Like many Southern housewives of the 1950’s, my grandmother Jane had a pimento cheese recipe. After she died our other relatives kept up the tradition. I specifically remember writing in my diary after a visit from our Houston cousins: “Today we went to the Austin Kite Festival and afterwards we ate pimento cheese sandwiches.”
Pimento cheese is a spread made with cheese, mayo, pimento peppers (the sweet red peppers you get in olives.)
I forgot about pimento cheese until senior year of high school. I was worried about all my friends leaving for college, and felt a real need to cook and care for them. So I would have everyone over, and I would make cookies from Martha Stewart, and pimento cheese spread. Back in 2010 when I was a team member on the MIT truck, I told Ayr about pimento cheese. We ran it through the Clover food development machine. We used Grafton cheddar, mayo, house-roasted peppers. Rolando added pickled celery and cucumber planks tossed with Aleppo pepper. And we ended up with the sandwich you can eat today. Let me know what you think of it if you try it.
