The British Have Finally Learned to Love Peanut Butter

The land of Marmite and jam is finally embracing America’s favorite spread, with dozens of varieties on supermarket shelves.

When the American political commentator and noted peanut butter lover William F. Buckley Jr. arrived at an English boarding school in the late 1930s, care packages from home would include jars of peanut butter, which his British peers, he later wrote, “one after another actually spit out.”

The travel writer Rick Steves once recalled that for his first visit to Europe, in 1973, he packed a big plastic tube with what he knew couldn’t be found there: “a swirl of peanut butter and strawberry jam.”

But over the last decade, Britain and many other corners of Europe have come around. Perched between the jams and marmalades at Waitrose, a popular British grocery chain, there are now 35 varieties of peanut butter — creamy and chunky, sweet and salty and extra-dark roasted, crammed into jars, squeeze bottles and two-pound tubs.

In cities across the United Kingdom, peanut butter appears in shortbread form at Hawksmoor, a high-end steak chain; in a tart at the Greek chain Gaia, and sandwiched among 20 tiers of chocolate and mascarpone in a viral layer cake at Lavo, an Italian restaurant in affluent Mayfair. Peanut butter — or as Jon Krampner, the author of “Creamy and Crunchy: An Informal History of Peanut Butter,” calls it, the “all-American spread” — has well and truly landed across the Atlantic.

Britain is not the first European nation to take up the sticky baton — the Netherlands outpaces even the United States in peanut butter consumption, according to Mr. Krampner. Yet it is the most recent European country where the product has taken off, with sales skyrocketing in Britain over the last half-decade as it’s popped up in brownies, bakes and burger relishes and as a topping for curries and crumpets.