I happen to see Gary making his lunch. A peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I'm watching him, he pulls out the two slices of bread, the peanut butter jar, the jelly jar, his knife. Then he starts with the jelly - not the peanut butter. I said, is that always how you make it? With the jelly first and not the peanut butter? He said yeah why? I said because I ALWAYS do the peanut butter first. Now, I know that I'm sort of OCD about a lot of stuff so I decided to ask other people about it. I put it on facebook, asked around work, Gary and my mom asked around their works. And I was just shocked at the responses!!
It seems everyone falls in to one of the following categories:
1. Put peanut butter on the first slice of bread. Put jelly on the other slice of bread. Put the two slices together.
Now, this is how I do it and how I consider to be the correct way. After a little research I see that wikihow agrees with me!
http://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Peanut-Butter-and-Jelly-Sandwich
2. Put jelly on the first slice of bread. Put peanut butter on the other slice of bread. Put the two slices together.
This is how Gary does it. I found a lot of the guys I work with do it this way too. Their reasoning was you can clean the knife off on the other slice of bread before putting it in the peanut butter jar. I said when you use the peanut butter first you just wipe the knife clean on the inside of the peanut butter jar. They got really upset about that and said that is how you get the lid crusty and then it gets stuck... I don't know what they are talking about, but they were really upset so I let it go! People feel so strongly about all of this!
3. Put peanut butter on both slices of bread. Put jelly on top of the peanut butter on one of the slices, put the other peanut butter slice on top.
A few of my friends were talking about doing it this way on facebook. They said if you are packing it in your lunch it prevents your bread from getting soggy with the jelly laying on it. I never thought to do it this way, but it does make a lot of sense. And Stef was nice enough to take pictures to explain herself!!
4. Put peanut butter on the first slice. Then the jelly right on top of the peanut butter. Then put the plain slice on top.
My favorite old man (his is 79) said this is the only way to do it. He thought I was a complete wacko when I said you put the peanut butter on one slice and the jelly on the other... hahaha I mean, he has been around a long time so he probably knows better than me. He also tells me about growing up eating these sandwiches with raw meat in them though... so maybe his cooking abilities should be questioned!
5. Use only peanut butter - no jelly. Which really doesn't qualify as a peanut butter AND JELLY sandwich... but it was a response from people to my question... So there you have it.
Another thing I asked people was if they use grape jelly or strawberry jelly. We always have both in our house because I'm a grape girl and Gary prefers strawberry. Well I learned that some people use all sorts of wacky things with their peanut butter - orange marmalade for example... ewww. I guess another thing I could have asked was creamy or crunchy peanut butter. I feel like there needs to be a real ligate survey about all of this!
I think this all just fascinates me because making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is something that everyone has done at some point and I always just figured everyone did it pretty much the same way. That just isn't the case.
