Peanuts! 🥜 Get your peanuts! 🥜🥜🥜
A few thoughts about a food that evokes so many things for me. Also, David Lebovitz's recipe for peanut butter cookies.
Happy Sunday, roasted-and-salted cook!
Maybe it’s because my beloved L.A. Dodgers just won the National League pennant, but lately I have had peanuts on the brain.
Or maybe it’s because Thierry, who is allergic to peanuts, is away in France, and I can crack and eat them with abandon in his absence.
Peanuts evoke so many things for me.
My childhood dog was Peanuts, a beagle, of course.
Thinking about Peanuts makes me wonder why we didn’t smother the little creature with love. So many questions this raises, as my brothers and I all have been life-long animal-lovers. Did our parents not instill in us dog-love? Bob Brenner (my late father) never seemed to have feelings about dogs one way or the other. My mom adored Willie, the Golden Retriever she acquired when I was in high school; she constantly showered him with affection. When Willie went to the big kennel in the sky, Joan eventually recovered and got another Golden Retriever, Fredo (I called him Fettucine Al). Was it because she acquired both Goldens as puppies that she loved them more? Peanuts was a rescue dog, though no one patted themselves on the back for rescuing animals in those days; they were just dogs picked up at the pound. Eleanor, the collie who preceded Peanuts, and Boris, the Keeshond who succeeded him, were also pound-dogs, fully grown when they came into our lives. They were more like furniture than beloved family members.
Boris, whom we called Bo, devoted his life to trying to escape. One time he got out and was gone for most of the day. Finally he came trotting back, followed by a dog-catcher in a truck from the pound. He trotted onto our white vinyl-brick tile floor, leaving bloody footprints everywhere, then plopped down, pooped. The dog-catcher said he chased Bo for 23 miles.
🥜
During baseball season, I’m inevitably taken back to Dodger Stadium, where Bob Brenner (that’s usually how I refer to him, even to family members) used to take us growing up. Those are some of my happiest childhood memories. The Dodger Dogs. The home runs. The red-and-white paper bags of peanuts. The fabulous organ playing “Take Me out to the Ballgame” every 7th inning stretch, the entire stadium singing along. The feeling that anything is possible.
“Peanuts! Get your peanuts!” the vendors sang, climbing and descending the stairs of the aisles, their peanut trays suspended by straps slung around their necks. When someone stood and yelled back “peanuts!” the vendor would throw them a bag, always with short-stop-like aim. The payment would get passed hand-to-hand all the way down the row to the vendor. Not participating in this would have been unthinkable.
Bob Brenner grew up going to baseball games in L.A., but not Dodger Stadium, which hadn’t yet been built. Instead, he and his brothers, one older, one younger, would go to watch the Hollywood Stars — a triple-A team — play at Gilmore Field, which was near Farmers’ Market at Third and Fairfax, close to where they lived. They’d watch the game through a knot-hole in the left-field fence, as they usually didn’t have the money for a ticket. My Uncle Larry, Bob’s younger brother, told me recently that my dad used to go to every ball game he could possibly go to. Also, that he was a sleep-walker, which I never knew. One night the family was awakened by a noise downstairs at two in the morning. Bob Brenner was there, in his jammies, with his baseball cap on. “Bobby, where are you going?” said Cera, their mother (my grandmother).
“To the baseball game,” said my dad.
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