LONDON>> 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.”

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 past 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 2-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 U.S. in peanut butter consumption, according to Krampner. Yet it is the most recent European country where the product has taken off, with sales skyrocketing in Britain over the last five years as it’s popped up in brownies, bakes and burger relishes and as a topping for curries and crumpets.

According to a report from Market Data Forecast, European peanut butter sales are growing at an estimated rate of more than 10% each year, a market likely to be worth $1.35 billion by 2026.

In 2020, peanut butter outpaced jam, the quintessential British preserve, for the first time in sales. A year earlier, perhaps sensing a shift in tastes, Marmite, the yeasty black spread beloved in Britain for more than a century, introduced a peanut butter-Marmite hybrid.

Krampner attributes the growth to “gastronomic imperialism,” and the continued influence of American culture.

British peanut butter is different from its forebears in the United States. The jars filling shoppers’ baskets are more salty than sweet, with many starting out as small-batch products rather than mega-brands. (For decades, Sun-Pat, the closest the United Kingdom has to Jif or Peter Pan, remained a lone warrior on shelves.)

ManiLife’s Deep Roast Crunchy was named Britain’s best peanut butter in a taste test by The Times of London this year, having started life in an old rugby-club kitchen in London rented by its founder, Stu Macdonald, less than a decade ago.

Ryan Lepicier, the president and CEO of the Atlanta-based National Peanut Board, reflected on the “emotional connection that Americans have to peanut butter” that begins with Mom’s PB&J, and lasts a lifetime. Peanut butter is like home,” he added. In another decade, Brits may be saying the same.