Photo by Spencer Haskell
Story by Sarah Monoson
Shredded sharp cheddar. Pimento peppers. Mayonnaise.
These simple ingredients compose the pâté of the South, the Carolina caviar — pimento cheese. The fancy names point to its origin as a delicacy. It was first concocted in the American north in the early 20th century, made with pimiento peppers imported from Spain and cream cheese (itself a new spread, an American spin on French Neufchatel).
Once Georgian farmers began growing their own pimientos, the dish democratized — becoming cheaper, more widespread and a Southern staple. Somewhere along the way, pimiento lost its second “i” and the cream cheese turned to mayo. It’s still the star of tea parties with white tablecloths and raised pinkies; the Masters Tournament in Augusta, Georgia has served pimento cheese sandwiches since the 1940s, charging only $1.50.
But it’s also what countless Southern mothers have made for their kids after days playing outside, when they’d come in hungry and scoot their chair up to the dining room table to watch her whip up a sandwich. This image is so beloved and enduring that the North Carolina town of Cary has an annual festival dedicated to pimento cheese.
Downtown Cary Park General Manager Joy Ennis said the festival began seven years ago to bring the community together and promote Cary’s newly renovated, 7-acre downtown park. While looking for a cultural icon to celebrate, pimento cheese was thrown onto the table. It stuck. Now, the Pimento Cheese Festival brings upwards of 15,000 attendees to Cary to enjoy the event’s offerings. This year, on April 12, the attractions varied from vendors to food trucks to a cheese sculpting competition to a golf simulator — a nod to the Masters, where the winner here gets an orange blazer instead of green.
Right outside the festival grounds sits a white Colonial Revival house where pimento cheese is crafted year-round. It’s the ancestral home of Frank Yarborough and where he sells the product of his family business, Frankie B’s Pimento Cheese.
“You’re not going to get more local, or more Southern,” Yarborough said.
The retailer follows a 100-year-old recipe passed down from Yarborough’s great grandmother. A few years after his mother — the last, he said, in the line of matriarchs — died in 2015, Yarborough took over the company. He expanded into higher-quality ingredients and added spicy and spicy bacon variations.
“I just started sharing it with people, and people would go, ‘This is the best pimento cheese I’ve ever eaten.’ So I kept making it and giving it away,” Yarborough said. “I’ve probably given away 1,000 pounds of pimento cheese over the last three years. I say I’m loving people through pimento cheese.”
Yarborough spent the last two Pimento Cheese Festivals perched outside of the actual event to host tastings. This year, he got his own booth in the park’s makeshift marketplace. A constantly replenishing line of festivalgoers crowded the grassy space to sample and buy from Frankie B’s and other vendors.
Uncle Chris’ Premium Pimento Cheese, owned by Forest City’s Kevin Heath, was stationed one booth over. It was his second time working the festival. Throughout the five-hour-long event — and past closing time, when only the persistent stragglers and Uncle Chris’ remained — Heath repeated his sales pitch, which he’s named Pimento Cheese 101. The lecture was born 12 years ago as Heath identified a need to make Uncle Chris’ stick in people’s heads long after the pimento cheese has left their taste buds. Anyone who just wants their free sample?
“You gotta hear the spiel,” Heath says to them. “My cheese, my rules.”
He tells the assembled students what pimento cheese is, exactly. Those three simple ingredients. Uncle Chris’ goes light on the mayo, putting just enough to hold all the shreds of cheese and chunks of pepper together without turning the spread into a paste. It isn’t the recipe he grew up with, as Heath has never asked his mother and she’s never told. She approves of the Uncle Chris’ recipes, though.
Located in Winston-Salem, Heath manufactures five different flavors — from traditional to fire-roasted jalapeno to “It’s a Gouda Day” — across his Uncle Chris’ brand and another called Lily Farms. His customers include Lowes Foods across the Carolinas, which sell the 12-ounce tubs in their deli section, and Triangle restaurants.
Inevitably, a pupil asks Heath, “Are you Uncle Chris?”
No. That was Heath’s former business partner. They separated and, as Heath tells it, he got the kids in the divorce.
Heath said he brought five boxes of 404 crackers each to give out with samples. Estimating that he used about half, factoring in people who used spoons instead, Heath figured about 1,400 people came to his booth that day at the Pimento Cheese Festival.
Carol Henderson and Linda Stevens were among the many customers milling about the marketplace. The friends, each from Georgia, grew up loving pimento cheese. Henderson said her mom always made it for her. She has that recipe, but she usually buys from a local market instead of making the spread herself. So, when she and Stevens read about the festival in a newspaper, they drove six hours to attend.
By early afternoon, they’d bought four tubs of pimento cheese from two different booths and said they were just getting started. They had to take a break from sampling and shopping, however, to participate in a cheese sculpting competition.
Five minutes to turn a hunk of pimento cheese into art. Competitors lined a table in front of the park’s pavilion and dozens of onlookers. Thirty seconds before the round began, the emcee announced what the sculptors would be creating: a mouse and a wedge of cheese. Armed with bright orange gloves, Henderson and Stevens tore at and molded the unusually gummy mixture tailor-made for sculpting.
What drove them to compete?
“She did,” Stevens said, pointing at Henderson. They burst out laughing.
“I just thought it sounded like a fun, quirky, out-of-the-box thing to do,” Henderson said.
Despite being eliminated in the first round — Stevens confessed cheese sculpting is not her forte — the pair said they had fun. Their next venture was to hit the food trucks, which ranged from Southern barbecue to Jamaican cuisine to French pastries, all required to feature pimento cheese. Henderson and Stevens had their sights set on pimento cheese ice cream.
Unfortunately for them, Mama Bird’s Ice Cream ran out of their pimento cheese specials only two hours into the festival. Owner Lesley Richmond said that people were generally wary of the taste, but intrigued. Once they tried it, they loved it.
“It’s definitely one of those mind game flavors,” Richmond said. “You’re not expecting it to have that sweet [flavor], and knowing you’re eating ice cream [meant] to taste like a cheese product.”
To make it, Richmond starts with a traditional ice cream base. She melts down a block of cheese, adds toppings from candied pickles to pecans and mixes it all together. Being from the north, Richmond isn’t a native to pimento cheese.
“It’s definitely a Southern item,” she said.
That doesn’t mean she’s immune to its charms. Neither was Alaksha Surti, owner of food truck Curry in a Hurry.
Surti still remembers her introduction to pimento cheese. Originally from India, she moved to North Carolina 26 years ago. Surti had a grilled pimento cheese sandwich and was hooked. Now, she makes the spread all the time for her three kids. Surti said she was happy to bring her love of pimento cheese to the festival — especially with the unique challenge of pairing the Southern dish with Indian food.
Normally, Indian cuisine doesn’t have anything cheesy. But Surti knew pimento cheese would go well on masala and curry fries, garlic naan and chicken kathi rolls. She was right: Curry in a Hurry sold out of its planned dishes well before the festival’s end.
The versatility of pimento cheese is one of its staples. It can go on sandwiches, crackers, vegetables, grits, hot dogs and deviled eggs. It can be made into ice cream, smeared onto naan, rolled into sushi and baked into pizza. It can be served in tea rooms and food trucks and childhood kitchens. It can even deviate from those three simple, sacred ingredients.
But it always has to be made with love.
“When you feed people with love and sincerity and great food,” Surti said, “You get that back tenfold.”
