Pimento Cheese: Summer’s Pâté
There’s a lot to love about summer, but let’s be honest, one of the best things is the food. Over the years, I’ve written in this column about many I like, including watermelons, fried chicken, sweet corn, peaches, and potato salad. Today I want to pay homage to another of my summertime favorites: pimento cheese. Or, as we say in the South, puh-mennah cheese.
At its essence, pimento cheese is a simple recipe of grated sharp cheddar cheese, mayonnaise, and diced red pimento peppers. It’s an incredibly versatile spread. It can be fancy when made into dainty tea sandwiches—bread crusts removed, of course. It can be casual when served with Ritz crackers. It can be retro when spread on celery sticks. Pimento cheese is perfect for summer picnics, garden parties, barbecues, a day at the beach, and even when a troupe of drag queens descend upon one’s house to deliver apple pies over the 4th of July weekend….
Those of you who hail from the South are probably salivating right now. Other readers are probably wrinkling their noses or scratching their heads about this ubiquitous Southern specialty. Yet despite the glorious reputation of pimento cheese in the South, it’s quite surprising to learn that the roots of this delicious cheese spread are north of the Mason-Dixon Line.
What? Lawd, child, clutch those pearls!
Here’s the story as best as I can discern it. New York farmers back in the 1870s started making a soft Neufchâtel style cheese that eventually evolved into what we refer to today as cream cheese. Around the same time, Spain began exporting canned pimento peppers to the US. Good Housekeeping magazine is believed to have put these two products together into the first pimento cheese recipe in 1908. Food manufacturers in the Midwest soon began producing this version of pimento cheese for grocery store shelves.
By the 1920s, a domestic pimento pepper industry was thriving in Georgia as an alternative to expensive Spanish imports and this helped increase the popularity of pimento cheese nationwide. During the Depression, Southerners began replacing cream cheese with cheaper “rat cheese,” a name for the cheddar cheese sold at country stores, and “hoop cheese,” a homemade concoction where cooks drained cottage cheese, added pimento peppers, and then molded the flavored curds into semi-firm hoops. Mayonnaise was used to bind these cheeses with the pimento peppers.
The orange cheddar cheese version won the day. As it spread across the South like kudzu, it became an affordable staple, including for millions of workers in the textile industry. In the anti-union South, workers had to eat quickly on breaks. By the late 1940s, pimento cheese sandwiches, sold by small companies and later in vending machines, became popular for lunch.
And speaking of lunch, a husband and wife named Hodges and Ola Herndon began selling homemade pimento cheese on white bread sandwiches for a quarter apiece to guests at the Master’s Golf Tournament in Augusta, Georgia. It’s an ongoing tradition at the tournament, though the sandwiches are now made on-site, and the price has increased to a hefty $1.50. Golf patrons purchase it more than any other sandwich on the menu.
For the next 60 years pimento cheese remained a quiet mainstay at Southern picnics, cookouts, funeral receptions, and church socials. In 2003, the Southern Foodways Alliance announced a Pimento Cheese Invitational. The Alliance’s mission is to document, study, and celebrate the diverse food cultures of the changing American South.
The Invitational drew 350 responses and put pimento cheese on the emerging foodie map. It became trendy and celebrity chefs and hip young restauranteurs jumped onto the pimento cheese express. Chef Bobby Flay uses it to top grilled hamburgers. Southern chef Carla Hall melts pimento cheese into a béchamel sauce and ladles it over French fries. Even renowned food author Ina Gartner has a recipe that adds in cream cheese, onion, garlic, and sriracha.
Personally, I prefer my pimento cheese on the classic side. And I must admit I usually buy it pre-made, but only if it is manufactured in the Carolinas. Sometimes I’ll mix in chopped jalapeno-stuffed olives to spice things up a bit. When I want it wetter, I’ll add extra mayo. All this to say my philosophy is you can season it anyway you like so long as you start with the holy trinity of cheddar, mayonnaise, and pimento.
So, give pimento cheese a try this summer. Pair it with a cold Pinot Gris or Grüner Veltliner. And if you pour it over French fries, please by all means send me a picture! Bon appétit. ▼
Rich Barnett is the author of The Discreet Charms of a Bourgeois Beach Town, and Fun with Dick and James.