Grilled Cheese, but make it “meh.”
On the journey that is Sandwich Sundays (as arbitrarily dictated — for now at least — by this list), there are bound to be good weeks and bad weeks. Sometimes because a sandwich just isn’t to our personal liking. Sometimes because maybe we screwed up somehow (we are both human and not chefs).
And sometimes because a sandwich is a nonsense sandwich. Case in point, this week’s sandwich, The Pimento Cheese Sandwich. Described as a southern staple, it’s “creamy pimento cheese spread on sandwich bread and then griddled with butter until it turns toasty brown.”
Nice try with that fancy-ish descriptor, whoever-wrote-this-list. It’s basically grilled cheese, but with a cheese dip/spread instead of just regular cheese slices. We know what’s up.
Now, I am a Southern girl at heart. I grew up in Texas and spent a couple of years living in Georgia. I was aware of pimento cheese. I’ve seen it at potlucks and on menus at charming local eateries, but it’s never called to me and I don’t recall ever having even tried it. It just seems to be something that tastes like it looks and looks like something I don’t want to taste.
I don’t know why. I love cheese (except blue cheese which tastes like farts. Anyone who says otherwise is just trying to avoid saying out loud that they enjoy the taste of farts. Understandable, I guess.) But something about the pimento cheese just looks like something your mom threw together because she had to use up ingredients in the fridge before they went bad. So eat up!
But, it’s on the list. We’re being loyal to the list. So, here we go.
We found a solid recipe via the New York Times cooking app, so we made our own pimento cheese. It turns out it’s pretty simple to make. Essentially, it’s sharp cheddar, cream cheese, mayo, and pimentos all squished together. Easy enough.
Come dinner time, once again I had a toddler glued to my hip, so Nate did the griddling honors while I tended to the tomato soup we made to make this more of a dinner-worthy meal.
We spread the pimento on some freshly buttered sourdough and bing, bang, boom, dinner was ready.
It turns out, I was right. Pimento cheese tastes exactly like you’d think it would taste. It wasn’t disgusting or offensive, but I’d much rather just had a good old-fashioned grilled cheese. And quite frankly, it was super upstaged by the tomato soup that was supposed to be the supporting dish, not the leading feature.
I just can’t help but feel that Georgia deserves better than to be represented by this sandwich. For all the things Georgia is known for on a culinary level, this is what we’ve given them? Nothing with fried chicken or biscuits or any good old-fashioned Southern food? I know that — for some reason — it’s become the official sandwich of the Master's Golf Tournament. But I can’t help but feel that it was one of those things that has been accepted as tradition for so long that no one wants to be the asshole who speaks up and says, “but we can do better than this, guys.”
Unfortunately, this one is solidly in the bottom three for both Nate and me. Maybe it’s because we went into it with low expectations. But then I’d argue that if the bar was that low, shouldn’t it have easily stepped over it if it’s a sandwich that is that good?
Or maybe it’s because it had the misfortune of directly following Florida’s Cuban sandwich. I feel like that would be like auditioning for your school’s talent show and you got to go on after Beyonce. And in that case, the pimento cheese never had a chance.
But I just think it’s one of those dishes that, if you were raised eating it, there’s a sense of nostalgia that allows you to think it’s a sandwich worthy of choosing it over clearly better sandwiches. But if you managed to dodge pimento-cheese laden bullets until adulthood, it’s a solid “meh.”
