Peanuts may have made their way to North America in the slave
ships either brought by the Africans themselves or by the
Europeans who used the legume as a cheap, nutritious food.
Plantation owners began growing peanuts to feed the slaves,
and the legume went on to be widely cultivated throughout
the South.
Africans
certainly popularized the peanut in colonial America. For
example the Americanism "goober" for peanuts,
likely came from the Congo word for peanut, nguba. The preparation
for peanut soup anchors many colonial recipe collections.
The peanut is also made into candies and cookies, including
peanut brittle, often called groundnut cake in the South.
Southern
American cuisine uses the peanut in a wide variety of ways
that echo its use throughout the world: in soups, in stuffings
(or dressings) in the American South for fowl and game,
as well as a garnish for vegetable casseroles.
The
agricultural chemist, George Washington Carver, an African-American,
developed some 300 products coming from the peanut in the
early twentieth century.
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