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Différance

Cheese ball

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Pimento Cheese I've been making pimento cheese for over a decade, since the Lee brothers published their Southern Cookbook. I've made it a ton of different ways: with roasted red bell pepper; with roasted poblano peppers; with pickled hot peppers; ridiculously with an absurdly expensive double Gloucester; disastrously (yet more than once) with pre-shredded cheese. Mostly, lately, I've been making it as part of what Julie's family has named "the Stack."

In digitizing my grandmother's recipe collection, I found that she, too, had been making a kind of pimento cheese:

These recipes are different. But both are pimento cheese, and both are now family recipes. I want to begin by thinking about how we can describe, rather than defer the description of, those differences.

Certainly these recipes are separated by space. My grandmother's recipe originates—as do I—in Hampstead, Maryland. My recipe, as it stands today, was developed in Glenside, Pennsylvania—more than 100 miles away. If I wanted to, I could problematize that further: pimento cheese as a Platonic form originates in the mythical American South. As the Lees have it, "[t]here was a time when you could eat pimento cheese sandwiches at lunch counters throughout the South, but these days you're more likely to find this lively orange spread of sharp cheddar and mild pepper served in someone's home, on crackers, at the cocktail hour" (89). I say mythical because the Lees manage to evoke Southern lunch counters of decades past while neatly avoiding the racial history of those counters, allowing nostalgia sans guilt. Similarly, making pimento cheese in Glenside, Pennsylvania marks me as a charming outsider who brings with him an iconic food culture. My grandmother, making pimento cheese in a town literally situated on the Mason-Dixon line in a state who still bemoans the "tyranny of Lincoln" in forcing Maryland to remain in the union positions her culinary culture in a different light. The map below, which frames the difference as essentially that between Baltimore and Philadelphia, is particularly evocative.

Time, of course, matters quite drastically here, too. When I say that I've made pimento cheese for more than a decade, this simply means that I've made it since around 2016. I had never written the recipe—that is, made it a material object—until 2018. My grandmother's recipe, on the other hand, might well have come from as early as 1927. Thus the temporal difference in years is nearly equal to the spatial difference in miles; though, of course, the substantive changes in culture across time have likely been far more drastic than those across space.

Yet, time and space are also clearly insufficient markers for difference here. Saying that I wrote my recipe in 2018 while my grandmother wrote hers, perhaps, in 1927 only invites in the differences between those two times and one is forced into the kind of endless deferral of meaning I mentioned earlier. In order to discuss the difference between 1927 and 2018, one must first discuss the differences between 1927 and 1937, and 2018 and 2008. Things change, including ourselves, and often quite a bit even in just a decade, and really understanding those changes...well, it's a lot (as Lenin said, "there are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen."). You can say that things were different, but there's so much wrapped up in that difference that saying it doesn't really mean anything. The author Jorges Borges once described a similar paradox. It is impossible, he said, for a single minute to elapse in the course of a millennium. Why? Because before a millennium can elapse, five-hundred years must first elapse, and before that two-hundred-fifty years, then one-hundred-twenty-five years. Before any of those things can happen, a minute must elapse, but first half a minute, a quarter of a minute, a second, a half second. Can you see the paradox? No amount of time divided in half will ever equal zero, so we will never arrive at the moment the millennium starts. Yet, here we are in time. Here we are, deciding what those differences in time are, choosing them out of a confusing, endless sea of differences.

All of this, of course, is a bit heady for poor, unassuming pimento cheese. So I'll try to do the best I can with what's available. Perhaps ingredients are as good a place as any to start.

Both my recipe and my grandmother's have at their base cream and cheddar cheeses. The ratios are quite different, though. My grandmother's is half-a-pound of cheddar to a full pound of cream cheese whereas mine uses half that amount of cream cheese for three times the cheddar. She also uses a lot less pimento and includes ingredients I struggle to understand, such as raw pepper and onion. There are also a number of similarities. We both recognize a need for an acid in the dish, so she chose lemon juice whereas I chose hot sauce (not much in the way of spicy foods in this archive, except what I bring to it). I think we can imagine my addition of smoked paprika as being roughly analogous to my grandmother's addition of Worcestershire sauce. Both are born out of a desire for an earthy depth of flavor that I won't call umami here. The call in both recipes to chill for at least a day is one surely resulting from experimentation. Pimento cheese tastes like cheddar cheese mixed with red peppers until hour 23.5. Lastly, both are decidedly party foods.

But what of those differences (and why are they more compelling than the similarities?)? I thought I could safely say that price was a predominant concern. She simply used more of the less expensive ingredients. And this is probably true to some degree. But if that's the only concern, what's up with rolling the whole shebang in chopped pecans? Maryland is hardly far enough South for this to be either a cheap or socially required option. So at least part of the equation must also be taste. The Cream Cheese tag seems to bear this out. Rather than the strong flavors of roasted sweet peppers and sharp cheeses, my grandmother (or perhaps my grandfather? I can imagine her catering her tastes to his.) seemed to prefer smooth textures and rich mouthfeel. One might also argue that there was a desire here to "class things up"—not unlike my plating the stack on a bespoke serving dish.

All told, I'm left imagining a life unled here. What if my grandmother and I somehow both were to find ourselves at a family function, both having brought this pimento cheese. How would we encounter that moment? Would the food be recognizable, legible to us? Would we gravitate towards our own interpretations? Would we be receptive to one another's? Deeper down, I see a question of approval there: would she be ok with my attempt or would she find it pretentious, reaching? Or worse of all, perhaps, simply alien?