Elvis Presley was the bridge between soulful blues, forever establishing a nationwide love for rockabilly music, but it’s not just his tunes that made him famous. Across the country (and even the world), Elvis’ banana bacon and peanut butter sandwich (PBBB for short) is purported to be his favorite snack, but one has to wonder about the origin stories of this beloved flavor combination. Even though Elvis’ life is full of myths, there is evidence that he took inspiration from a crazy four-pound sandwich he had eaten in Colorado!
Countless biographies and interviews confirm the King’s love of salty, sweet, and buttery. His fat bomb greasy-spoon meals implied that for Elvis, bacon was a food group on his food pyramid. He was known to mix bacon or baked bologna with a slew of creamy sauces between slices of soft white bread, and having a private cook on beck-and-call, meant that rich comfort food was whipped up around the clock. Who invented or when the PBBB came into existence is honestly hard to pinpoint, many cite that Elvis requested the cook at Graceland to make a PBBB sandwich, checking off all of the King’s crunchy, sweet, and salty cravings. His fiancee cites in her biography that she never really saw Elvis eat his favorite sandwich, so where does the hype originate?
The best theory is almost folklore at this point, but it seems to tie in most of the elements of the PBBB sandwich. On one of his many tours, Elvis and his crew of people went to the now-closed Colorado Mine Company Restaurant, and they experienced one epic sandwich called Fool’s Gold.
Honestly, eating a monstrous sandwich is foolish, but that didn’t stop the King. Rumor has it that this sandwich could serve ten people, but Elvis ate it as one single serving (which is still a very unverified claim). Fool’s Gold is simple but massive – an entire loaf of (ever so slightly hollowed out) Italian bread is smeared with one pound of peanut butter, one pound of blueberry jelly, and one pound of bacon. Seems a bit unhealthy, but the ratios are super easy to follow. Supposedly one experience of this sandwich wasn’t enough for the King. In 1976, just a year before his death, Elvis went off in his private jet from Memphis to Denver to get a rather large order of Fool’s Gold, the restaurant owners even met the King with the order in the hangar of the airport itself.
So where does the banana fit into all of this? Other recipes like banana pudding frequently appeared on the Graceland menu, suggesting that bananas were a mainstay, so wedging them between bacon and peanut butter wouldn’t be too outlandish in an already rule-breaking sandwich. Swapping out the jam for a banana made sense to some degree. Between his trips to that restaurant in Denver Colorado, it’s safe to assume Elvis played around with the concept of his favorite foods all mashed into one sandwich. So when he went to ask his cook to make the sandwich, he had found the bliss point of sweet, crunchy, salty, and greasy.
The more manageable portion of the Fool’s Gold Sandwich, the PBBB, still isn’t healthy, according to an interview with his cook Mary Jenkins Langston, it took two sticks of butter to fry three PBBB sandwiches. Since the PBBB grafted itself to the King of Rock-n-Roll, the Elvis-inspired combination is a strong mainstay in the culinary world even to this day.