Peanut soup is the colonial-era Virginia tea-table soup, with roasted peanuts simmered into a chicken-stock cream. A staple of Williamsburg-era dining and a Jefferson Hotel dining-room standard.
African enslaved cooks brought West African peanut-stew traditions to colonial Virginia. By the early nineteenth century, peanut soup appeared in Virginia cookbooks alongside she-crab soup and oyster stew. The dish is closely associated with Colonial Williamsburg dining rooms and the Jefferson Hotel's Lemaire dining room (named for Thomas Jefferson's maitre d' Etienne Lemaire) in downtown Richmond. Virginia peanut country runs through Hanover and Suffolk; the fall harvest anchors the soup's seasonal window.
