Some things make as much sense as cookies and milk, cats and string, and Simon and Garfunkel. But if Sonny and Cher, salt and caramel, and Felix and Oscar have taught us anything, it’s that sometimes an odd couple can create something beautiful together.
In fact, peanut butter and jelly was once considered a strange combo. In 1896, a magazine called Table Talk published a sandwich recipe in which they recommended mixing peanut butter with mayonnaise. A popular cookbook published in the same year recommended spicing peanut butter with cayenne pepper and paprika and serving it with five o’clock tea. The next year, in 1897, the Philadelphia Press suggested mixing peanut butter with cream cheese.
Yet, even though Julia Davis Chandler suggested the classic combination of peanut butter and jelly in 1901 in the Boston Cooking-School Magazine of Culinary Science and Domestic Economics, it didn’t become widely beloved until the late 1920s. At which point, boy did it ever. The Peanut Board even reported that during World War II, both peanut butter and jelly were found on U.S. soldiers' military ration lists.
In other words, if humans never bothered to pair seemingly different things together, life wouldn’t be nearly as delicious.
Tony Bennett understands this, so for his 2011 album Duets II, he recorded “The Lady Is a Tramp” with a duet partner that could be considered his polar opposite. Yet, when these two sing together, it’s as magical as biting into a PB&J.
Watch the video below to see this genius pairing!
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