From school lunch boxes to elegant buffets, pimento cheese can be traditionally simple or wildly creative.
Fred Sauceman
The Willow Tree, in downtown Johnson City, TN, uses a family recipe for its pimento cheese.
When the late B.J. Broadwater finished his degree in pharmacy at the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond, he had some more learning to do. He was well-versed in drug interactions and the procedures to compound medications, but he didn’t know a thing about making pimento cheese.
He carried sack lunches of pimento cheese sandwiches to Shoemaker Elementary School in Scott County, Virginia, in the 1920s, but he had never made one. In his day, most every drugstore had a lunch counter. When he opened Broadwater Drug on East Jackson Street in Gate City, alongside that sophisticated education from Richmond, he sought tutoring in pimento cheese creation from his mother in Southwest Virginia.
Pimento cheese has always been the pride of home kitchens. The late North Carolina novelist Reynolds Price once wrote, “I’ve failed in a long effort to trace the origins of pimento cheese, but it was the peanut butter of my childhood—homemade by Mother.”
Price said he could easily eat a pound of pimento cheese in two days, “especially if life is hard.”
He may have been unaware of the product’s history, but he was certainly onto something when he connected pimento cheese with hard times, whether emotional or financial. The Broadwater recipe is typical for its brevity: pimentos, black pepper, a speck of sugar, mayonnaise, and the cheese itself. Many recipes are even shorter.
Promotional language for a recent book on pimento cheese claims that it is “taking the North by storm.” Pimento cheese is as closely identified with the South as barbecue and SEC football. But it just might have been created above the Mason-Dixon Line.
Anne Byrne, former food editor for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, writes, “It’s well documented that the first pimento cheese was a blend of Neufchâtel cheese and diced pimento peppers. It was sold by the slice or in a jar in early 1900s groceries all over the country, from Richmond to Portland.”
Food historian Robert F. Moss adds, “Commercially-made pimento cheese hit the market around the beginning of 1910 and was distributed to grocery stores across the country, starting in the Midwest.”
Fred Sauceman
Zoë Dosher and her mother Teri at The Willow Tree.
Moss writes that an American version of Neufchâtel was first made in New York in the 1870s and that within a few decades, cream cheese was introduced.
With the importation of sweet red peppers from Spain into America, the two mandatory ingredients were in place. But how did pimento cheese become a “Southern thing”?
Enter two primary characters, at almost exactly the same time. The first was George Riegel of Experiment, Georgia. Byrne credits him with being the first farmer in the United States to grow the Spanish pimento. He obtained seeds from the Spanish consulate in 1916.
The very next year, Duke’s Mayonnaise was born in Greenville, South Carolina. With the U.S. entry into World War I in 1917, Eugenia Duke incorporated her product into pimento cheese and other sandwiches and began selling them to the soldiers who came to train at Camp Sevier. Pimento cheese quickly caught on as an inexpensive, satisfying lunch for workers in the textile mills of the Carolinas.
“It was this connection to the working class that permanently situated pimento cheese in the South,” writes Emily Wallace in Carolina Arts & Sciences. The subject of Wallace’s master’s thesis at the University of North Carolina was pimento cheese.
There’s another hero in this story, too—a man who lived right down the road from us in East Tennessee. In 1933, to supplement his $65-a-month salary as a teacher in a one-room school, Moody Dunbar of Limestone started selling pepper seeds and soon began to can peppers. His company, now headquartered in Johnson City, became the nation’s leading supplier of consumer pimentos.
Riegel, Duke, Dunbar and hard times converged to make pimento cheese a southern trademark.
In 2003, the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi sent out a call for pimento cheese recipes and stories. The office was inundated with them—enough to fill a 312-page book.
For its capacity to incite pride-filled arguments, pimento cheese ranks very close to barbecue as a minefield of opinion. The passion for pimento cheese in South Carolina may be hard to top. We find more pimento cheese-covered burgers there and even steaks dripping with the molten product.
But at Litton’s in Knoxville, Tennessee, the pimento-cheesy Thunder Road burger is a huge seller. And in Roanoke, Virginia, the Southern Belle, served at Martin’s Downtown, has won first place for six years in a row at the Big Lick Burgerfest.
John Park
Martin’s Southern Belle pimento burger has won first at the Big Lick Burgerfest six years in a row.
“I love smoked Gouda, so I decided to do a 50-50 blend with aged sharp cheddar,” says owner Jason Martin. “The subtle smokiness really plays well against the rich cheddar. For an extra kick of spice, I opted for green Tabasco sauce. If there’s a secret ingredient, that’s it.” With a fried green tomato, bacon, and sautéed Vidalia onions, the burger is aptly named.
Pimento cheese ranges from the spartan to the avant-garde. It’s tradition-bound, illustrated by stubborn loyalty to aging metal cheese graters. And it’s open to infinite improvisation. At The Willow Tree in downtown Johnson City, Tennessee, Teri Dosher and her daughter Zoë take an old family recipe to the wild side with smoked paprika. Across town at Cranberries, David Read mixes pimento cheese into cornbread.
Red Clay Gourmet
Pimento cheese ingredients at Red Clay Gourmet.
Tennessee cookbook author Perre Coleman Magness adds red pepper jelly. Chef Sean Brock, originally from Wise, Virginia, mixes in pickled ramps and their brine.
Michele Sawyer flame-roasts North Carolina-grown jalapeños and blends them into growth hormone-free cheese at her business, Red Clay Gourmet, maker of four different varieties of pimento cheese. The company’s Hickory-Smoked Cheddar took second place at the 2019 American Cheese Society competition.
Sawyer calls pimento cheese “uncluttered food.” Maybe that’s why we’ve been loyal to it for so long.
Café at Williams Hardware Pimento Cheese: Make You Some!
The popular café in Travelers Rest, South Carolina, closed at the end of 2018 after 10 successful years. This is the recipe served by the owners, sisters Joyce and Nancy McCarrell. Given the history of pimento cheese, we chose to share a recipe from Upstate South Carolina.
- 1 pound cream cheese
- ½ cup diced pimentos
- ½ cup mayonnaise, or more as needed
- 1 ½ pounds shredded cheddar cheese
- 1 teaspoon paprika
- ½ teaspoon cayenne pepper
Heat cream cheese in the microwave at half power. Once it’s softened, place it in a mixing bowl and add pimentos and mayonnaise. Mix to a smooth consistency with very few chunks of cream cheese remaining. Combine with remaining ingredients and mix well. Add more mayonnaise as desired to make pimento cheese smoother and easier to spread. Keep refrigerated for up to a week.
Fred and Jill Sauceman celebrate and study the foodways of Appalachia and beyond from their home base in Johnson City, Tennessee.
The story above appears in our November/December 2019 issue. For more subscribe today or log in to the digital edition with your active digital subscription. Thank you for your support!