18 BULLETIN 769, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 
1917, the South to-day is making more of this delicious food oil than 
ever before. The 1917 crop of peanuts was about 60.900,000 bush- 
els. In 1917 we manufactured over 50,000,000 pounds of peanut oil, 
some of which, however, was made from imported peanuts. Reports 
for the first six months of 1918 show an output of about 43,000,000 
pounds of peanut oil. 
PRESSING PEANUTS. 
Peanut oil, like olive oil, can be obtained by cold pressing, and 
when so made from sound, sweet nuts it need not be refined. Such 
cold-pressed oils possess a characteristic flavor which, in the opinion 
of many consumers, makes them superior, especially for salad pur- 
poses, to the oils that are hot pressed and refined. Cooking the 
peanuts and subjecting them while hot to a very high pressure, 
however, gives a larger yield of oil than cold pressing. It is custom- 
ary, therefore, when a virgin, or cold-pressed, oil is made to regrind 
and heat the cake, which is then pressed a second time, to extract as 
much oil as possible. 
In France, where the crushing of peanuts was an important industry 
long before any peanut oil was produced in the United States, the 
almost universal practice is to make virgin oil from all the fresh sweet 
peanuts. The cold-press cake and rancid nuts are then hot pressed, 
and the lower grade oils thus obtained refined. Unfortunately, so 
far very little virgin peanut oil has been made in this country, but 
a number of mills are now producing it, and already it is appearing 
on the market. The American practice has resulted in an appre- 
ciable loss in our production of edible peanut oil. Not that the hot- 
pressed oils can not be made entirely satisfactory for both table and 
cooking purposes, by refining, but in the refining process a part of 
the oil is converted into soap stock, thus going to the soap kettle 
instead of to the kitchen. 
Large as this loss is, and it probably means at least 150,000 pounds 
on the crush of 1917, an additional and greater waste has occurred 
because of the fact that most American mills are pressing part of the 
shells with the peanut kernels. These shells contain less than 0.5 
per cent of oil, but they readily absorb it from the kernels when 
pressed with them, and come out from the presses with from 5 to 7 
per cent of oil. The Spanish varieties of peanuts, the kind usually 
pressed for oil, contain an average of 25 per cent of shell, or 500 
pounds to the ton. As the average press cake contains 6 per cent 
of oil, the shells in the cake from a ton of nuts will absorb 27 K 
pounds of oil, in addition to the 2^ pounds they originally contained. 
Based on a price of 15 cents per pound for oil, this failure to remove 
the shells represents a financial loss of some $80,000 on the 1917 
crush. 
