The joke’s on us. We didn’t think it was good. We just ate it because sometimes we had to. If the cupboard was bare, we could always grate some cheese, mix some mayonnaise in, and open the squatty jar of pimentos that had been in the pantry since the last leap year.
Once, my uncle Bob and Aunt Lois Ann had a homeless person knock at the door asking for food. Being the kind people they were, they obliged emphatically. “Absolutely!” they would help the stranger. But then the story turned pitiful as they looked through the refrigerator to find only pimento cheese and a hot dog bun to put it on. The stranger was very grateful, and promised them it was just fine, but they always told the story with deep embarrassment for having such a paltry offering.
Are you kidding me? Come to find out, it’s selling in restaurants like Swift tickets on the black market. People can’t get enough. It’s the Great Pimento Cheese Comeback of 2024! I just paid ten dollars and some change at the airport for pimento cheese fries.
That’s a far cry from grabbing a short clear container of it at the grocery store for $1.99 that always read Mrs. Somebody on the lid in red cursive writing. Mrs. Somebody wasn’t the favorite cook at the fellowship meal, I’ll tell you. Mama mixed it up better, but even then, it just wasn’t something you’d consider selling for a fundraiser like Spaghetti and stuff. I don’t think it would have brought in the masses waving eight dollars before the sell-out.
Now it does.
I want to say the chicken place started the craze. Don’t get agitated if I’m wrong. I’m really good at being wrong, but that’s the first place I remember seeing it (other than the home fridge and the cold section at A&P). Somebody said, “Would you like to try our limited time pimento cheese?”
“On a CHICKEN SANDWICH?”
“Yes, it’s very edgy.”
“No, I came in here for chicken. Pimento cheese is . . . not my pleasure.”
It grew from there. It scares me just a little bit to find people waiting in line at food trucks to get something we were trying to move out of the way in the fridge as kids to see if there was anything good in there, like the Cool Whip bowl. It scares me because I feel like if this is already out there in the casual eateries, bologna can’t be far behind. And I, for one, have peeled off enough red plastic circles from the baloney slice during my childhood to replace the roof on the Red Roof Inn. I’m not about doing it anymore.
I guess that’s my food review today. The lesson is, you may feel like a squatty, forgotten jar in the back of the pantry, but one day, you could end up in lights on a chicken menu.
Now, I better get in that kitchen and come up with something for supper, or else we may end up with a clear container of Mrs. Somebody's.
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