming trips and the oranges slices we would eat as snacks during sports games, but mostly they remind me of my grandmother. I eat my lunchtime PB&J, and even though they are just waking up on the other side of the world, I feel like I am sitting on my parents’ deck, eating sandwiches with my family.