Pimento Cheese - An Example
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 a kind of Borgesian paradox. To discuss the difference of a near-century, one must first discuss the differences between 1927 and 1937, but before that, one must first discuss the difference between 1927 and 1936, and so forth, such that in three-thousand years, a single minute can never elapse and difference remains endlessly deferred.
Nor are these differences of time and place the only substantive ones. The recipes themselves provide differences. Helen's recipe features a great deal more cream cheese.
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- Introduction Sean Gill
