All the Ingredients

Pimento Cheese Sandwiches

Last weekend, I made food for a friend's baby shower. The party was in the middle of the afternoon and we wanted food that was easy to eat that didn't require silverware. I couldn't face another platter of cold-cuts and cheese, or sliced chicken wraps, so I made finger sandwiches.

My age is really showing here, because I don't think people make platters of finger sandwiches anymore. At least not here in the Midwest. When I was a sophomore in high school over thirty years ago, my school had a mother-daughter tea in the spring. My mother was in charge of the finger sandwiches for two hundred girls and mothers, and the two of us made hundreds of ham salad sandwiches. It was at least a decade before I could look a ham salad sandwich in the face. But as a hostess, I have always had a fondness for finger food for parties. Especially for showers where people are sprinkled throughout a living room to watch the bride-to-be or mother-to be-open presents.

For this shower, I decided to make ham salad, olive and cream cheese, and pimento cheese finger sandwiches. The nice thing about these were, I could mix up the spreads and make the sandwiches a day or two early, and they would keep beautifully. I also had my bases covered for the Muslim and vegetarian friends in the crowd who couldn't eat the ham salad.

The ham salad was easy. I had baked a ham and ground chilled slices of it in the food processor with sweet pickle relish and mayonnaise until it was the right consistency. You have to be careful not to over-process ham salad, or it becomes too pastey. You want to be able to see little pieces of ham and pickle.

For the olive and cream cream cheese spread, I started by putting a block of cream cheese in the food processor and adding a small can of sliced black olives. To perk this recipe up a bit, I also added a half a cup of a variety of olive--mostly green--that I had bought at the food co-op. The zesty green olives gave the spread more olive flavor.

Then I made the pimento cheese following my mother's recipe:

• 1 lb grated cheddar cheese (the recipe in her handwriting actually says "rat cheese"--I think this means mild cheddar, but I like sharp)
• 8 oz softened cream cheese
• 1 T melted butter
• 1 C mayonnaise
• 1 4 oz jar pimento cheese
• dash of Worcestershire sauce
• dash of Angostura bitters

I didn't add the bitters because I didn't have any, so I doubled the Worcestershire sauce and added an extra 2 oz jar of pimentos because I like a lot of them in my pimento cheese. My mother used to make this when there was only about a cup of mayonnaise left in the large mayonnaise jar, and would then pack the cheese spread into this handy container.

Finger sandwiches are made on bread that you have cut the crusts off of, and that are then cut into three "fingers" or four triangles. I like to use wheat and white bread so that the sandwiches can alternate colors on the platter. There are lots of nice breads available, but I always use Pepperidge Farm bread for finger sandwiches as my mother did. It holds up well to the trimming and tastes good. To keep the sandwiches from drying out, I packed them in plastic lidded containers between layers of damp paper towels (my mother, of course, used damp linen tea towels).

The sandwiches were a hit at the party. We served them with potato chips, small fruit kabobs, and a punch made of Sprite and limeade. Sometimes old-fashioned food is just what you need.

After the party I looked in several cookbooks to see what sorts of pimento cheese recipes exist. IBeing Dead is No Excuse: The Official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral  by Gayden Metcalfe devotes an entire page to discuss this "Southern pate" debating the pros and cons of sweet versus savory, and creamy versus fluffy. The six pimento cheese recipes here run the gamut from simple to complex, but the sweet pimento cheese recipe sounds awful to me. I can't imagine putting sugar in a cheese spread.

The "Epilogue" to Ham Biscuits, Hostess Gowns, and Other Souther Specialties: An Entertaining Life (with Recipes) by Julia Reed is entirely about pimento cheese, and gives an overview of the ways this spread changes throughout the South. I can see the merits of adding jalapenos or pecans, but I would never use either. And if I felt the urge to add onion, I would just grate in the tiniest bit.

I was fascinated by the section on pimento cheese in The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbookby Matt & Ted Lee. Their basic recipe uses a red pepper they have blackened, peeled and diced, themselves. That sounds wonderful. They also include a recipe for a pimento cheese that can be used for grilled pimento cheese sandwiches or to top hamburgers. This recipe uses only cream cheese and no mayonnaise so that the resulting mixture is thick enough to slice when it's chilled. I can see the attraction of this. One of the ways I prefer my pimento cheese sandwich is to toast the Pepperidge Farm Bread, spread the cheese, and eat the sandwich immediately while it is hot. The Lee Brothers explain that to grill the pimento cheese you have to take the mayonnaise out of the recipe or the spread breaks down when it is cooked. I will have to try this new twist on an old favorite.

Retro Dutch Apple Pie

Recently I was working my way through a lug of Colorado peaches by making a number of peach pies for the freezer. (Warm peach pie tastes great in front of the fire on a cold Iowa January day.) I found myself left with only enough pie dough for a bottom crust. I had a lovely bowlful of Cortland Apples that I had gotten at the farmers market, and decided to make my mom's Dutch Apple Pie. It has a crumb topping and only needs dough for the bottom crust.

I rolled out the dough while the oven preheated to 425 degrees, and peeled and sliced nine small to medium apples.I had never tried Cortlands before this fall. They are grown at the local Honey Creek Acres, and were recommended to me by the lady who sold them at the market as her "new favorite eating apple." The fruit of these apples is pure white, with a nice crunchy texture that doesn't break down in a pie. I had made applesauce of the first batch I had bought, cooking the apples with the red skins still on. They produced the most lovely pink applesauce.

Following my mother's recipe, to the sliced apples I added:

• 1/4 C sugar (the recipe calls for 1/2 C, but these apples don't need a lot of extra sugar)

• 1/2 t nutmeg

• 1 t cinnamon

• 2 1/2 T lemon juice

• 2 T flour

Once I had mixed all the ingredients, I heaped the coated apple slices into the pie shell. Then I mixed up the crumb topping (what my mother's recipe called the "Dutch part" of the pie). It consisted of:

• 1/2 C flour

• 1/2 C sugar

• 1 stick butter, at room temperature

Mix the flour and sugar, and cut it into the butter to make thick crumbs. Then place the crumbs evenly over the apples in the crust. (It was very warm in my kitchen and the crumbs were a bit gooey.)

Then (and this is the really weird part of this recipe) you slide the pie into a clean brown grocery bag, being careful that the pie pan is in the center of the bag and not touching the sides. Staple the bag closed, place it on a cookie sheet, and slide the pie-in-bag onto a rack in the oven that has been lowered enough so that the top of the brown grocery bag doesn't touch the top of the oven. Bake the pie one hour.

Now when the pie first starts to bake, your kitchen will smell like baking grocery sack, and you will be sure the entire bag is going to burst into flames in such a hot oven. Mine never has. And after about ten minutes, the smell goes away.

After baking the pie for an hour, slide the pie--still in the bag--onto a rack to cool. When you can easily handle the pie (but it's still a little warm), take it out of the bag and enjoy a slice with some vanilla ice cream on top.

I don't usually make pies with this much butter and sugar anymore. I like to taste the fruit without much more than crust, but we enjoyed this apple pie a lot. My mother didn't bake a lot of pies (that was my area of expertise), but we always had fun with this recipe. It also works well with peaches or strawberries. You just want enough fruit to mound into the pie pan, so that when it cooks down, it's a good ratio to this sweet topping.

 

Retro Food--Banana Cream Pie

We eat a lot of pie in our house. Mostly we bake fresh or frozen-fruit pies with half the usual amount of sugar, some tapioca for thickener, and a nice double-crust. Recently I had cause to make a banana cream pie for a friend, and I realized how long it had been since I had thrown caloric considerations to the wind, and made a custard-based pie.

The first cookbook I ever bought of my own was the 1980 edition of The Fannie Farmer Cookbook.  Fannie was a great teacher of cooking techniques I needed to learn. The second cookbook I bought was the first paperback version of The Culinary Arts Institute Encyclopedic Cookbook, the "newly revised" version of 1971, edited by Ruth Berolzheimer. This book was originally printed in the 1940s, and includes basic recipes for many foods that are now retro such as "Bologna Cups with Peas" (broiled bologna slices filled with cooked peas and served with rice and tomato wedges) and meats that no one in my neighborhood cooks such as moose, reindeer, and opossum. But as fascinating as the roasted squirrel recipe is, I love looking through the old dessert recipes. This is the cookbook that taught me how to make a killer banana cream pie when I had my first apartment in the early 1980s, and had yet to acquire a middle-aged waist.

I found the page in the encyclopedia's section on pies with my pencil notations that showed what recipes I had used, and started in. First, I followed the recipe for a basic graham cracker crust. While that was cooling, I prepared the "Cream Pie" filling. First I scalded 1 1/2 cups cold milk, and added it to 1/2 cup of cold milk, 1/3 cup of sugar, a dash of salt, and 3 tablespoons of cornstarch. Once I had simmered this mixture, stirring until it thickened, I added 3 egg yolks (tempered with some of the hot custard), and a dash of vanilla. Then I cooled the custard, added four sliced bananas, and spooned it into the graham cracker crust.

The Culinary Arts Institute Encyclopedic Cookbook has five different meringue recipes. I have always topped my banana cream pie with meringue instead of cream, and like the "Brown Sugar Meringue." This consists of 2 egg whites beaten until stiff with 4 tablespoons brown sugar and a dash of vanilla. Once I had made the meringue, I topped the pie with it, being sure to connect with the crust all the way around so the meringue wouldn't shrink, and then baked it at 350 degrees for 10 minutes until the meringue was a nice golden brown.

Rather than make a second pie just for myself, I  made four, small graham cracker crusts so that I could experiment with a batch of the custard filling. The first pie I made plain banana cream, to the second one I added coconut to the custard, and for the last two I mixed banana and coconu in the filling.

My husband and I split one of the banana-coconut pies. We both liked it, but agreed that it was too sweet to eat very often. And it certainly took longer to prepare, assemble, and clean up after than a fresh or frozen-fruit pie. Retro pie was fun, but for now is done!