Peanut butter & pickles anyone?

Over at The New York Times Dwight Garnier has a fun blog item, Peanut Butter Takes On an Unlikely Best Friend. In it, he confesses to a love of peanut butter and pickle sandwiches (and he’s obviously not pregnant). As he writes, “I’ve been happily eating these distinctive little sandwiches for years. The vinegary snap of chilled pickle cuts, like a dash of irony, against the stoic unctuousness of peanut butter. The sandwich is a thrifty and unacknowledged American classic.”

Mr. Garnier proceeds to give a history of the dish, talks about its existence today as a cult item, (“there’s a consistent but low-level Internet buzz about the combination, just as there is about the other unlikely things people like to marry with peanut butter and place between bread slices: mayonnaise, olives, thick onion slices (this was Hemingway’s favorite sandwich), horseradish, bacon, Marmite (in England) and Vegemite (in Australia), to name but a few”) and then goes on a quest to find chefs who will help him find respect for the dish.

He has a bit of trouble, however, until he does find a fellow peanut butter and pickle enthusiast. It makes a fun story but, in the meantime, we became curious. Is there anything our readers like to match with peanut butter that could be considered out of the ordinary? We like bananas and apples, but those really don’t count as extraordinary. We’d love to hear any of your ideas.

And we were also curious about how popular peanut butter recipes are. A quick look at the EYB library showed over 25 cookbooks devoted to peanut butter.  Who would have guessed?