Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Fluffy lard-replacing peanut piggies
The big local news of Labor Day Weekend 1919 was an awful story about Alma Calvert, an abused woman who shot her brutal husband to death, tried pathetically to lie about it, was caught on details and taken to jail, where she collapsed.
That’s depressing, so let’s talk about Pindapan.
Pindapan was peanut shortening, a lard substitute. Or, as the advertisement in the Sept. 2, 1919, Arkansas Democrat put it:
This is the pure essence of peanuts, the veritable fat of the land — not an oil, but a peanut fat of the consistency of lard, made from peanuts only — the richest, most delicious, most nutritious shortener— vastly superior to butter, animal fats or oils.
Pindapan was, or so its wonderful advertising copywriter proclaimed, “the new shortening of surprising delights.”
As talented as that unknown ad writer must have been, the illustrator for the ad was even more gifted. I mean, look at those adorable peanut-pigs. Peanut piggies with curly pig tails — curly-tail peanut piggies that are bakers — baking, presumably, their pulverized and refined fat-rich brother peanut-pigs.
The Magnolia Provision Co. of Houston sold Pindapan, a “snowwhite flaky fat … made exclusively of peanuts.” Do not disbelieve for a moment that a product made of peanuts, which tend to be tan, could appear snow white. Take the word of the brilliant George Washington Carver, hero of many a Black History Month theme paper, who used peanuts to make milky white peanut milk.
As he wrote in his 1920 essay “Peanut Milk. What Is It?” peanut milk “consists of a perfect emulsion of the oils, fats, proteins,
carbohydrates, and some of the ash of peanuts. … In looks and physical characters, some of the grades are practically identical with that of cows’ milk, if you did not know one was peanut milk and the other cows’ milk the eye would never detect the diference.”
But Pindapan was not a milk and not an oil. It was a shortening and used for baking biscuits or frying chicken.
Searching Newspapers. com, I found references to Magnolia Provision Co. between 1917 and 1924 in Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Louisiana newspapers. By and large these mentions were advertisements for Pindapan and other vegetable-oil products, especially Crustene.
Among the earliest mentions of Pindapan was a March 1918 report from The Houston Post about the new Texas-grown shortening.
The name of the new product is “Pindapan,” derived from the word “Pindar,” one of the botanical names for peanuts, and it is now being distributed in Texas, finding a ready sale.
The article extols the crop it came from for growing in any sandy soil and being a money-making crop. Unlike cotton, the stalk could be used as cattle feed, so the entire plant — vine, leaves and “nuts” — was used.
The Magnolia Provision Company has grown rapidly and recently moved into the large office building of cement-concrete steel construction, one of the finest office buildings in the South.
And it had an in-house advertising department in the executive offices in Houston. So those peanut-piggies were drawn in Houston.
In May 1919 the Post wrote about a cooking demonstration by Mrs. Betty Wilson, who “never praises unduly.” She only used Pindapan, Crustene and Magnolia peanut oil. Pindapan was richer than lard, she said, and it went two-thirds further in cooking than butter or other shortening. She had made mayonnaise dressing and had recipe books.
Searching for “peanut shortening” opens a fat rabbit hole. I fell into digitizations of The Peanut Promoter, “official publication of the Southwestern Peanut Cleaners and Shellers Association.” I found Carver’s essay on peanut milk in the March 1920 number.
In that same issue, under the headline “Increased Domestic Consumption of Peanuts Is the Hope of the Trade,” peanut “folks” were exhorted to contribute to a national advertising campaign. “The peanut trade must see to it that more peanuts and peanut products are eaten. It is not enough that they leave the factory and go to adorn some little space in the retail store. Who shall eat them?”
Mrs. American Housewife had to be educated.
This journal included many ads and other articles, such as “What National Advertising Did for the Raisin Industry,” “Southwestern Peanut Crushers Are Active,” “Where They Produce the Spanish Peanuts” (Texas) and “Will the Government Ever Cease to Discriminate Against Vegetable Oils?”
The last essay was by one John T. Ashcraft, an Alabama lawyer who died a few days after its composition. He caught the flu while setting out for a vacation.
Pindapan ads peter out of the Gazette in May 1921.
By 1923, The Houston Post reported, Magnolia had a huge plant with 26 buildings that covered eight acres. It was producing 240 tons of lard substitutes daily, but the brand name was Crustene. It was also producing cottonseed cooking and salad oils, cattle feed, linters for manufacturing munitions and soap stock.
All that to say this: I did not want to write about the sad saga of Mrs. Roy Calvert, who was found standing beside her dead husband’s body and claiming that a bullet had come in from the window and entered his skull via his chin.
A quick search of the archives for Mr. Calvert’s name turned up stories from 1913 in which an earlier wife, Myrtle, accused him of vicious treatment that caused her to deliver a baby prematurely. He buried that baby in the woods. Neighbors testified on her behalf. He was fined $100 and sent to the county farm for 90 days. They divorced.
Flash forward to 1919. Alma Calvert was exhausted and sick when she went to jail and still in shock when she left. Roy’s co-workers came to her assistance, and all the neighbors testified about his extreme cruelty. The Gazette published before and after photos that showed the once vibrant, 130-pound Alma Calvert reduced to a haggard 97 pounder.
The Grand Jury did not pursue the charge of first-degree murder against her. She moved away.
Flash forward again to 1949. Gazette reporter Joe Wirges, who had reported about her in 1919, spotted a story in a Memphis paper about a 54-year-old woman named Alma Gill. She was being held at Memphis for questioning in the shooting death of her sixth husband. He was shot in the back of the head.
Mrs. Gill changed her plea from innocent to guilty of second-degree murder and was sentenced to not more than 10 years in prison.
Gill was the third of Alma’s spouses to die with bullet wounds. The first was Roy Calvert.
It is entirely possible in this old man-made world that many things are not what they seem to be.