Being embedded in a foreign culture — with different food, social customs and political systems — is an exhilarating, enriching experience. But as global nomads like me know well, there are times one just craves a certain taste of home. Typically, this desire is focused on a comforting staple — and often one that people from elsewhere find disgusting.

For Brits, that is often Marmite, a pungent brewers yeast extract spread on toast. For Australians, it is Vegemite, their local equivalent. Japanese friends find comfort in miso soup, which has now gone global. Indians need their pickles. But, as an American, the taste of home that I cannot do without is peanut butter.

So it was that my quest for high-quality, natural peanut butter recently took me to the gracious streets of Kolkata to meet the owners of Bharat Kernels, a small family-owned enterprise that has been making peanut butter in India since 1962.

The company’s late founder, Girdhari Lal Bharech, a member of the enterprising Marwari business community, was a trader in popular salty snacks, known as namkeen. In the late 1950s, he and a friend travelled to the US to investigate its food products market and came away impressed with two things: the sturdy strength of American bodies — and their consumption of peanut butter, a product unfamiliar at home.

Bharech suggested the Indian army serve peanut butter to its troops as a healthy source of protein. The army agreed, and awarded him a contract to supply them. Bharat Kernel, and its flagship product, Prutina peanut butter, was born.

Peanut butter never became a hit among the soldiers, and the army stopped procuring it after a few years. But the family continued to produce this niche product, which had found enough favour with urban consumers to create a small but viable business.

I knew none of this when I turned up in New Delhi in the mid-1990s — just as the Indian economy was opening up to the world — and found Prutina, in its retro blue and white tubs, stocked in the crowded, local shops where I bought my groceries.

Peanut butter had always been a serious business in my family. While my mother thought nothing of serving my sister and me processed TV dinners, she insisted on the highest quality, all-natural peanut butter as a staple at breakfast and for our school lunches.

We regularly visited the Los Angeles Farmers Market to stock up on peanut butter from Magee’s House of Nuts, which three years ago marked its centenary. Magee’s had a machine that took raw peanuts and ground them into a luscious, creamy butter, with no additional ingredients or chemical stabilisers. We loved it.

Prutina has a bit of sugar, salt and stabiliser, but is still pretty close to the natural-style spread I grew up on. In the 1990s, I ate my way through tub after tub without ever considering how this quintessential American food came to be made in India.

But, in recent years, Prutina has become harder to find. The shelves of Delhi’s local stores are filled with highly processed, American peanut butter brands — Sundrop, Skippy and Jif — and new local imitators. Frustrated, I did what many Indians do, given the limited development of brick-and-mortar supermarkets. I turned to ecommerce. On Amazon India, I recently ordered some 10 tubs of Prutina — about 2 kgs-worth — to stock up for at least a year.

A few days later, a well-spoken young man telephoned to ask whether I’d ordered peanut butter. When I confirmed, he apologised and said Kolkata’s biggest annual religious festival was starting, and my order could not be shipped on time. On a hunch, I asked whether by chance I was speaking to Prutina’s owner.

It was indeed Tushar Bharech, the founder’s 28-year-old grandson, who I arranged to meet on my next visit to the city. He said Bharat Kernels, which employs about 22 people, now faces fierce competition, making distribution a challenge.

But he believes that peanut butter’s moment in India has finally arrived, amid rising health consciousness. And he feels Prutina, as India’s peanut butter pioneer, will benefit from its first-mover advantage.

“People remember that taste from their childhood,” he told me. “People who are loyal to Prutina, they will buy Prutina.”

amy.kazmin@ft.com

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