Peanut Butter Gets a Patent Number

On October 21, 1884, the U.S. Patent Office granted Patent No. 306,727 to Marcellus Gilmore Edson, a chemist and pharmacist from Montreal trained at what is now McGill University. His process ran roasted peanuts through heated milling equipment until they reached what the patent called a fluid or semi-fluid state, then let the paste cool into something with, in Edson's own words, the consistency of butter, lard, or ointment. He was chasing candy, not a sandwich spread: the patent's optional step was mixing that peanut paste with sugar for confectionery. Nobody has found evidence Edson ever sold his peanut paste under any name, but the paperwork for turning a legume into a spreadable food now existed, more than a decade before John Harvey Kellogg filed his own peanut-paste patent in the 1890s.