Pimento Cheese Pops

Or: Stick 'em Up?

No one will be surprised to learn I’m not a Southern person. But I do like to pretend I am when the mood strikes. Especially after a bourbon or two. After five bourbons, I like to pretend I am a sleeping person.

When pretending to be Southern, my vowels may elongate to such an extreme that “pen” becomes a two-syllable word or, if it’s a very warm day, my voice might take on a sweet and languorous flow, like sorghum syrup on gently sloped, cool marble.

I’m not sure sorghum spillage is much of an issue in real life, but it’s something that happens with surprising frequency in the vague, sultry South of my imagination.

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Throughout the course of my ever-lengthening lifespan, I’ve met a lot of actual Southern (and Southern-adjacent) people, some of whom have been kind enough to pass on their family recipes for iconic* dishes like banana pudding and fried chicken.

As an outsider, I can approach these foods with clear-eyed detachment, being free from both the baggage of nostalgia and the tyranny of phrases like “But that’s the way your Meewaw always made it.” While preserving one’s heritage is a worthy practice, I’d like to remind every single one of my readers that you are not your grandmothers. You should be allowed to play around with family recipes without being burned alive for heresy.

Pimento cheese is one of those Southern delicacies that came my way late in life and I must admit I struggled to wrap my head around it as a concept. “You mean you can spread it on crackers, stuff celery with it, and use it as a sandwich filling?” I once asked the food magazine I was reading, in disbelief.

And then there is the pronunciation. The other night, I was discussing pimento cheese with my North Carolingian/Carolinian friend Jay, who is from North Carolina. “It’s pronounced ‘pi-men-nuh’,” he corrected me. “I spent my whole life calling it ‘pimenuh cheese’ and the first time I saw it spelled, I had to sit down.”

When I finally got around to making it, I hunted around for a good recipe. I pored over magazine articles, browsed blogs, and even asked some of my Southern friends, which was a mistake. It turns out that Southern people have very strong opinions when it comes to “pimenuh cheese”.

I wisely tuned them all out.

I found what sounded like a good, basic approach: finely grated sharp cheddar, “good” mayonnaise, and a few other basics. Mix them all up, cover, refrigerate.

It was…fine.

I spread a generous amount on a Ritz cracker. Not bad, but I was nowhere near achieving culinary orgasm. I put it back in the fridge and promptly forgot about it. When it caught my eye again a couple days later, I tried it again. The taste improved. Or perhaps my attitude toward it had. But this non-Southerner thought it was still missing something.

Pimento cheese is creamy, a little salty, and a little bitter. Adding a bit of crunch and sweetness couldn’t do it much harm. I made pralines—another beloved Southern staple. I ground them up fine, rolled the pimento cheese into little balls, coated them in pralines, and shoved cake pop sticks up their backsides, since I had a bunch left over from my eldest godkid’s birthday party.

To the surprise of no one, even though I was the only one there, they were fantastic.

But I was now saddled with 24 pimento cheese “pops”, which is not ideal when one is a bachelor of a certain age living alone, so I did the only thing I could do under the circumstances: I posted about them on my blog and went to bed.

I worried that these little treats might cause the South to rise again, if only to regroup, travel 3,000 miles, and burn my kitchen down. Was I being heretical by combining two beloved dishes and impaling them with sticks made of food grade virgin paper pulp ? Had I committed an unforgivable culinary sin?

If anyone dared complain, I would pull the ace out of my Italian-American hole, to coin a very unfortunate phrase. “Ever heard of spaghetti and meatballs?” I’d ask in a voice both defensive and vaguely upset by this crime against Italian culinary tradition.

And then I would calm myself down enough to explain how actual Italians would be confused by the dish because spaghetti is spaghetti and meatballs is meatballs. They’d never be served together. In fact, they’d never even see each other because they’re never served in the same course.

Also, they do not have eyes.

A quiet nearly crowning with the threat of violence would fall over the theoretical crowd until someone hesitantly admits, “But I kinda like spaghetti and meatballs.”

At which time I would hold up my platter of two dozen pimento cheese pops and say, “My point exactly.”

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