"Boiled Peanuts, Boiled Peanuts"

One of my favorite memories as a child was eating Mr. Sylvester Crocker's boiled peanuts. He and Mrs. Etta planted their own field of peanuts to gather, boil, and sell in downtown Elba. Occasionally I would go to his house, three houses over from us on the small country road, and help pick the peanuts off the vines. We would sit outside in straight wood chairs circling the pile of freshly dug peanuts. It was a dirty job. I never liked to get my hands dirty with red dirt under my figernails, but the reward was too great to not be willing to help. You see, Mr. Crocker would give me a bag of boiled peanuts for helping him. That was a great gift. After the peanuts were picked off, Mr. Crocker would wash and get all the dirt off them. Next, he put the peanuts in a large black wash pot outside in the yard, started a fire under it and boiled them until they were tender. He added salt as he stirred and let them boil. Not only were they delicious, but he sold them for ten cents a bag. The only problem was ten cents was expensive to me.

Mr. Crocker had a long, green, wood, wagon that he pulled with his horse. That is the way he went to town, three miles away, to sell his peanuts. I recall riding on the back of the wagon. I would jump off and say, "I can walk as fast as you can go." Of course I soon hopped back onto the wagon because it was such fun to ride and to hear the clippity clop of the horses hooves as they hit the road.

Occasionally in the summer time I would go and spend the night and day with Brenda, my first cousin. Her daddy, Fred Jackson, was the local butcher in Elba. He killed animals that were bought at the local stock yard right beside their little brown sided house on the Troy highway. More about that story will have to wait for another time, but Uncle Fred would some way buy two bags of boiled peanuts for us. The highlight of the day was sitting at the kitchen table and eating our peanuts. I liked those that were firm and filled out best. Brenda preferred those that were soft and had lots of salty juice in them. We made a neat little pile with our peanut hulls on the table. We talked and ate peanuts. When we finished Brenda would go back and relick some of her hulls hoping to find a little more of that salty juice that she loved. I had nothing to revisit the hulls for since I had cleaned them the first go round.

When I grew up and started dating Douglas, he had never eaten boiled peanuts. He was from the hills of Tennessee, as he called it, and had always eaten roasted peanuts. He would try one of the boiled peanuts and say, "I don't see how you eat these things," and reach for another one. I wanted to scream, "If you don't like them, please don't waste them!" Douglas kept trying to eat boiled peanuts until he learned to like them.

Here in Southern Alabama farmers will often have the large peanuts with three or four peanuts in one hull. I prefer the smaller Spanish peanuts with only two nuts in each hull and always look forward to the first boiling of the season. When we boil too many we let them cool, put them in a freezer bag, and freeze them for winter and once again remember Mr. Crocker yelling "Boiled peanuts. Boiled peanuts."