I Finally Tried Pimento Cheese: It’s Great!

Crackers topped with pimento cheese. : David Leite

There’s nothing remotely Southern about me. I can’t name the capital of Virginia. I have no idea whether Lee or Grant led the Confederate troops into battle (although I do know who won the war). And for the life of me, I simply don’t get the concept of boiled peanuts. For years my only primer to Southern society and mores was Gone With the Wind, Steel Magnolias, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. And I’m not ashamed to admit that I have, when in a mischievous mood, borrowed from Scarlett O’Hara, that great screen goddess, when entertaining. See, our house in Roxbury has four big columns in front. It looks more like a home from the lower half of the Mason-Dixon Line than anything remotely in keeping with Connecticut’s clapboard colonial sameness. When we’re expecting guests with resilient senses of humor and hearty constitutions, I don my big floppy gardening hat, sit coyly on the front stairs, doing my best Scarlett to no one in particular. Vivien Leigh won an Oscar for her captivating ways. I’m usually awarded a chorus line of shaking heads and pitiful looks as everyone steps over me on their way inside.

Bottom line, nary was there ever a gay man more in need of schooling in True Southern hospitality.

So earlier this year when I visited Beth Price, our director of recipe testing, in Charleston, South Carolina (which, I later learned, is not the capital of the state) for an LC gathering, I was literally a galumphing Yankee in a Southern lady’s courtyard. In those four days, Beth did much to instruct me in the ways of her South. I learned, for instance, the oft-repeated “Bless her/his heart” isn’t the invocation my blessed evangelical mother uses as much as it’s meant to insinuate a person beyond the pale–basically, hopeless. I found out how to conduct myself at an oyster roast, which is with abandon in one hand and a linen napkin in the other. And I discovered pimento cheese.

☞ MAKE THE RECIPE: PIMENTO CHEESE

Crackers topped with pimento cheese. : David Leite

I have no idea why, but I’d always thought pimento cheese was some dotty old aunt of pimento loaf—a vile delicatessen concoction of forced meat studded with pimento-filled green olives—that my grandfather Costa used to make me eat for lunch. But no. Pimento cheese, I was thrilled to find out, is reason enough to pull up stakes and permanently move to Charleston. For those Northerners who are sadly unacquainted with its bewitching ways (bless your hearts), pimento cheese is Cheddar cheese mixed with mayonnaise, chopped pimento, and, depending on where in the South you are, various other seasonings.

The pimento cheese I practically devoured all by myself at Beth’s was from a recipe by food writer Rebecca Lang. I contained myself on the evening of the big cocktail party, instead welcoming Leite’s Culinaria folks and fans. But the next morning, when I arrived on Beth’s doorstep hungry and a bit hung over, it was a whopping pimento-cheese sandwich that she thwapped into my hand. And I am absolutely not embarrassed to say that throughout the day, I outmuscled and outmaneuvered her skinny adolescent son in order to get the lion’s share of the two 1-pound containers of cheese she had tucked in the back of her fridge.

So a few weeks ago when I had a craving, I thought, what a lovely thing it would make mounded high on Carr’s Table Water Crackers for the holidays. So I called Beth.

“Bunny, can you tell me, does that pimento cheese of yours work at a formal affair?”

I could practically hear her eyes rolling on the other end. “Well, Fatty Daddy, I’m serving it at a black-tie affair. Does that count as formal?” Damn, if only Faulkner could’ve been so witty, I thought, I would’ve read more of him.

Tonight, The One and I will ring in 2014—a year that I’m sure will be one of the finest ever—with crab and lobster and yet another largish bowl of pimento cheese. And when I wake up on January 1, there’s no way I’m going to have Scarlett’s famous 17-inch waist—corset or no corset. But that’s okay. After all, tomorrow’s another day. Originally published December 31, 2013.




About David Leite

I count myself lucky to have received three James Beard Awards for my writing as well as for Leite’s Culinaria. My work has also appeared in The New York Times, Martha Stewart Living, Saveur, Bon Appétit, Gourmet, Food & Wine, Yankee, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, and more.


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22 Comments

  1. I am so pleased, David, that you have discovered the pleasure that is Pimiento Cheese. I waxed rhapsodic about it once years ago on my own blog recounting my discovery as a young bride exiled to the Northeastern U.S. that not everyone knew of this particular delicacy. I find it endlessly amusing how something so humble that we Southerners have enjoyed all our lives has suddenly become a nationwide sensation. Why, I’ve been eating Pimiento Cheese since my Mama started me on solid foods 😉

  2. you could make your own boiled peanuts! you do know your way around a legume, and i suggest making a savory and a sweet batch. i too was a naysayer…til i had some good ones. (not purchased IN the gas station, but from the stand OUTSIDE OF, and maybe a few yards down the road from, the gas station. i’ve never made my own, which is part of why i’d love for you to figure it out and teach me how to do it right! 🙂 i have made pimento cheese many times and as long as you have the cheese, pimentos/peppers, mayo and onion right (some swear by adding in some cream cheese, which is also good) you really can’t fail.

    1. julia knox, I just may have to add the recipe to my 2014 mastery list of recipes. Let me think on it!

  3. As one who has lived her whole life in the South, I am glad we have another Pimento Cheese convert…Welcome, David!!!!