Boiled peanuts are a traditional snack in the South Carolina. Pronounced "bald peanuts" by diehard Southerners. They are an acquired taste, but according to southerners, they are totally addictive. From May through November, all over the south, you will see roadside stands - ranging from woodsheds to shiny trailers - offering fresh boiled peanuts. Sometimes they are hard to open with your fingers, and you must resort to using your teeth, but according most people feel they are worth the trouble.

A traditional way that old-timers like to eat boiled peanuts is to drop the shelled peanuts into a bottle of cold RC Cola and gulp down the combo. Southerners will tell your boiled peanuts should always be accompanied by a beer, sweet tea, or a soft drink. Traditionally they are eaten outside where it doesn't matter if wet shells are tossed or spit on the ground.

Boiled peanuts are green or raw nuts that are boiled in salty water for hours outdoors over a fire. The shells turn soggy, and the peanuts take on a fresh, legume flavor. A green peanut is not green in color, just freshly harvested. It takes ninety to a hundred days to grow peanuts for boiling, and they are available only during May through November throughout the southern states. One of the drawbacks of boiled peanuts is that they have a very short shelf life unless refrigerated or frozen. If you leave them out on the kitchen counter for 3 to 4 days, they become slimy and smelly!

No one knows just why southerners started boiling peanuts or who was the first to boil them. However, it is known that boiled peanuts have been a southern institution since at least the Civil War (1861-1865), when Union General William T. Sherman (1820-1891) led his troops on their march through Georgia. As a result of General Sherman's campaign in Georgia, the Confederacy was split in two and deprived of much needed supplies.

Contemporary writings are full of complaints of lack of bread and meat. The great concern of the Confederate government was to feed the army. When troops of the Confederacy were without food, peanuts were an important nutritional source. Since cooking facilities were scarce, soldiers roasted the peanuts over campfires or boiled them. It seems to be lost in history as to who came up with the idea of adding salt to the peanuts when boiling them. What they were doing by boiling in salt, is a ancient preservation technique. It was discovered that these boiled peanuts would keep in their kits for up to seven day. The salt works as a preservative and the boiling kills impurities and bacteria. This produced a high protein ration that could be carried by the soldier. As salt was also scare during the Civil War, history doesn't tell use how the confederate soldiers had enough salt to use, unless salt meat, a large part of the army ration, was used somehow.

Confederate soldiers also adopted peanuts as a cheap coffee substitute along with parched rye, wheat, corn, sweet potatoes, chestnuts, chicory, and cotton seed . Some history books note that Confederate soldiers from Georgia were know as "goober grabbers."

It was during the slave-trading years of the 17th and 18th centuries that the peanut was first brought to the southeaster United States, and for a long time it was assumed that the peanut had originated in Africa. However, peanuts actually originated in Brazil and Peru.

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