Spreading goodness from Bedford to bellies around the world
Canadians love peanuts. A recent survey found that 94 per cent of us eat the legume (no, it’s not a nut) and the average annual consumption is almost three kilograms per person. When it comes to Quebecers, 57 per cent of us enjoy peanut butter at least once a week. Despite the fact that there are only a handful of commercial peanut producers in Canada, all of them located in Ontario, there is a strong historic link between this province and the use of peanuts as a food staple. This is because one of the first forms of peanut butter was invented in Montreal by a chemist originally from the Eastern Townships.
Marcellus Gilmore Edson was born on February 7, 1849 in Bedford, Québec. The son of Hiram Edson and Elvira Gilmore, two recent arrivals from the United States, he was also the younger brother of Allan Aaron Edson who would grow up to become one of the preeminent Canadian landscape artists of the 19th century. Both brothers were raised just east of Bedford in the little village of Stanbridge, where their parents ran the local hotel. Sometime around 1870 the bulk of the family moved to Montréal where Hiram gained employment as a grocer. Marcellus, however, took his own path and by 1871 was employed as a “chemist and dealer in perfumery, patent medicines etc.” in Trois-Rivières. It was there that he married local woman Agnes Housliston in 1871 and together they had four children over the years: Herbert, Ivan, Mercer and Dolly. Trois-Rivières, however, was too small for Edson and by 1874 he had joined his family in Montreal where he was employed as a chemist and druggist on rue Saint-Antoine. He also had a side business with his brother Walter at this time as a wholesale wine merchant although this venture was declared bankrupt in January, 1875.
Over the next twenty years Edson’s life was more or less consumed by the tasks of earning a living and raising a family but somewhere along the line he began to experiment with food. This led to him to seek a patent for the manufacture of “peanut-candy” in the fall of 1894. With an efficiency that would confound modern bureaucrats his application was approved by the United States Patent Office on October 21 (a Sunday no less), only 48 days after the proposal was submitted. Edson’s patent, numbered 306727, described a new process to manufacture a “flavoring