Let’s talk p.c. No, not politically correct. Something much more important:
Pimiento cheese.
See, if I could witness your reaction to those two little words, I could tell a lot about your origins. If you’re curling your lip and saying, “Eeeeeeeew,” chances are that you aren’t, as we say, from around here.
But if your face lights up like a kid with a new balloon, if the sound you are making is more like an “ooooooooh” of delight, you’re definitely a pimiento cheese fan.
And experience has shown me that you are probably from somewhere in the South.
Oh, pimiento cheese has spread–or should that be smeared?–beyond the Mason-Dixon line. Children from Maine to California could be marching off to school clutching paper sacks with pimiento cheese on Wonder bread.
Even food writer Sheila Lukins, firmly ensconced in Manhattan, announced in her “U.S.A. Cookbook” last year, “Pimiento cheese is back!” But then again, she followed that with a recipe for pimiento cheese sandwiches with cucumbers. (OK, now we’ll say it together: “Eeeeeeeew.”)
Maybe it takes a native-born Southerner to treat pimiento cheese with respect.
Acquired taste
“If you’re not from the South, you don’t understand it at all,” declares Jeanne Voltz. “And there are people who claim they never heard of it.”
When it comes to things Southern, Voltz would know. Former food editor of the Miami Herald, the Los Angeles Times and Woman’s Day magazine, Voltz was born in Alabama in the ’20s. If it’s Southern, she has cooked it.
So in my search through the many controversies surrounding pimiento cheese, Voltz was the first person I called.
Pimento cheese controversies? You better believe it. First, there’s a popular notion that pimiento cheese got started in the Depression, as a cheap form of protein when people couldn’t afford meat.
Piffle. People were eating pimiento cheese long before the first stock crashed, Voltz says.
“We had it all the time. It was my mother’s favorite to take to a picnic. Tomato sandwiches were too juicy. Peanut butter was just for kids. And she didn’t like to fool around with chicken salad. And you know, when I was a kid, tuna was expensive.”
So which cheese?
Then there’s the cheese question. Dave Baity, a longtime columnist for The Charlotte Observer’s Gaston County edition, admits a fondness for pimiento cheese made with pasteurized, processed American cheese. It lets the flavor of the pimientos shine through, he says.
But most true pimiento cheese aficionados say that only really sharp Cheddar will do. In fact, Voltz says that’s why she never makes pimiento cheese anymore: It’s too hard to get really sharp cheese.
“I grew up with that sharp country Cheddar,” she says. “We called it rat-trap cheese. I can’t remember ever putting it in a rat trap, but that’s what we called it.”
And then Voltz leads me right into the next pimiento cheese controversy: the White Cheddar Question.
White Vermont Cheddar is good and sharp, Voltz muses. But white pimiento cheese just wouldn’t be right. “I’d probably add turmeric to color it. Because it has to be yellow.”
Not so fast. My next Southern expert steps right into the Vermont Cheddar issue. Charlotte native Martha Pearl Villas is the mother of James Villas, a nationally known food writer himself. In their book, “My Mother’s Southern Kitchen,” Villas describes his mother making pimiento cheese by cranking the cheese through a meat grinder.
But when I called Martha Pearl, she waved that off. She has discovered something even better, she says. On a visit to Charleston last year, she and Jimmy stopped in the culinary bookstore Hoppin’ John’s to say hello to food writer John Martin Taylor. Taylor sent them across the street to the Pinckney Cafe for “the best food in Charleston–and the best pimiento cheese sandwich in the world.”
“I’m telling you the truth,” Martha Villas says. “It was the best thing I ever put in my mouth.”
Ruth Fales, co-owner of the Pinckney Cafe with her husband, Scott, was glad to tell me her secret: chopped olives, pimientos, mayonnaise, lemon juice. . .and white Vermont Cheddar. Coarsely grated.
“I was just looking for a better grade of cheese,” Fales explains. “And I was really tired of seeing all that stuff with the nasty Cheddar.”
But what about the color?
“The pimiento color bleeds into it,” Fales says, giving it an orange tinge. “But it’s just not that fakey-looking stuff you get in the stores.”
Taylor, who had a pretty darn good pimiento cheese recipe in his book “The New Southern Cook,” wasn’t surprised that the Villases were so impressed with a Charleston pimiento cheese. Pimiento cheese has a special place in South Carolina.
“You know what people call it here? Palmetto cheese, after the state tree. Because it’s the state dip of South Carolina.”
All of my digging into pimiento cheese questions–Duke’s mayonnaise versus Hellmann’s, roasted red peppers versus pimientos, stuffed celery versus white bread, and the very existence of the pimiento cheese burger at the Dairy Barn in Columbia–still left me with one big pimiento cheese question:
What is this thing called cooked pimiento cheese? Most of my sources, from Martha Pearl Villas to John Martin Taylor, had never heard of it.
Jeanne Voltz had heard of it, but not until she moved to North Carolina. It may be strictly a Carolinas variation, she said.
In her hometown in Alabama, she says diplomatically, “the people who came from North Carolina, and there were a few, did things differently from the way we did them.”
Diddy Irwin, a cook who has contributed many recipes to The Charlotte Observer through the years, says she learned the cooked version while growing up in Orangeburg, S.C.
“Mother did it. And she was from John’s Island (near Charleston). I don’t know where she got it. But when she did pimiento cheese, that’s the way she did it. And it was marvelous.”
Irwin’s recipe involves mixing grated Cheddar–sharp, of course–with evaporated milk and pimientos in a double boiler. The cheese melts, then firms up into a smooth spread when it is refrigerated.
Could it be. . .Carolina pate?
Told you. Treat that pimiento cheese with respect.
IS IT PIMENTO, OR PIMIENTO?
There is one more pimiento cheese controversy that we haven’t addressed: Pimiento or pimento?
The experts at Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary define pimiento as the pepper and pimento as the cheese. But what do they know? They also define “pimento cheese” as “a Neufchatel, process, cream or occasionally Cheddar cheese to which pimientos have been added.”
Simplicity, everyone agrees, is the key to good pimiento cheese. In the interest of simplicity, we prefer the all-around spelling “pimiento.” If that’s not how your mother did it, spell it however you like.
HOPPIN’ JOHN’S PIMIENTO CHEESE
Preparation time: 15 minutes
Yield: About 3 cups
Many people insist that homemade mayonnaise is required for good pimiento cheese. But because of the risk of salmonella, young children, older people and people with compromised immune systems shouldn’t consume uncooked eggs. This has been adapted from “The New Southern Cook,” by John Martin Taylor, using commercial mayo.
3/4 pound sharp Cheddar cheese, coarsely grated (about 4 cups)
1/2 small onion, grated
1 cup chopped pimientos or roasted red bell peppers
1/2 cup mayonnaise
1/2 cup large pimiento-stuffed olives, about 1 dozen, sliced into thirds
Ground red pepper or hot pepper sauce to taste
Stir together cheese, onion, pimientos, mayonnaise and olives in medium bowl. Season with pepper or pepper sauce to taste.
Nutrition information per 1/4 cup:
Calories ………… 190 Fat ………… 17 g Saturated fat .. 7 g
% calories from fat .. 81 Cholesterol … 35 mg Sodium …… 315 mg
Carbohydrates ….. 1.8 g Protein ……… 7 g Fiber …….. 0.4 g
JALAPENO PIMIENTO CHEESE SPREAD
Preparation time: 15 minutes
Yield: 18 servings
The only place better than a church cookbook for pimiento cheese is a Junior League cookbook. We found this one in “Party Receipts,” by the Charleston Junior League.
1 pound extra-sharp Cheddar cheese, grated
2 jars (4 ounces each) chopped pimientos, drained
1 1/2 cups mayonnaise
2 teaspoons sugar
1 tablespoon minced canned jalapeno peppers, drained, or more to taste
1/4 teaspoon salt or to taste
Freshly ground pepper to taste
1. Combine all ingredients in large bowl; mix well. Refrigerate until ready to serve. Serve with crackers or use to stuff celery.
Nutrition information per serving:
Calories ………… 240 Fat ………… 23 g Saturated fat .. 8 g
% calories from fat .. 86 Cholesterol … 40 mg Sodium …… 300 mg
Carbohydrates ……. 2 g Protein ……… 7 g Fiber …….. 0.3 g
