Peanut butter and raspberry jelly oozed between my fingers, out of that freshly made bannock, as I bit down on it. The bannock itself contained wild blueberries…the best PB&J! I ate my bannock, freshly baked and hot enough to touch as did everyone in my team, every night sitting on the ground, in the light of a campfire. We sat, squatted really, around the hot coals of a campfire, built beside the banks of a river, better still a beach. The bannock was cooked and we ate it as the drift wood coals were still red and oozing heat. It was a tradition, our tradition. ‘Our bannock’ whether for breakfast or at night, after we’d eaten something savoury often contained freshly picked wild blueberries, which one of us had picked earlier that day. But it could contain raisins. Our bannock recipe was Bob’s which he’d learned from his mother. He cooked it over hot coals, rather than in the oven in a cast iron pan. As a rule, he made it, but all of us could stand in for him, but it wasn’t quite the same.
Eating a PB & J on bannock twice daily was our ritual. It was what we, a small team of archaeologists who surveyed the granite cliffs on rivers in relatively unknown parts of the Canadian Shield, in Northwestern Ontario, did. This bannock not only satisfied our increasing hunger pangs as our appetites grew. The ritual of eating it daily comforted us as we ventured into an area that relatively few had visited, and only by canoe or by bushplane. We’d driven six hours by vehicle to a sand beach…after driving down a dirt logging road.. At beach we’d unpacked the vehcile and our fieldwork equipment and all the baggage into the canoes are sole transport. The canoes, Grummans, were our transport….our means to travel through a landscape which we knew of by map and from professional briefs in the ‘lab’ 5 hours drive away. The river, the water, became the medium we used to traverse through the ‘bush’ as the landscape as we moved, well floated, canoeing, flowed through ‘wild’. We were surveying it for archaeological sites but in many senses, we were being examined by those unknowns on the river banks. So, those bannocks kept us together and the act of making and eating them, kept us together. Every day we ventured further into the ‘bush’ using the rivers, as our highways, edgeing away from everything, and lives that we knew the comsumption of that bannock connected us to each other. We knew that the water, the river and the lakes, was the constant and potential ‘friend’ or ‘foe’.
It’s the combination of raspberry jelly and crunchy peanut butter which is key to a ‘good’ PB and J bannock, in my mind. I’m aware that the iconic combination is peanut butter and grape jelly but some swap it with strawberry jam. Personally I hate grape jelly. Bannock P B and J is arguably an interesting example of food ‘fusion’ or a ‘cross-cultural’ artifact – something in translation. Whenever I eat it, I’m reminded of sitting beside a roaring fire, usually burning driftwood where the hot red embers light up the faces of my teammates as shadows are pushed to the back in a black night. The fire was always closeby to the river, on the bank, our ‘highway’ , our ‘road’. Around the campfire we forgot that we were in the ‘middle’ of ‘nowhere’. We laughed together,we talked through the day’s events. ‘Nowhere’ being the coniferous, cone-bearing, evergreen forests filled with freshwater rivers, lakes, bogs, fens, and marshes – that Boreal Forest which wraps itself across the northerly regions of North America with a myriad of vegetation types ranging from fresh-water lakes to swamps. We knew that the forest was often viewed by many people who didn’t know it as a mosquito-ridden swamp with some pine trees. We knew that the geographical region was viewed as, good for nothing but furs, wood, diamonds, precious metals, wilderness holidays, fishing trips and not much more. In fact the combination of peanut butter and grape jelly resonates with many North Americans as it’s the standard child’s lunch sandwich filling whether at home or in a lunchbox. It was relatively cheap compared to other sorts of lunch materials, nutritious, and the sandwich is very easy to make.
The nightly consumption of bannock signalled a time to relax after a long day conducting fieldwork. If we ate it, in the mornring it was our ‘breakfast’. So, in the evenings, we made it almost immediately after we’d eaten it after whatever we’d eaten for dinner, prior to disappearing into the darkness to find our own tents, away from the sputtering wood fire burning. We cooked the bannock on a grill, over a wood fire burning scavenged wood what we’d found dried out, washed up on the riverbanks, of the river which we travelled in by day. We’d brought the grill into the ‘bush’ with us, for using on our campfire. Every time we arrived at a ‘new’ place on the side of the river we’d forage for dead trees from the surrounding forest. So, we carried an axe and a saw with us, in the ‘bush’ to cut up what we found into bits to carry back to ‘camp’. Wood fires were everything – the one place to ‘meet each other’ again after a long day, to talk together and to resolve our daily problems – from keeping us dry to drying our wet or damp clothes, warming ourselves in the chills of summer evenings but above all to cook everything we ate. It was key to grilling our twice ‘daily’ bannock – breakfast and the second half of dinner. The act of eating Bannock transmitted our primordial “togetherness’ or ‘groupness’, cementing shared experience.
Once cooked, the bannock was sliced open and slathered with crunchy peanut butter and jam or jelly of some sort. Crunchy rather than ‘smoothie’ was preference of our team members with strawberry or raspberry jam…we referred to this combination by the letters ‘P B & J’. The jam or jelly chosen changed according to a group decision made every grocery day, in the cheapest supermarket –always the day before we left the government laboratory, in Kenora, a small rural North western Ontario country town. Bannock, our medium for eating PB & J, is a well-known a staple of ‘fur trade life’ in the geographical region of North America where we undertook archaeological fieldwork. The label ‘fur trade’ implies the acquisition, sale, and transportation from the region’s Indigenous peoples to London and Antwerp and beyond to the globe’s fur trade markets during the early modern period. The trade in fur, animal fur from the Boreal Forest had stimulated not only exploration but colonization by Europeans of Siberia, North America, and beyond. We were aware that the introduction of Peanut butter and J on bannock is something from ‘outsiders’.
The word ‘bannock’ itself originates from the Gaelic word ‘bannach’ meaning morsel, which in turn likely derives from the Latin word ‘panis’ which means bread. It originates from Scotland and was made traditionally of oatmeal. The Algonquian speaking peoples in ‘our geographical region’ made it from flour with a bit of baking powder mixed with water. We knew of regional variations where different varieties of flour, corn or nuts were used with dried or fresh fruit added to the dough mixture before cooking. Ours used white flour mixed some baking powder, mixed with a spoon. We made it from scratch everyday as we carried in the white flour to mix it with baking powder just before it was made up in the field. We definately did not use a prepapared mixture from the superstore or a ‘mix’ that we’d made up in the lab prior to take into the field! Freshly picked blueberries or raisins were often added. Once the mixture was a dough, Bob divided into equal portions, usually half the size of his palms, and gently shaped into flat roundish balls. They were gently laid on the grill which was ready, laying the edges of rocks surrounding the hot wood coals. Once it was a light golden brown and had risen, Bob flipped the dough flipped using his fingers for it to rise again. The bannock was taken off the grill once it was bearable to touch, cut in half while gingerly held in one’s hand. The peanut butter on one side and whatever the jam/jelly was on the other. As archaeologists we’d joke that we deployed “land-based skills” (used by archaeologists) but from a boat, in our case, Grumman (aluminium) canoes. In all seriousness we surveyed the landscape for pictograph sites and habitation sites on the riverbanks of the Turtle River System, in Northwestern Ontario, Canada.
Our knowledge came from the forest and geology teams from the Ontario Ministry of Northern Ontario and Mines surveyed the physical region before us. We’d spoken to them prior to ‘leaving Kenora’. We were few days away from Ignace, the nearest rural community. The ‘lab’, or our HQ, was in Kenora, some three to four hours drive west of Ignace. Our mission was to find and record all of the known and unknown pictograph sites, often called rock art sites, so that government officials could create a management plan for what’s called the Turtle River-White Otter Lake Provincial Park. This document would provide policy direction for the protection, development and management of Turtle River-White Otter Lake Provincial Park and its resources. But we went further. We were determined to establish the range, type, and location of any archaeological sites we might find on the riverbanks. We were determined to understand this part of the granitic Shield, from the water’s edge, a region first used by its Indigenous inhabitants. The undulating topography of the region is the product of interaction between late Pleistocene glacial activity and the underlying Precambrian bedrock formations. Settlement patterns are influenced by the climate, soils, geomorphology, and hydrology of the Boreal (coniferous) forest. Our team boss, Susie, had worked in the region for some time, as had some of the team members. I was the most junior team member of a group, a team of four to six depending on when everyone’s schedule – all of us were at very stages of our undergraduate education. For a while now, I ‘d spent my summers working surveying the banks of rivers, in the Boreal Forest often called the ‘Canadian countryside’ …or the ‘bush’. From my perspective it gave me the chance, which I relished to be away from the rush of city living, and the opportunity to learn more about the natural world. It more importantly, gave me time to clear my head and to try to work out what was next, other than the upcoming academic year.
It was pleasant to wear t-shirts and shorts during the heat of day, but the temperature always fell at night, so we could sleep. We had our own tents. We had a routine: – we returned to where we’d set up camp, once dusk fell. Any paperwork left over from the day’s work was completed once we’d pitched tents (if this was a new campsite) (we did move every other day at times), found wood for the campfire cook and eat our supper. Then we’d practice our ritual of baking freshly made bannock on a grill, to be eaten with P B & J. Our ritual we practiced twice daily: for breakfast and after supper over the campfire made of foraged driftwood.
The letters ‘P B & J’ to refer to that iconic sandwich mix of ‘peanut butter with jelly’. It’s that fail-safe quick thing to eat, the answer to that proverbial question ‘what to eat when you’re hungry and you just can’t think about what to make’. It is a little-known fact is that the average American eats 1,500 PB&J sandwiches before graduating high school! That’s one every day!
So, what’s the story of the invention of this quintessential combo? The sandwich has its origins in World War Two where peanut butter and jelly, called Grapelade which was (made of Concord Grapes), were listed on US military ration menus. These sandwiches were made with pre-sliced bread. Peanut butter is delicious (even with a spoon) but as a high-protein, stable and portable substance, it was considered apt for carrying on long marches. Grapelade had been eaten by soldiers during World War One. So, during World War Two, a combination of the two seemed natural. I’ll pass on the grape jelly and use either raspberry or strawberry. So, where am I going?
It’s not just the jelly but the nature of the peanut butter which is a divisive topic for every expedition that I’ve been on. I’m a crunchie fan. I dislike the way that smooth peanut sticks to the roof of my mouth, but this makes me consider the development of peanut butter. The earliest references go back to the Aztecs and Inca civilizations who ground peanuts into paste. That aspect makes me realise that this stuff isn’t a ‘butter’ but a paste reminding me that various origins of it exist.
Several people can be credited with the invention of what’s consider in quotes “modern peanut butter” and the processes involved in its creation. It’s assumed George Washington Carver, the American botanist, invented it based upon his unstinting promotion of peanuts in the early 20th century and his publication “How to Grow the Peanut and 105 Ways of Preparing it For Human Consumption”. Yet, at the time many people had developed or patented various methods of producing peanut butter. The first US patent for producing a paste from roasting peanuts using a heated surface obtained by a Marcellus Gilmore Edson, a chemist and inventor from Montreal, in 1884. His product was as protein-packed paste used by people who didn’t have teeth, who couldn’t chew as brushing and flossing weren’t commonplace. [NB: Question here: what are you brushing if you don’t have teeth? Your gums probably] Gilmore Edson milled the roasted peanuts until peanuts reached “a fluid or semi-fluid state” mixed it with sugar to harden its consistency. Ten years later, in 1894, Geoge Bayle, a businessman from St. Louis, Missouri, produced and sold peanut butter in the form of a snack food.
The most well-known US patent holder is John Harvey Kellogg, [better known for breakfast cereals and in particular cornflakes], obtained a patent for the process of making peanut butter in 1896. Kellogg’s method meant that the peanuts were boiled the peanuts rather than roasted them. He renamed the ‘paste’, ‘butter’. Seven years later, in 1903, a Joseph Lambert who had worked at the John Harvey Kellogg’s Battle Creek Sanitorium with a Dr. Ambrose Straub obtained a patent for a peanut-butter-making machine. But peanut butter’s rise to rise to stardom occurred when it was debuted at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri. C. H. Summer, the sole vender, presented it as an American innovation. By 1917, many Americans ate peanut based products during periods of meat rationing as the government promoted “meatless Mondays”. One of the many conversations we had while canoeing on those long stretches of river was whether we preferred ‘smoothie’ or ‘crunchy’ peanut butter. Now, ‘smooth peanut butter’ was first marketed under the brand name ‘Skippy’, a brand which I’ve always found too sweet. Joseph Rosefield, a chemist, in 1922 invented the process of adding partially hydrogenated oil so that the smooth peanut butter didn’t separate. This invention was initially licensed to the company which created the ‘Peter Pan’ peanut butter in 1928; but it was later produced under the name, ‘Skippy’. Rosefield subsequently developed a new method of churning creamy peanut butter, so it obtained a smoother consistency but mixed fragments of peanut into peanut butter, creating what became known as the first “chunky”-style peanut butter. The stuff labelled ‘Jif’ produced by Procter and Gamble, in 1958, was sweeter than other brands as sugar and molasses was added to its recipe. But why this conversation? Whilst seemingly pointless conversion, this combination of peanut butter, jam/jelly and bannock it was fundamental for our mental sense of ourselves, our well-being. This was because it was something that we always did, it was a constant. It was our ritual especially during the days when the weather turned for the worse. And rained. We even made it over the gas flame of a propane camp stove when we couldn’t have a wood fire because of risk of forest fires in the region. This ritual gave us a sense of reassurance, faith in the group, sense that we’d arrived safely at a dry place for the night, we’d tackled and completed the day’s chores and tomorrow as another day.
One time, when the weather to a turn for the worst in White Otter Lake in today’s Turtle River Provincial Park. The sun disappeared, vanished. It rained. And I don’t mean drizzle. I mean sheet rain, rain where the weight of the drops felt as if it had pierced our waterproofs. We were sodden – the waterproofing of our outer clothes ultimately failed. We were damp, under those waterproofs – so damp our skins shrivelled as if we’d been in the bathtub too long. Sleep at night was punctuated by waves of lying awake wondering whether our tent pegs would hold up, our personal trenches overflow. Once the rain started coming in sheets, we’d dug deep narrow trenches encircling our own tents to prevent them from being flooded during the night after we’d gingerly climbed into them and zipped them close. The piles of brush underneath the tarps, underneath our tents which we’d placed to keep the base of the tent dry, were regularly breached. These piles were supposed to allow the water to flow easily under our tents. Our sleeping bags were damp. A pervasive damp existed inside our tents. Nothing dried. Nightly rainstorms decimated our cache of tent pegs, so we tied the tent lines to trees to prevent ourselves, in our tents, from cascading off the riverbank, down into the river. Endless rain during the day, meant that fieldwork was impossible. We spent days inside our tents periodically reading, sleeping, or writing in our diaries. Time simply stopped.
One early morning, after many days of rain, we all stood beside our ‘usual very wet smouldering’ campfire. We’d not seen the sun or its heat for days. It was overcast, grey, the air heaved with moisture. We were too uncomfortable to sit down or even perch on the rocks conveniently placed by nature, which we used as ‘stools’ as it meant that our skin touched our damp clothes. We were miserable. No-one spoke. We functioned like automatons barely daring to ask, just how many days of this to go? We watched our fire which wouldn’t burst into flames, it smouldered. A colleague mentioned that he’d like to build a wooden platform for his tent and a roof – he’d have enough of the rain. All of us, except for Bob, huddled around the camp ‘fire’. We knew the morning’s routine: eat breakfast, do the morning radio call required back in Kenora, to our HQ, to ‘radio in’ in order to confirm that we were alive and then in this ‘era of rain’, go back inside our tents. Prior to the ‘era of rain’ we’d have started the day’s field activities immediately after having ‘radioed in’. It was Bob’s turn that day,…to ‘radio in’ so he’d walked up the hill where the signal was strongest, through the mix of decidious and pine trees away from the the riverbank, our tents, and us by the campfire. We were dawdling mentally preparing ourselves for a potential day of doing very little, recognisingin the rain. Suddenely we heard Bob yelling from the top of the hill, through the trees on the hill. He arrived breathless trying to talk. Our friend’s brother was coming by motorboat to rescue us from the rain! He’d be with us in an hour.We already knew that the brother of a colleague of ours was in the next river system, to the east of where we were. Our colleague’s brother was working as a fishing guide at a neighbouring lake, Sanford Lake, where there was a fishing lodge. It was… a fishing lodge, and not any old fishing lodge, but a 5 star fishing lodge! His boss, the lodge owner wanted our help. We were to stay for few days! So we had to pack up our belongings into our backpacks, regardless of how wet they were. We’d be leaving our tents to dry out! What luck, we thought! We were out of there!
His arrival by boat, was heralded by the sound of the 30-horse outboard motor, a few hours later, coming through the mist. The mist was so thick on the lake, all around us, it was tough to discern the edge of shore. The boat’s arrival, a metal boat with an outboard motor, was such a relief. It’s encumbants helped us to clamber into it. We huddled down in the base of the boat, below the gunwales and clutched our wet belongings, in sodden backpacks. We all, save for the our colleague’s brother who was using the outboard, hunkered down for what was likely to be a twenty minute – half an hour boat ride to the portage, with its sandy beach across to the portage to Sanford Lake. But the lake was rough, it was a bumpy ride, and we heard the waves slapping the sides of the boat. It was tough to see much given the mist.
Once on the beach, we eagerly walked to the truck, hidden in brush near the entrance to a 3-mile portage, a dirt track, which we’d explored a few weeks back. We knew from our map and from walking down it, it led to a rock and sandy beach on Sanford Lake, on another river system. The truck was connected to a thick brown metal chain which was attached to a large thick pin in the middle of a block of concrete at either end of the portage, in the ground, in the ends of the track. We’d found, by trying, that the truck’s cab door was unlocked. But who had the keys to the truck? Who used it? Our colleague’s brother had the key! The truck moved backwards and forwards along the chain which was laid along the length of the portage between White Otter Lake and on Sanford Lake to carry boats, fishing gear while the people walked beside or sat on the truck’s tailgate. We dumped our bags on the truck, some of us squeezed into the cab and the others sat on the tailgate. The rain poured down but we were happy, we laughed and smiled. The drive ended as we climbed off the truck, and into another boat with a 30-horse outboard motor for a boat ride. We had to cross some very rough water, to a distant building which we could vaguely see through the rain. It was, we could just see, made from logs.
The lake water was rough, well ‘angry’ as there were numerous white caps. The ride was bumpy, as the boat, a aluminium boat with an outboard motor on the back crossed across the tops of the waves towards a log building in the distance, beside a strip of sand. The log building, described in tourist guidebooks as “a remote, all-inclusive Fly-In access Lodge for predominately American tourists in the Boreal Forest”. It was, for us, another planet – warm with a roof, with showers, washing machines, wooden walls, flat floors, shock horror….a flush toilet, doors that closed, dry beds with sheets and stripy Hudson Bay Company blankets. If this was heaven, we’d found it.
But we knew that we’d miss our ‘bannock’. We heard from our colleague, the sister of the guy who worked at the lodge, that there was a chef. But could we even have bannock? Would we slather peanut butter on it? Crunchie or smoothie? Would it contain blueberries? Or raisins? What were the jams? What were the jellies? The usuals for the region: pincherry, blueberry, strawberry, grape, or raspberry? We were there and we had to keep our ritual!
So, after a what was probably a delicious fish supper which we didn’t have to cook nor did we have to eat standing up as the ground was so muddy and the ‘chairs’ rocks so wet…it was time for bannock. Our bannock that night was made in an oven by a Chef, not our good friend and companion Bob. It arrived at the table elegantly piled in a serving dish lacking the marks of a grill, the waft of wood smoke. The collection of glass Mason jars containing jam and jellies in the middle of the table made sense…they were strawberry, grape, pincherry, strawberry, raspberry and two unknown types, which were clearish in colour.
The Chef told us that these two clear jellies were made specifically for the Lodge guests: Leech Jelly and Rock Jelly. They were considered specialties of the Lodge. What a dilemma! Which one to try? The leech jelly was a light grey colour. The rock jelly was clear. I remember being puzzled, uneasy. We’d become fixed to specific types, to traditions. Should they be tried? What would they taste like? Could we handle this change? I tried both. They had a gentle flavour, not the hard acidity of the strawberry, the raspberry or the pincherry. Comparison with the grape? Who knows? As I said, I dislike it intensely.
The Chef explained the origns of the Leech Jelly as we tried it…it was made from those leeches which weren’t used by the fishing guides by the end of each day. These leeches would have been thrown out. The point being that the waste of anything was unethical, regardless of how exclusive a place maybe. These leeches weren’t cheap, as they were flown to the Lodge, by bush plane to be used by the tourists from the US, for fishing. The leeches could only last a few days before they died. The Rock Jelly originated from an experiment to see if rocks had a flavour and because of the well-known folk tale of ‘stone soup’.
The point here is that the Leech and Rock jelly with peanut butter aren’t the quintessential PB & J. The existance and possible consumption suggests that sometimes fundamental changes are necessary in life and one’s circumstances to recognize that what’s a given, what one has accepted as tradition or a ritual at times must be challenged and dare I say, even changed. No experience, nothing must be wasted. But the eating of the bannock around the campfire celebrated our group – it was a ritual, magical in a sense and far more meaningful than the PB&J at the Tourist camp, made by the Chef, not by Bob. We ate those jellies at the Lodge on the beautiful bannock, lacking blueberries or raisins knowing that what we did there, for those few days was far from ‘the norm’, we had an unusual job, and even trying Leech Jelly or Rock Jelly was likely once in a lifetime event. Utimately we didn’t fit the category of the usual American Tourist guest a at a 5 Star Fly in log Lodge….but we knew that our job wasn’t conventional in any case. All in all it was a once in the life time event.
