Tornado Alley (PROG)

[janice shell]

LOLOL!! It's newly fashionable, in a way.



No, pimento cheese got its start up North—in New York, in fact—as a product of industrial food manufacturing and mass marketing. Its story is one of redemption, of a wayward factory child adopted by a good Southern family, scrubbed up nice, and invited to Sunday dinner...

Almost any pimento cheese recipe today calls for grated cheddar or a similarly firm cheese mixed with diced pimento peppers, mayonnaise, and any number of seasonings and special ingredients. Many cooks are quite adamant that you use homemade mayonnaise, while others start with fresh red peppers and roast them themselves. The original version started out as something quite different: the marriage of cream cheese and canned pimentos, two popular and newly-available products of the industrial food trade...

These two new, up-to-date products—cream cheese and red pimentos—were favorites of the practitioners of Domestic Science. Also known as "home economics," it was a women-led social reform movement that sought to bring order and scientific precision to all aspects of the home, with a particular emphasis on scientific cooking and a neat dinner table. Cream cheese was the perfect food for the Domestic Science sensibility. It was soft and mildly flavored, and its clean white color connoted purity. That it was something new and sold by modern food manufacturers only added appeal, for the Domestic Scientists were champions of industrial canning and scientific food packaging. Before long, they were devising any number of inventive ways to incorporate cream cheese into salads and hors d'oeuvres: rolling it into balls to serve in lettuce cups or combining it with nuts or herbs, and stuffing it into celery sticks and hollowed radishes.

The Domestic Scientists loved canned pimentos, too, especially their mild, inoffensive flavor and their flashy red color. In 1899, the editors of the Boston Cooking-School Magazine included a cauliflower and pimento salad on their Monday dinner menu for August, noting that, "on account of their brilliant color, pimentos are a pleasing addition to many a salad, and when used sparingly their sweet, mild flavor is usually relished."...

...Pimento cheese has now been transformed into a sort of fancy, all-purpose condiment that can add an instant Southern touch to just about any dish. Chefs stuff quail with it, tuck it inside omelets, and slather it between two fried green tomatoes to make a modern pan-Southern snack—creations never seen in the 20th century South.

Last year, Vivian Howard and her husband, Ben Knight, opened the Boiler Room Oyster Bar, their second Kinston restaurant, where they serve baked pimento cheese with sausage and crackers and also spread it on top of a chili burger. "That would have been blasphemous back then," Howard admits. "It was always just white bread and a very thin layer of pimento cheese."

Homemade pimento cheese may be a relatively new Southern culinary icon, but it's an icon nonetheless. To my mind, that basic sandwich is still the best way to enjoy pimento cheese today. If you want to get really fancy, slice off the crusts and cut the bread in diagonally into quarters to create little triangles. Stack them high on one of your best platters, lay them out on the buffet line, and watch them disappear.

https://www.seriouseats.com/history-southern-food-pimento-cheese