Pimento Cheese
Originating from a 1908 Good Housekeeping article on Sandwich Making, Pimento Cheese has become an American favorite as an appetizer spread on veggies or crackers, or in a deli sandwich.
A Golf Tournament Staple
One typically thinks of Pimento Cheese as a Southern concoction in part because for decades, the Masters Tournament, held the first week of every April at the Augusta National Golf Club, became famous for its Pimento Cheese Sandwich in the 1950s. Served in a familiar green wax paper wrapping, they have retained their $1.50 price tag since 2003, and are made fresh every day by the thousands in an assembly-line fashion at an off-site, shut-down grocery store rented by the club each year.
I'll come back to Augusta in a moment, but the concoction we call Pimento Cheese actually has roots in upstate New York. In the 1870s, farmers in that state began producing a cheese called French Neufchâtel, the forerunner of what later became known to us as Cream Cheese. Around the same time, sweet peppers from Spain, called Pimientos, became readily available and popular. Eventually, the extra "i" was dropped and the peppers became known in America as Pimentos.
In 1908, Good Housekeeping ran a magazine article on sandwiches and recommended mixing cream cheese with mustard, chives and minced pimento. Pimento cheese was born and soon became commercially available by the turn of that decade. It gained in popularity in places as far away from New York as New Mexico, Oregon, Alabama and South Carolina.
But in 1911, farmers in Georgia began experimenting with growing the pimento pepper on US soil, which greatly reduced its cost, and is thought to be the beginning of the South's adoption of this versatile cheese spread. A few years later, mayonnaise was commercially available and took top billing to mustard as the key binding ingredient. Somewhere along the way, shredded cheddar cheese was added to the recipe and the spread became more akin to what we today know as Pimento Cheese. It seems fitting, therefore, that Augusta, Georgia should be ground-zero for the most famous Pimento Cheese Sandwich of them all.
My Number One Fan is fond of pimento cheese and Price's Pimento Cheese seemed to be a staple in our refrigerator for many years. Price's was founded in 1959 by a Texas couple that had a great recipe and at some point, their brand was acquired by the third largest cheese manufacturer in the US, the Bel Brands USA, which has its roots in France.
But Price's doesn't actually use pimento peppers; it uses red bell peppers and the recipe contains corn starch and sugar. My Number One Fan was seeking a healthier, more genuine alternative. A couple of years ago, she found several recipes she liked online and made an amalgamation of them; I posted that recipe in 2020 and we've used it may times since. It was a good recipe; certainly more healthful than the store-bought brands. But she felt something was missing, and that brings us back to Augusta.
In 2015, the creator of the original Augusta National Golf Club Pimento Cheese Sandwich, Nick Rangos, died at the age of 86 and he took his recipe to the grave. He never gave it up. Seventeen years earlier in 1998, the Augusta folks fired Nick as the principle catering vendor after forty years and he was understandably angry, so he didn't pass the recipe along to the new vendor. The new vendor didn't have the recipe, but what he did have was a batch of frozen Pimento Cheese Spread from the prior year's tournament.
The Feds Intervene
He was able to deconstruct it and life went on until 2013 when the Augusta folks made another change and brought all concessions operations in-house. The new guy was therefore fired and wouldn't give up his recipe either, so a second deconstruction took place and as you might guess, the recipe in use today is a heavily guarded secret. Except it really isn't. Since the 1990s, pre-made sandwiches, like all pre-made foods for retail consumption, are required by the FDA to list their ingredients on the packaging. The Augusta National Golf Club caught up with this regulatory requirement sometime in the 2000s.
All of this is little bit silly for what essentially is nothing more complicated than shredded and cream cheese, pimentos, mayonnaise and a few spices. But even today, there seems to be a lot of disinformation on what exactly constitutes the quintessential Pimento Cheese Sandwich as defined by a Georgia golf club.
In 2005, the Junior League of Augusta touted they had broken the recipe code and published the alleged "official" recipe in a cookbook called, Par 3 - Tea Time at the Masters. Only, it wasn't. Their recipe contained blue cheese and Parmesan cheese. It's unlikely that Nick would have used those expensive ingredients and in any event, they are not today listed in the ingredients that are printed in yellow ink on a white sticker that seals every green wax paper wrapper surrounding each sandwich. Since it is unclear as to exactly when the Augusta National Golf Club started using that white sticker, this also means the Junior League was either demonstrably stupid for publishing something that was so easily and verifiably false, or later was suitably embarrassed when they were shown to be utterly wrong. Or, were they? More on that in a moment.
When My Number One Fan found the recipe below as the "official" Master's recipe, we tried and liked it. While it may be official, is it the original? No one can say for sure. Nick is not in a position now to confirm or deny, and in any event, the actual recipe is made in fifty pound increments because that's what professional caterers do. I'm betting Nick never broke down the proportions of his recipe just to make four sandwiches.
This recipe came from a website called Mrs. Happy Homemaker. Only, it's not her recipe. It is exactly the same recipe without deviation from dozens of other food bloggers, including the Intentional Hospitality recipe blogger who claims to have deconstructed the recipe. She says that in 2016, she actually went to the Masters Tournament, bought a pimento cheese sandwich there, brought the wrapping home with her and followed the ingredient list from one of the aforementioned yellow and white ingredient stickers. All she had to do was play around with the proportions.
Ah, but it's just not that easy. In 2010-11, yellow-ink printed labels list American and Swiss cheeses as ingredients. Sharp Cheddar was not seen on labels printed prior to 2013. Which calls into question, just exactly what kind of cheeses did Nick actually use for forty years prior to 1998? The Junior League of Augusta may have been right after all. We will never know.
Then, there's an ongoing Internet debate, now, around the mayonnaise. It is Kraft? Dukes? Something else? Some mayonnaise ingredients use vinegar; some use lemon juice. And to some people who need something to complain about, this seems to be a big deal. The latest ingredients labels from 2022 list only vinegar when parenthetically itemizing ingredients of the mayonnaise used in the sandwich. That would specifically eliminate Kraft, which uses both vinegar and lemon juice concentrate.
I would bet top dollar that Nick used an institutional brand of mayonnaise, sold in bulk, unavailable to the general public. I'm also willing to bet that over the forty years he provided the sandwich to the Augusta Golf Club, he tinkered with not only the brand of mayonnaise he used, but with all the ingredients, including the cheese. Monterrey Jack cheese, for example, was not widely commercially available until the 1970s. Nick's job, after all, was to make money and drive the best possible profit margin year-after-year. Anyway, who knows? Maybe that's why he got fired after forty years of providing the same sandwich year-after-year that really wasn't the same sandwich.
The Iconic Sandwich
The truth is: the ingredients of the iconic sandwich, aside from the obvious, were never really set in stone. They changed and evolved over the years. There really is no one, single, holistic, ecumenical, "official" Augusta Master's Pimento Cheese Sandwich recipe. There never has been. But this is still a great Pimento Cheese recipe.
Pimento Cheese
Ingredients
- 2 cups shredded sharp cheddar cheese
- 1 cup shredded Monterrey Jack cheese
- 4 oz cream cheese, softened
- 3/4 cup mayonnaise
- 1 4-oz jar diced pimentos, drained (like Goya)
- 3/4 tbsp dried minced onion
- 1/4 tsp garlic powder
- 1/4 tsp fine sea salt
- 1/4 tsp fine ground black pepper
- 1/8 tsp cayenne pepper
Instructions
- Put everything in a mixing bowl and using an electric cake mixer, blend all ingredients well.
- Allow to chill for at least three hours before serving.
