It Was There for Work: Pimento Cheese in the Carolina Piedmont
Emily Elizabeth Wallace
A thesis submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in
partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department
of American Studies (folklore).
Chapel Hill 2010
Approved by:
Dr. Marcie Cohen Ferris
Kelly Alexander
Dr. Bernie Herman
Dr. Charlie Thompson
© 2010
Emily Elizabeth Wallace
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
ii
ABSTRACT
Emily Elizabeth Wallace:
It Was There for Work: Pimento Cheese in the Carolina Piedmont
(Under the direction of Marcie Cohen Ferris, Kelly Alexander, Bernie Herman, and
Charlie Thompson)
At its simplest, pimento cheese consists of cheddar, pimiento peppers, and mayonnaise.
This thesis investigates the role of pimento cheese spread in regard to a particular history,
place, and context within the Piedmont of North and South Carolina to provide a name
and face to the men and women who have produced and consumed the food over the past
century. The history and narratives woven together about pimento cheese reveal a simple
and meaningful food that provides a window into working class experience, memory, and
regional identity.
iii
To my mother, Myra Rothwell Wallace.
iv
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This project is indebted to the work of many people, the first of whom is Kelly
Alexander. It was Alexander who oversaw the initial stages of my writing and research
as a student in her Food Writing course at the Center for Documentary Studies, and who
encouraged me from the very second I knocked on her door to say, “I’d like to write
about pimento cheese.” I am so grateful that she remained on board to see this project
through, and also to challenge me as a writer. Equally important from the get-go were
workers at Star Food Products in Burlington, North Carolina—particularly Hector
Gonzalez, George Bell, Norman Mabry, Jason Griffith, Lee Harless, Aurelia Curtis, and
Donna Moore—who graciously opened their factory’s doors to me and shared countless
stories about their lives and work.
I am thankful to my mother, Myra Rothwell Wallace, whose comments about
pimento cheese and her experience in the textile industry were integral in expanding and
understanding my early work (and who also provided a close eye as a dedicated
proofreader). I am also incredibly grateful to my chair and mentor, Marcie Cohen Ferris,
without whom this thesis would not have been possible. She generously provided
resources, insight, and questions that led my work into directions I would have never
foreseen. In addition, her own writing and scholarship in the field of food studies set the
bar for the type of work I hoped to produce with this thesis.
v
My thanks also go to a number of people who joined my project along the way:
Bernie Herman and Charlie Thompson, committee members who provided thoughtful
feedback and support; Nancy Elrod Vandiver, a Georgia resident who shared her personal
stories and photographs about pimiento peppers; Ed Simmerly and Jennifer Clements of
Moody Dunbar, Inc., also for their work with pimientos; Becky Tousey, an archivist for
the Kraft Cheese Corporation; Lynn and Jim Rumley of the Textile Heritage Initiative in
Cooleemee, North Carolina, who granted me access to their collection of oral histories
and put me in contact with former textile workers, including Nancy Bowers Daniels,
Norman Bowers, Tag (Hayden) Bowers, Lawrence Couch, and Peggy Hellard, to whom I
am also grateful for their assistance; Donny Joe Ragsdale, Richard Morris, and my uncle,
Billy Holt, who each told me about their experiences in the mills around Albemarle,
North Carolina; Bill Rudisill of Ruth’s Salads; Tom Fisher of Fisher/Rex; Jimmy Beason,
Jane Noland, and Rodney Nolan of the Cleveland Sandwich Company; Andrew Smart of
Duke’s Sandwiches; Judith Bainbridge, a Greenville, South Carolina historian who has
written extensively about the Greenville area and its citizens, including information about
Eugenia Duke; Bruce Hester of Maid Rite Sandwiches; Martha Tyson, whose mother
owned the Biscoe Sandwich Shop; Suzie Augusta Lowe of Augusta’s Creations; Sherry
Hudgins Tapp of Stan’s Pimento Cheese; and The Southern Foodways Alliance, who
provided a grant to support my research and whose earlier work on pimento cheese
through the 2003 Pimento Cheese Invitational helped pave the way for this project.
vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION ………………………………………………………………………. 1
Chapter:
I.
“STUDDED, LIKE RUBIES”:
PIMENTO CHEESE AS A DELICACY AND
WORKING-CLASS STAPLE ………………………………………….10
II.
“GOING TO WORK”:
THE BUSINESS OF PIMENTO CHEESE …….....................................18
II.
PIMENTO CHEESE AND THE FACTORY LINE:
CURRENT PRODUCTION AMID THE DECLINE
OF THE TEXTILE INDUSTRY….…………………………………….40
IV. “REAL CHEESE, REAL SOUTHERN AND REALLY GOOD!” ……….53
APPENDIX ONE: ILLUSTRATIONS ………………………………………………...70
BIBLIOGRAPHY ……………………………………………………………………...96
vii
In its purest form pimento cheese is nothing more than cheese, pimentos, and
mayonnaise.
Melissa Booth Hall
2003 Pimento Cheese Invitational
viii
INTRODUCTION
I can’t remember opening my grandmother’s refrigerator without seeing pimento cheese
there, but the pimento cheese at that house always took me to work. You know, we didn’t
eat it—we never had sandwiches as meals at home. We always …. sat down at the table
and you ate a hot meal, three meals a day. And so it was never there for a meal at home.
It was there for work.1
Myra Rothwell Wallace
2009
Where they slip into the Pee Dee River, the pine-dotted Uwharries, one of the
oldest ranges in the world, conceal the fact that they are mountains at all. Mostly
submerged, the now low-lying swells that remain above Stanly County’s abundant lakes
and rivers cement the area as part of North Carolina’s central foothills in the Piedmont
region of the state. We drive north on US-52, a four-lane highway that cuts through the
center of Albemarle—the county seat. “It used to just be two-lanes,” explains my
mother, Myra Rothwell Wallace, who points to a traffic island where the highway
intersects Mason Street. There, her grandparents’ home—a four-room, one story house
where she lived as a child with her mother, grandparents, and three brothers—is just a
memory. So is her great Uncle Carl’s house, which stood next door, but is now a paved
used car lot. Except for the dye house and smoke stack, nothing is left of Wiscassett, the
textile company less than a mile away, which built and maintained my family’s former
1
Myra Rothwell Wallace, recorded telephone interview by author, December 1, 2009.
houses, and those of hundreds of others on what was once known as the Wiscassett Mill
Hill.
I struggle to imagine how the house must have looked when my mother was born
in 1948. She recalls blocks of houses with “white plank siding” and “big front porches.”
And gardens. “We . . . always had a garden . . . that was part of the property,” she tells
me.2 Now, sixty-one years later, it’s hard to think that my mother grew up on a quiet
road where her grandmother, Laura Simmons Walker, picked tomatoes and yellow
squash. Today the roar of traffic is overwhelming, and I wonder if the area was even
noisier when Wiscassett and the adjoining Efird Cotton Mill were in operation. I know
that it was loud inside the factories. My mother tells me that each night in the summer of
1969, her ears rang for almost the entirety of her mile walk home from Efird’s, where she
stripped bobbins and cleared lint from pneumafils—cotton vacuums—as an employee on
the second shift. That was the summer before my mother’s junior year as a student at
Elon College, which she attended with the assistance of a $5,500 loan from Wiscassett
Mill through the Canon Foundation. Like a number of young people on the hill, she
hoped to find opportunities outside of the textile industry. Though she moved home for
the summer in 1969 to work in the mill and save money for school, her position in the
spinning room was just a minor setback; her new life was well underway.
The decision to attend college was the biggest factor in my mother’s new
trajectory, but circumstances in her family slowly separated her from the mill, too.
Earlier that year, her grandmother passed away, as had her grandfather a year earlier—
William Elijah Walker—who spent the majority of his life as a truck driver for
2
Ibid.
2
Wiscassett. It was his position that enabled the family to rent the house on the mill hill.
In 1971, my mother moved east to Smithfield and began her career as a high school
English teacher. Not long after, my grandmother, Lois Walker Holt, retired from a
position of nearly forty-five years in the spinning room at Wiscasset. It was around that
time, too, that the city condemned the house on Mason Street to expand the highway.
With a pension of approximately $28 dollars a month, my grandmother moved into a
house on Norwood Road. By the time I was born in 1982, little physically remained of
my mother’s relationship to her cotton mill past. That is, except for the tubs of Star’s and
Ruth’s pimento cheese spreads in our refrigerator—foods whose connection to the textile
industry I only recently came to understand.
As we drive past the site of one of the three local groceries, my mother tells me
that sandwiches, including pimento cheese, were a family and neighborhood staple,
something cheap to carry to work and eat quickly in an industry with no formal meal
breaks. I ask why she continued to buy pimento cheese when I was young and she
explains, saying, “Shopping felt incomplete if I didn’t have pimento cheese in the
refrigerator. It was a throwback to my childhood because when Grandma would send me
to the grocery—the neighborhood grocery—there would always be cheese on her list if
we were out. You know, and so I’ve always bought pimento cheese.”3
I know exactly
what she means.
***
Surrounded by a spectrum of pale pinks that emanate from packaged ham slices
and vacuum-packed hot dogs, the brilliant orange sheen from tubs of pimento cheese is
3
Ibid.
3
well pronounced where shelved near the top and center of a refrigerated deli case at my
local grocery. It is an undeniably striking image, one especially accentuated under the
glow of any supermarket’s fluorescent lighting. It looks like home to me. But when
pimento cheese finds itself in writing, which it increasingly does today, reclaimed as a
food of the New South,4 manufactured varieties are almost always mentioned with great
disdain. In print, tubbed brands like Star’s, Ruth’s, and Stan’s are berated as “congealed
insecticides,” to use the oft-quoted words of North Carolina author Reynolds Price.5
Producer Wright Bryan provides another description for National Public Radio’s Kitchen
Window, saying:
Like most Southerners, I grew up with pimento cheese spread—from the
soulless, processed stuff sold in supermarkets to the wonderful, chunky
and flavorful varieties made at home. There is no need to go down the
highly processed path to store-bought pimento cheese, which features an
unnaturally fluorescent-orange coloring and slimy consistency.6
When my mother said to me, “the pimento cheese at that house always took me to work,”
she offered a challenge to Bryan’s statement, confirming that there are plenty of reasons
to venture down the aisles where processed pimento cheese is shelved. In her words,
pimento cheese takes on a role beyond mere sustenance to become the thing that literally
carried her to the mill. It was there for work, she reiterates about her own experience
with the stuff. And as it turns out, it was there for work for many people in the North
4
For examples of pimento cheese in recent print media, see Francine Maroukian, “Anatomy of a Classic:
Spread the Love,” Garden & Gun, April/May 2010, 27; Bellwether Vance, “Pimento cheese is happy
food,” Salon.com, April 13, 2010 under “Guest Chef,” http://www.salon.com/food/feature/2010/
04/13/pimento_cheese_recipe_open2010 (accessed May 4, 2010); “Homemade Pimento Cheese: Totally
Worth the Effort,” Houstonpress.com, under “Blogs,” http://blogs.houstonpress.com/eating/2010/04/
homemade_pimento_cheese_-_tota.php (accessed April 30, 2010); and Bryan Hunter, “Behind the Scenes
With…Palmetto Cheese’s George Easterling,” Southern Living, May 2010, 14-17.
5
Reynolds Price in The Great American Writers’ Cookbook (Oxford, MS: Yoknapatawpha Press, 1981).
Quoted in John Egerton, Southern Food: at home, on the road, in history, (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1993), 199.
6
Wright Bryan, “Pimento Cheese: It’s a Southern Thing, Npr.org, May 4, 2010, under “Kitchen Window,”
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6877304 (accessed May 4, 2010).
4
Carolina Piedmont, in many ways.
In the 1920s, pimento cheese, originally seen as a delicacy of sorts in the South,
became a cheap way to feed working class whites and blacks. Like members of my
mother’s family, workers in the local industries carried sandwiches in paper sacks and ate
on the job. At some mills, sandwiches were sold on site as items on “dope carts”7—
wagons that were stocked with food and drinks to sell to workers who were not allowed a
formalized meal break. Later, sandwiches found their way into mill commissaries or
vending machines. Star Food Products, which is based in Burlington, North Carolina, is
an example of a company that supplied these foods. The business began in 1952 by
securing contracts with Burlington Industries, what was then the world’s leading
manufacturer of cotton textiles. George Bell, former president of Star’s, recalls the start
of his business and others like it as people “trying to make a living.” He adds, “We
talked briefly about how many textile mills were in the state of North Carolina. Well,
you know those people, they either bought [food] at the commissary or they took it with
them. So, they needed something to make a sandwich with . . . all of the factories that we
had in this State ate a lot of food, consumed in the factory—take their brown bag with
them . . . if they couldn’t get what they wanted at the commissary.”8 In addition to their
place within the mills, sandwiches were also sold at locally owned, segregated restaurants
that were close enough for workers to visit for a quick lunch. In these ways, pimento
cheese was there for work in the sense that it became a staple item for small food
manufacturers like Star’s, or a prominent menu item at sandwich counters or restaurants
7
The term “dope cart” was applied to these wagons because they sold Coca-Colas (often called “dopes”)
and B.C. powder, a pain reliever that originated in Durham, NC in 1906, and that contained caffeine.
8
George Bell, interview by author, Burlington, NC, October 16, 2009.
5
where it helped sustain business. Alongside men like Bell and his brother-in-law, Otto
Caudle, women were instrumental in both establishing regional food manufacturers and
formulating their products. It was Caudle’s wife, Louise, who developed Star’s initial
recipes and directed the business as president after her husband’s death.
For many women, pimento cheese provided a starting point to create work in a
way that was non-threatening to the gender roles of the time. Rather than beginning with
an obvious or stated business plan in a downtown store, white working and middle class
women like Eugenia Duke (1917), Karlie Keith Fisher (1928), and Ruth Ross (early
1950s) produced pimento cheese sandwiches in their home kitchens or basements. It was
only after finding success and great demand that they moved into downtown locations
and expanded their production. Such expansions were often made possible with the labor
of African American employees. At Star’s and also Ruth’s Salads in Charlotte, black
workers made up a large portion of the factory production lines during the 1950s. And it
was during this period that sandwich companies became most prevalent in the area. As
Bell explains, “After WWII there was a start in Greensboro, there was a company in
Durham, there was a company in Louisburg, there was a company in Kinston, there was a
company in Concord. Charlotte had a couple. Gastonia had one. Roanoke. Oh yeah,
there were a bunch of them.”9 These businesses were the result of wartime industry,
which required women who had never done so before to move into the work force,
coupled with a push for convenience foods and growing industrialization. When Ruth
Ross’ pimento cheese and chicken salad spreads came on the scene in the early 1950s,
they did so under the slogan, “Less Work for Mother.”
9
Ibid.
6
Obviously not all of the small food manufacturers that started in the 1950s remain
today. Many of their closings were tied in part to the decline of the textile industry,
which slowly began to close or move overseas around the 1980s. Still, out of the
companies like Star’s, Ruth’s, and Stan’s that remain, the scope of their production and
distribution is impressive. Ruth’s is the top producer of pimento cheese in the nation,
manufacturing more than 50,000 cups of cheese per week, which are distributed
throughout the South.10 As the second highest distributor, Stan’s ships 20,000 pounds of
pimento cheese per week to the same area.11 According to Ed Simerly, Vice President of
Moody Dunbar, the nation’s leading canner of pimientos, “Approximately 80% of
pimiento cheese spreads are sold in 11 Southeastern markets,” with the Carolinas,
Georgia, and Alabama, respectively, ranking at the top of that list.12 Simerly quotes
statistics gathered by Information Resources, Incorporated (IRI)—a company that
specializes in market-based data including grocery retail—to reveal Raleigh/Durham and
Charlotte “as the two largest [markets] in the U.S.”13 Today these pimento cheese
companies continue to feed the region. Bill Rudisill, one of the current managers at
Ruth’s, explains area consumption this way:
Why do we sell three times as much in Charlotte of everything than we do
in Raleigh? Raleigh’s much bigger—but we sell more product here. I do
know some of the reason for that is the fact that we still have lots of
manufacturing people—people that carry their lunch to work. And
basically, that’s outlying areas—Charlotte proper is offices. Basically,
people that carry their lunch in a paper bag or a lunchbox or whatever,
they tend to eat more of our product than people that work in offices
because they go to lunch, they go out, whatever, they eat fast food. And
you would—it amazes me that our sales increase to some extent at least
10
Bill Rudisill, interview by Author, Charlotte, NC, February 12, 2010.
Amy Joyner, “Stan’s Pimento Cheese,” Our State, August 2009, 138.
12
Ed Simerly, email message to author, February 10, 2010.
13
Ibid.
11
7
every year when you look at the number of fast food restaurants that are
out there and being built more and more and more. It’s amazing that, you
know, we can increase sales even though fast food is increasing even more
than we are, you know. I think it’s because, especially people—well, the
area that we cover, we’ve covered it for a lot of years—and when we
started in those areas, there wasn’t nearly as many fast food restaurants as
there are now. People bought our product. They liked our product. They
got used to eating it, and they still, you know, they want a pimento cheese
sandwich, or a chicken salad sandwich.14
Rudisill’s closing words echo my mother’s sentiment and the void she feels if she does
not purchase pimento cheese spread. Similarly, it rings true to my own experience in
Chicago, where I worked after graduating from college. In the Midwest, I realized for the
first time that I hailed from the land of pimento cheese, a place where, as Reynolds Price
has said, it was “the peanut butter of my childhood” (though Price was referring to
homemade varieties).15 Wright Bryan offers a similar view in his piece for National
Public Radio, saying,
Pimento cheese is so ingrained in the lives of many Southerners that we
don’t realize our passion for the stuff doesn’t exist outside the region. Call
me provincial, but I was shocked (shocked!) when I learned that everyday
people from Boston to San Diego don’t slap pimento cheese on bread for a
quick lunch, or slather it across their burgers for a decadent treat.16
Add Chicago to Bryan’s list of cities, throw in a third and more dramatic shocked, and
there you have me in the aisle of Dominick’s back in 2004. Apparently it was an
experience that I spoke of often. When it came time to write a short biography for the
artist residency program where I worked, Deirdre McConnell, a visiting artist, scribbled
the following on a piece of paper and turned it in for me: Emily Wallace—pimento
cheese. Now, it is apparent to me that I used that food as a way to talk about my regional
14
Rudisill.
Reynolds Price. Quoted in Kendra Myers, “Pimento Cheese. Puh-mintah cheese. The Pate of the South.
P’minnuh cheese,” The 2003 Pimento Cheese Invitational (University, MS: The Southern Foodways
Alliance, 2003).
16
Bryan, Npr.org.
15
8
identity and memory. Apparently, I was not alone. In the first letter that I wrote to Star
Food Produts in order to schedule an interview, I found myself including details about
growing up with the product and missing it during the years that I lived outside of the
South. Vice President at Star’s, Jason Griffith, wasn’t surprised. “We get it all the time,”
he explained before showing me an email from a displaced southerner in Manhattan that
was eerily similar to my own letter, thus making it clear how pimento cheese functions as
an icon of familiarity and a symbol of home.17
The following chapters situate manufactured pimento cheese within a particular
history, place, and context. They also provide a name and face to the men and women
who have produced and consumed these foods over the past century. The history and
narratives woven together about pimento cheese reveal a simple and meaningful food that
provides a window into working class experience, memory, and regional identity. Or, as
the Star’s slogan puts it, “A Galaxy of Fine Foods.”
17
Jason Griffith, interview by author, Burlington, NC, 2009.
9
CHAPTER 1
“Studded, Like Rubies”:
Pimento Cheese as a Delicacy and a Working-Class Staple
While the summer fields of Meriwether County, Georgia, smelled of fresh peach
trees and gleamed with bushes of bright red pimiento peppers, the streets of downtown
Woodbury stank. “I have vivid memories in which the whole town would have a funny
odor,” says longtime Woodbury resident Nancy Elrod Vandiver. “We would look at each
other and say, ‘Oh, the pimientos are cooking.’”18 With a population of only a little over
1,200 residents in 1960,19 Woodbury was once the “Pimiento Capital of the World,” a
place where over 15,000 tons of the small red pepper were annually packed and
processed.20 Best known as the stuffing in pitted green olives, the pimiento is first cousin
to the ubiquitous red bell pepper. Of its unique qualities Ed Simerly explains:
The skin of a pimiento tends to be quite a lot thicker than the skin of a bell
pepper, and the skins of peppers and pimientos don’t digest . . . that’s one
of the reasons that a lot of pimientos—including all of the retail sizes and
consumer sizes—are sold with the peeling off . . . From an everyday, on
the street, layman’s standpoint, that’s the difference—the thickness of the
skin. Pimientos definitely tend to be a bit sweeter than most bell peppers.
They’re a little bit different on the Scoville scale21 . . . but an awful lot of
folks could taste them blindly and not tell the difference.22
18
Nancy Elrod Vandiver, telephone interview by author, April 14, 2010.
Genora Barbour, Georgia Census, telephone interview by author, June 23, 2010.
20
Albert Edwards, “Woodbury Sets Annual Pimiento Festival Today: Christopher Columbus Had Role in
Pimiento,” The Columbus Enquirer, October, 13, 1965.
21
A scale that is used to measure the pungency of a pepper.
22
Ed Simerly, interview by author, Johnson City, TN, January 18, 2010.
19
Of course, that was probably not the story in Woodbury or other parts of central Georgia
where folks like Vandiver could pinpoint the pepper by its smell alone. Regarding the
role of jarred pimientos in the area, Vandiver stresses, “Everybody always had them. It
was just part of our life.”23 But that was not always the case.
Prior to 1908, canned pimientos were imported to the United States from Spain.
Originally a product of South America, they were taken to Europe by Christopher
Columbus. A 1920 advertisement by the J.L. Kraft & Brothers Company states, “When
Columbus returned from his first voyage he brought back to Spain proof that he had
found the ‘spicy islands.’ That proof was a pepper—soft and sweet and pungent—the
now world-famed pimento.”24 Spanish for pepper, pimiento became a term commonly
used to refer to the thick, conical variety of canned peppers that made their way onto
American shelves.25 An early example of the pimiento in American print can be found in
a 1908 edition of The New York Times for an article titled, “Some Puzzling Problems that
Confront the Hostess as to the Correct Way of Serving a Dinner to Her Guests.” For that
piece Anne Rittenhouse explains the use of “Pimentoes as a Garnish” saying, “Not
enough hostesses make use of the small sweet peppers called pimentoes. They are
artistic accompaniments to many dishes, with the added advantage that they can be
eaten.”26
Two years later the peppers appear in publications as a companion for cheese,
though the exact nature of that convergence remains unclear. In her book, Sandwiches
23
Vandiver.
J.L. Kraft And Brothers Company, “From Sunny Spain" (Ladies Home Journal Sep. 1920), 128.
25
Dave DeWitt and Paul W. Bosland, The Complete Chile Pepper Book: A Gardener's Guide to Choosing,
Growing, Preserving, and Cooking (Portland, OR: Timber Press, 1999), 63.
26
Anne Rittenhouse, “Some Puzzling Problems that Confront the Hostess as to the Correct Way of Serving
a Dinner to Her Guests,” New York Times, November 1, 1908.
24
11
That You Will Like, Becky Mercuri cites advice from Annabella P. Hill in her 1867
cookbook, Mrs. Hill’s Southern Practical Cookery and Receipt Book, as possible
inspiration for the combination. For that work, printed before refrigeration, Hill suggests
a way to keep cheese, saying, “To protect fresh cheese from flies, mix red pepper with
butter with which it [the cheese] is greased.”27 Perhaps it was this prescriptive advice
that created an early taste for a peppery cheese mix among southerners, but The J.L. Kraft
& Brothers Company, in a 1920 advertisement for the spread that appeared in The Ladies
Home Journal, gives credit to a “Spanish epicure.”28 This seems plausible given the
pepper’s presence in Spain.29 Still, the 1910 publication Fancy Cheese in America names
Johan D. Frederickson, a resident of Little Falls, New York by way of Fuglsang, Lolland,
Denmark,30 as the man behind the spread in the following entry:
PEPPER-CREAM CHEESE OR PIMENTO.
This variety of cheese was first suggested by Mr. J. D.
Frederickson of Chr. Hansen's Laboratory, Little Falls, N. Y., and
is used considerably by those persons who desire spicy foodstuffs.
Method of Manufacture.
To 10 pounds of American Neufchatel cheese add onefourth pound to one-half pound of red peppers. The peppers should
first be put through a meat-mincing machine and ground to a pulp.
The cheese and peppers are then mixed and pressed into
rectangular shapes, weighing about one-fourth pound. These
usually retail at 40 cents per pound and must be kept in a cool
place.31
27
Annabella P. Smith, Mrs. Hill's Southern Practical Cookery and Receipt Book (Columbia, SC: U of
South Carolina P, 1995), 358. Quoted in Becky Mercuri, Sandwiches That You Will Like (Pittsburgh, PA:
WQED Multimedia, 2002) 66.
28
J.L. Kraft And Brothers Company, “From Sunny Spain."
29
W. H. Greenleaf et al., Bighart—Improved Variety of Pimiento Pepper (Auburn University Agricultural
Experiment Station, 78.1969), 2.
30
R. S. Breed, "Johan D. Frederiksen," Journal of Dairy Science 9.3 (1926): 306.
31
Chas A. Publow, Fancy Cheese in America: From the Milk of Cows, Sheep and Goats (Chicago:
American Sheep Breeder Company, 1910), 89.
12
No matter its creator, pimento cheese began as a product enjoyed by upper-class white
and black shoppers. This is hinted at by the use of the imported pepper in the mix, but
also the presence of pimiento cheese in publications dedicated to fancy cheeses and a
1910 advertisement for “Pimento Cheese in glass” at John H. Magruder, Fine Groceries,
Wines, and Cigars in Washington, DC.32 After 1910, advertisements and articles for the
spread’s quality and use abound—from suggestions in “A Page for Practical
Housekeepers” in the Chicago Daily Tribune to a listing under “delicacies” in a 1911
advertisement for Smith’s California Grocery Store in Los Angeles.33 That year, too, The
Baltimore Sun suggests spreading the cheese between slices of bread, referring to the use
of “dainty” sandwiches at “the teas, the card parties and other informal entertainments in
vogue today.”34 But the most extravagant language and marketing for pimento cheese
exists in a 1920 Kraft advertisement. Printed underneath the sketch of a man dressed in
an open-blouse and scarf who carries a bountiful basket of pimientos high on his
shoulder, the text reads:
It was a cook in sunny Spain who first enriched and softened the flavor by
boiling the pimento in oil. It was a Spanish epicure who first used it in
cheese. But it remained for the patented Kraft process of blending and
sterilizing to bring this toothsome combination to its full, delicious
perfection and make it a marketable delicacy. When you open—with the
key—a tin of the Pimento style of Elkhorn Cheese and remove the delicate
parchment protection, there before you is a symmetrical round of
wholesome goodness, studded, like rubies, with scarlet bits of imported
Spanish pimentos—nothing could be more tempting, except the flavor.35
Today, Kraft’s flowery endorsement of the Spanish imported pimiento reads with a bit of
irony. By 1916, the year that the company first introduced its line of Elkhorn tinned
32
"Display Ad 3," The Washington Post, December 30, 1910.
“Display Ad 69.” Los Angeles Times, December 14, 1912.
34
"Dainty Sandwiches," The Sun, February 26, 1911.
35
J.L. Kraft And Brothers Company, “From Sunny Spain."
33
13
cheeses, the pimiento was well established in American soil. To understand how pimento
cheese became affordable, and as a result, so prevalent in the American South—although
not limited to the South in product distribution—more information is needed about the
plight of the pimiento.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the first pimiento seeds entered the States in
1908 via southern California, where a fruit and vegetable grower named C. E. Utt
oversaw them in the Tustin area.36 Another article from the same paper doesn’t place the
pimiento in California until 1911 under the care of Louis M. Cole, president of the Los
Angeles Chamber of Commerce, who obtained the pepper seeds through the United
States Department of Agriculture.37 Whatever the exact case, the peppers grew well in
the warm, dry land of southern California. A headline for a 1914 article there announces
“Chili and Pimientos Worth Half Million.”38 Similarly in 1922, the pepper’s position in
California is described as prosperous, though also insecure. For the Los Angeles Times,
Ross H. Gast writes, “The Southern California pimiento industry has a new rival which
she should consider seriously. If Sherman should go marching through Georgia in 1922
he would probably be surprised to find that the negroes are forsaking the cotton fields to
harvest the pimiento, which is being grown in some sections of that State.”39 Gast was
inherently correct. In the wake of the boll weevil’s destruction, pimiento peppers were
grown as a means to diversify Georgia’s agricultural production. Under the direction of
36
Ross H. Gast, “Sweet Peppers of Spain Thrive in Southland Soil,” Los Angeles Times, December 3,
1922.
37
“Chili and Pimientos Worth Half Million,” Los Angeles Times, October 7, 1914. Louis M. Cole is
credited in his obituary from the New York Times as having “developed the State’s [California] canning
industry” in his position as President of the Royal Packing Company; “Louis M. Cole Dies at Los Angeles,
President of Royal Packing Company and a Leader in Many Causes,” New York Times, October 2, 1930.
38
“Chili and Pimientos Worth Half Million.”
39
Gast.
14
members of the Riegel family from Experiment, Georgia,40 who received seeds directly
from Spain, the way was paved for growing and canning peppers in Georgia and the
entire southeast region. In 1918, Mark Riegel established a canning facility on the farm
of D. F. Patterson in Pomona, Georgia. By the next year, Patterson enlisted the aid of
Walter L. Graefe and W. B. Elcock to establish the Pomona Products Company, which
moved to Griffin in 1920. It was reported that the new company “gave employment
during its first year of operation to a vast number of people, the amount paid out last year
to employees being somewhere between $88,000 and $90,000.”41 Building on Pomona’s
success, plants appeared across Georgia, including “Woodbury, Jackson, Meansville,
Vienna, Bradley, Wayside and at old Camp Wheeler, at Macon.”42
Pimientos thrived on both American coasts. A 1929 article from Los Angeles
stated, “The pimiento is adapted to a wide variety of uses. Everybody is familiar with
pimiento cheese.”43 A mere ten years later The Atlanta Constitution declared, “Pimientos
are no longer regarded strictly as a delicacy, but are now looked upon more in the nature
of a necessary food commodity. They are rich in vitamins A and C.”44 But by 1929,
Georgia eclipsed California as the largest producers and packagers of American
pimientos, a triumph that helped seal the fate of pimento cheese as southern fare.45 In
1960, Craig Claiborne reported that ninety percent of pimientos in the U.S. were grown
40
Experiment, Georgia derives its name from the University of Georgia’s Agriculture Experiment Station
located there.
41
“Spalding County Canning Industry Grows Rapidly,” The Atlanta Constitution, February 18, 1923.
42
Miller Thompson, “10,000,000 Pounds Canned Peppers To Move Soon From Georgia Plants,” The
Atlanta Constitution, September 1, 1935.
43
“Pimientos Flourish, Large Acreage in Ventura County Is In Peppers Now,” Los Angeles Times,
December 1, 1929.
44
“The Georgia Pimiento,” The Atlanta Constitution, September 17, 1929.
45
Today, the majority of American pimientos are once again grown in California, where Moody Dunbar,
Inc. bases its pepper growing operations.
15
around Georgia, with additional commercial operations in “Alabama, Florida, Tennessee
and South Carolina,” adding “Ten per cent of the commercial product comes from
California.”46 With pimentos firmly rooted in the southeast, pimento cheese became
closely associated with the region; pimientos were both affordable and in arms reach for
almost every southern state. Increasingly, cheese was, too. Mary Dahnke describes what
this meant for southern food in the following excerpt written in 1929:
Hog ‘n’ hominy, possum and watermelon, chicken Maryland and
Brunswick stew—they once spelled the fame of southern hospitality! And
now the new south may stake her reputation on cheese, spoon bread or
cheese sticks and cheese biscuits, and fondue and macaroni. For the
south, long teacher of gastronomy and the applied arts of hospitality, is
rewriting her cook book in terms of cheese . . . She’s adapting her old
recipes to the use of her latest industry, dairying and cheese-making and
discovering a new opportunities for making herself famous for cheese
dishes . . . Cheese, once considered merely a luxury for the epicures, is
used with palate tickling effect in dozens of the old everyday dishes,
giving them an almost infinite variety for southern menus, simple or
elaborate.47
The prevalence of pimientos in the South, as well as the lower cost of cheese, introduced
pimento cheese spread to a number of low income and working-class families, making it
what Kendra Myers, in the Foodways volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern
Culture, describes as “a wallet-friendly part of southern meals.”48 This does not mean
that pimento cheese fell from the graces of the white and black upper class in the South.
To this day it remains as standard fare on the likes of tearoom menus—though perhaps on
crustless bread. A noted example of pimento cheese’s place among the white and black
elite exists at the Masters Tournament in Augusta, Georgia, where it reigns as the official
46
Craig Claiborne, “Food News: Bright Note of Pimentos,” New York Times, February 12, 1960.
Mary Dahnke, “Southern Recipes Featuring Cheese With Tasty Effect,” The Atlanta Constitution,
January 20, 1929.
48
Kendra Myers, The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, Volume 7: Foodways, Ed. John T. Edge,
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), “Pimento Cheese.”
47
16
sandwich, wrapped in green wax paper, and sold for a $1.50. What follows, however, is
primarily an account of pimento cheese’s place and meaning for working-class
southerners.
17
CHAPTER 2
“Going to Work”: The Business of Pimento Cheese
Pimento cheese would be nothing without its binder, mayonnaise. There are
substitutions, of course—recipes from the 2003 Pimento Cheese Invitational hosted by
the Southern Foodways Alliance and the Southeast Dairy Association list cream cheese,
milk, eggs, and even peanut butter as other options. But nine times out of ten,
mayonnaise is a fixture ingredient alongside grated cheese and pimiento peppers—
particularly true for manufactured pimento cheese spreads. Mayonnaise, however, is a
highly debated ingredient in the mix. There are those that prefer a tablespoon of
mayonnaise for a dryer pimento cheese spread, and those who like a cup for a smoother,
creamier consistency. Another issue concerns the superiority of homemade versus store
bought brands. Still another, which supermarket brand is best? Opinions abound, but at
the heart of much debate is a South Carolina variety of mayonnaise called Duke’s.
Georgia O’Kelly, head chef at The Glass Onion in Charleston, South Carolina,
says of pimento cheese, “You must use Duke’s brand,” adding that it “just might be the
Holy Grail.”49 Bellwether Vance, in a recent online article for Salon.com, ignited
concern among readers when she called for two tablespoons of “good mayonnaise
49
Maroukian, Garden & Gun.
(Hellman’s please).”50 One reader commented, “A Southern recipe for pimento [cheese]
that uses Hellmann's (sugar and all) rather than Dukes [mayonnaise]? I don't think so.”
This was followed by another post, which read, “I can always spot an imposter. Duke's is
the only kind of mayonnaise that should touch pimento cheese.”51 Wright Bryan, in his
story for National Public Radio, concurs, citing his use of Duke’s as being in line with a
choice “that many pimento-cheese aficionados prefer.”52 (Among such experts and
Duke’s devotees was none other than Reynolds Price’s mother.53) The general reason for
Duke’s is that many believe pimento cheese should be tangy, not sweet, and Duke’s
mayonnaise does not contain sugar.
Duke’s original recipe—which has remained relatively untouched since its
inception in 1917—belonged to Eugenia Duke, a white, middle-class woman from
Greenville, South Carolina, by way of Georgia. According to Greenville historian Judith
Bainbridge, Duke’s family recipe consisted of “oil, eggs, and cider vinegar, [and] was
unsweetened, helpful (indeed necessary) since sugar was rationed and had almost
disappeared from grocers’ shelves.”54 As Bainbridge’s comment alludes, World War I
played a major role in what foods were available. But the war also greatly shaped many
of the foods that were produced, not the least of which was cheese—regular and pimento.
50
Vance, Salon.com.
At sea [pseudo], comment on “Pimento Cheese is Happy Food,” comment posted on April 13, 2010,
http://letters.mobile.salon.com/food/feature/2010/04/13/pimento_cheese_recipe_open2010/view/?show=all
(accessed May 27, 2010); Galieojunk [pseudo], comment on “Pimento Cheese is Happy Food,” comment
posted on April 13, 2010, http://letters.mobile.salon.com/food/feature/2010/04/
13/pimento_cheese_recipe_open2010/view/?show=all (accessed May 27, 2010).
52
Bryan, Npr.org.
53
Reynolds Price, email message to the author, April 23, 2010.
54
Judith Bainbridge, “Duke Sandwich Company,” company history, courtesy of Andrew Smart, Duke
Sandwich Company, March 16, 2010.
51
19
At the war’s onset, James Lewis Kraft, a vendor who bought cheese wholesale at
the South Water Street market in downtown Chicago and peddled it to local grocers,
increased attempts to manufacture a cheese that was less perishable. And in 1915, Kraft
sold the first processed cheese in tins under the Elkhorn label. The Kraft Corporation
refers to that early cheese as “fighting food,” explaining: “During World War I, the U.S.
government became Kraft’s largest customer for process cheese—purchasing six million
pounds in cans until the war ended in November 1918. The product was the perfect
ration—a highly nutritious food that remained fresh during long-distance shipping under
adverse conditions, but did not require refrigeration.”55
Kraft began to sell pimento cheese in the Elkhorn tins in 1916. A year later in
South Carolina, Duke made cheese useful and available to soldiers in another way. Six
miles north of Greenville in August 1917, thousands of troops moved in for training.56
They put down tents in an open expanse and cut long, parallel lines across the land,
mimicking the region’s rows of carefully sewn crops. Two months after their arrival,
Duke, with her mayonnaise recipe as a base, made pre-wrapped sandwiches like pimento
cheese or chicken salad in her home kitchen to sell at Camp Sevier’s YMCA-run army
canteens. For fifty cents, she could buy a roundtrip ticket and sell enough sandwiches to
cover the cost of transportation and still make a profit. Building on that success, she
expanded her business into other areas. In early 1918, she sold the sandwiches in
downtown Greenville through the Red Cross War Camp Community Club, which
Bainbridge describes as Duke’s “principal ‘sandwich stand.’” There, “officers, enlisted
55
Anne Bucher and Melanie Villines, The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Cheese: Stories of Kraft Foods
Inventors and Their Inventions [Kraft Foods, Inc. and Bogire, Inc., 2005], 6.
56 Bainbridge, “Duke Sandwich Company.”
20
men, and black troops” bought her food.57 But the military was not the only work force
that fueled Duke’s success; the employees in Greenville’s many mills also provided a
market. To understand why requires a brief look at the industrialization of the Piedmont.
Like a Family, a landmark social history written by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, James
Leloudis, Robert Korstad, Mary Murphy, Lu Ann Jones, and Christopher R. Daly, loosely
defines the boundaries of the larger southern Piedmont—an area that extends from
southern Virginia through central North and South Carolina, as well as northern Georgia
and Alabama—and illuminates its initial transition in the 1880s from an agricultural to an
industrial-based economy to become what the authors refer to as “the making of a
southern cotton mill world.”58 In this New South, agricultural-based lifeways didn’t fade
over night, but transitioned slowly. One place where this is evident is in many of the
foods that were first cultivated and consumed in the mill towns and villages, areas of
housing often owned by nearby mills that were erected to house residents in rural areas
where little or no infrastructure had existed before. As Hall, Korstad, and Leloudis
explain, “Mill hands . . . brought subsistence strategies from the countryside, modifying
them to meet mill village conditions. Just as farmers had tried to bypass the furnishing
merchant, mill workers struggled to avoid ‘living out of a tin can.’”59 Community
members planted gardens and canned food, or raised livestock for meat and milk in
community pastures.
Before World War I, the majority of mills ran on “central power systems in which
a water wheel, steam engine, or single electric motor drove the machinery through an
57
Ibid.
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall et al., Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (Chapel Hill:
The University of North Carolina Press, 2000) xivii.
59
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall et. al., “Cotton Mill People: Work, Community, and Protest in the Textile South,
1880-1940,” The American Historical Association 91.2 (Apr., 1986): 251.
58
21
elaborate network of belts, shafts, and pulleys.”60 Oftentimes, these devices were turned
off for a full hour each day, thereby stopping production and allowing time for a formal
dinner break. It was feasible then for mill workers who lived in nearby mill villages to
walk home for a sit-down dinner with their families, or to gather together outside of the
mill, eating away from the loud machines or dust-filled air. Unplanned breaks were a
common occurrence, too, the result of machines that broke or belts that came undone on a
single-power system.
By the 1920s, however, the incorporation of electric and steam-powered machines
that operated independently of one another introduced more consistent work schedules.
In addition, overseers consulted with industrial engineers to maximize production, and in
so doing, took away a number of rights, including meal and bathroom breaks.61 One
former millworker, Sam Finley, explains how the system was monitored and created,
saying, “They got a stopwatch, and they followed them around. They figured out exactly
how long it took you to tie that thread and start the loom up. They figured it right down
to the tick of that stopwatch. Then they expected you to stretch it out a little bit, to do a
little more. You couldn’t please them. The more you done, the more they wanted
done.”62 With the “stretch-outs”—a term used by workers to describe increased periods
of production with limited rights and wages—came the implementation of “dope
wagons” or “dope carts,” which sold sandwiches and drinks to employees who were
constrained to eat as they found time. Lloyd Davidson, a millworker, explained,
“Sometimes you’d start up several looms, then you’d eat a little. After you’d started two
60
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall et. al., “Cotton Mill People,” 258.
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall et al., Like a Family, 209.
62
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall et al., Like a Family, 208.
61
22
or three, then you’d eat a little more. You couldn’t take any time to amount to anything
for eating. You just had to work your eating in with your work.”63
These working conditions in the Carolina Piedmont required convenience foods,
and sandwiches filled that need.64 As Andrew Smart, current President of Duke’s
Sandwiches, explains, “What’s unique about the sandwich is that people were able to
make it and carry it with them.”65 Or, as Mimi Sheraton, food writer and former
restaurant critic at the New York Times, recently explained, “a sandwich is an
inexpensive, handy way to provide good (or bad) nutritional and psychological
sustenance to anyone busy at work who does not have time, place nor money to sit down
to a real knife and fork meal.”66 John T. Edge, director of the Southern Foodways
Alliance, describes similar work foods in the mining industry, including pepperoni rolls
(bread stuffed with pepperoni and dipped in marinara sauce) among coal miners in
northern West Virginia, pasties (meat and potato filled pastries) for copper miners around
the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and Moon Pies (chocolate and marshmallow cookies)
for coal miners in Kentucky.67
Recognizing the need for cheap convenient foods that could be eaten quickly,
entrepreneurs and manufacturers in the Piedmont sold pre-wrapped sandwiches, of which
63
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall et al., Like a Family, 209.
“Far from a one hit wonder: The wonder bread company through the years,” Wonder,
http://www.wonderbread.com/#/about_wonder_bread/history [accessed May 27, 2010]. Sandwiches
increased in popularity after May 24, 1921, when Taggart, a bakery in Indianapolis, Indiana introduced
packaged bread. Under the Wonder Bread label in 1930, the bakery introduced pre-sliced bread, a
commodity that represented eighty percent of bread purchased in the United States by 1933.
65
Andrew Smart, recorded telephone interview with the author, February 23, 2010.
66
Mimi Sheraton, email message to the author, April 24, 2010. For more about the history of the sandwich
as both an American delicacy and a work food, see Mimi Sheraton, “Sandwiches: Eating From Hand to
Mouth,” Time, June 16, 1986, under “Food,”
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,961621,00.html (accessed May 27, 2010).
67
John T. Edge, “Fast Food Even Before Fast Food,” The New York Times, September 30, 2009, under
“United Tastes,” http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/30/dining/30unit.html?_r=2&pagewanted=2 [accessed
May 27, 2010].
64
23
pimento cheese became the most iconic. Duke’s sandwiches appeared on dope wagons
that rolled through many Greenville mills including Dunean and Judson. In addition,
they found a place at some of the mill villages’ company shops and at segregated Main
Street drug stores like Carpenter Brothers, Community Drug Store, and the Greenville
Pharmacy. Regarding Duke Sandwich’s connection to the mills, Smart says that it was a
long-term business relationship: “Basically we sold to textile mills pretty much all the
way up through the [1980s] when obviously the textile industry started to deteriorate.”68
Before that decline, Duke’s was not alone in providing food to local manufacturers.
Jimmy Beason says that his family’s business, Cleveland Sandwiches, which
began in Boiling Springs, North Carolina in 1925, sold its products to almost every mill
within a 50-mile radius. Of the early mills, he explains, “They had a shop where people
could come in if they were on a break . . . and get it. But they had a dope wagon they
pushed through the mill so people didn’t have to leave their job. They could watch their
machine and turn around and buy a sandwich, moon pie, or whatever.”69 In regard to
how Cleveland Sandwiches worked to meet demands from the local industries, Beason’s
sister, Jane Nolan adds, “[For] Stonecutter mill, which is not 15 miles from here
probably, [the trucks] would have to go twice a day because when the shift changed and
everything, [the mill] would be out. And so they would have to take more sandwiches. It
was not unusual for a mill to call and say, ‘We’re out of sandwiches.’”70 Cleveland
Sandwiches also provided its sandwiches to other food manufacturers that sold products
68
Smart.
Jimmy Beason, interview by author, Boiling Springs, NC, October 5, 2010.
70
Jane Nolan, interview by author, Boiling Springs, NC, October 5, 2010.
69
24
to mills or who stocked vending machines—things that, alongside commissaries, became
staples in mills and other industries and eventually replaced the dope wagons.
Tom Fisher, former president of the Fisher/Rex brand in Raleigh, explains, “If
you can think of an industry or manufacturing plant, a lot of them would have a snack bar
in the plant trying to keep the employees there so they wouldn’t go out. And about any
business that you can think of, they had them in there at one time or another.”71 Star
Food Products in Burlington got its start by securing commissary contracts with
Burlington Industries, a company that dominated the local mill industry and was once the
world’s largest producer of textiles. Similarly, Made Rite Sandwiches, an operation that
began in Durham in the mid-1940s and soon after moved its headquarters and production
to Greensboro, supplied food to local manufacturers through the use of vending
machines.72 Edward McCoy and his two sons, Robert and John, launched their business
by selling sandwiches to workers in Durham and expanded to sell to the Greensboro
industries, as well as customers on streets of Greensboro. Bruce Hester, who worked in
product development, says of his company’s major customers:
We did a tremendous amount of business with the textile industry—Cone
Mills, Canon Mills—places that had around the clock labor operations
going on where people were not allowed the time to go places to get food.
Back in those days there were not fast food restaurants, so [the workers]
were kind of limited in the kinds of foods that they could choose from.
The mills and everything—the textile industry—put in vending machines
and we put our sandwiches in the vending machines and started selling
them there.73
Made Rite operated around the clock, taking orders from businesses by 3 p.m., and
producing sandwiches at night to deliver fresh the next day to places in Greensboro, as
71
Tom Fisher, interview by author, Benson, NC, March 30, 2010.
Bruce Hester, recorded telephone interview with the author, May 28, 2010.
73
Ibid.
72
25
well as in Raleigh, Charlotte, and cities in South Carolina. Donny “Boober” Ragsdale,
who worked in the card room at Wiscassett for twenty-two years until the mill closed,
remembers seeing pimento cheese and ham sandwiches in the vending machines there.
He also recalls Ruth’s pimento cheese in his family’s refrigerator, though he echoes my
mother’s sentiment, saying that it wasn’t there for a snack; it was there alongside deli
ham to make sandwiches for work. When asked about pimento cheese as something to
eat at home during his youth, he balked, saying, “Naw, that was a delicacy,” then added,
“You didn’t get it like you could just go in there and make a sandwich. Cause Grandma
and them—they fixed beans and taters and that’s what you ate. It wasn’t none of this, ‘I
want, or I need.’ You ate what was on the table if you wanted to eat.”74 Sandwich fillers
like Ruth’s that were sold in individual containers for sandwich preparation at home—to
be eaten there, or what was seemingly more popular, to be carried elsewhere—became
popular on the market in the 1950s. Hester says of Made Rite’s product, “It was one of
those situations where they hit at the right time because a lot of people—a lot of people
were going to work and there was a need out there for convenience foods that you could
serve your family and not spend time in the kitchen making them. So the salad business
really took off . . . in little cardboard cups with little plastic container lids . . . It caught
on. It just mushroomed.”75
All across the nation, convenience foods prospered in the years that followed
World War II. Energies and technologies that had been invested in war-production
shifted toward the manufacturing of food, and packaged or prepared foods were geared
heavily to a growing workforce of women. One of the biggest marketing campaigns of
74
75
Donny Joe Ragsdale, interview by author, Albemarle, NC, March 6, 2010.
Hester.
26
that era was what historian Harvey Levenstein refers to as “value added” products. He
writes, “The other aspect of the postwar industry’s structure—the drive for more value
added—was based on the idea that processors had something almost as valuable as
sustenance to sell to busy postwar housewives: time. Longer shelf-lives, more
processing, precooking, and packaging all had one great justification: to liberate ‘Mrs.
Consumer’ from the drudgery of the kitchen.”76 Ruth’s Salads, whose roots lie in the
home kitchen of Ruth Ross, a white working-class woman who lived in Charlotte, were
marketed with this concept in mind. Harry Ross, Ruth’s husband, peddled the foods to
local grocers and markets in the early 1950s, and, based on their growing popularity, took
on a business partner, Bob Miller, to help him expand the business. A history from
Ruth’s Salads explains Miller’s vision, affirmed in the company slogan, “Less Work for
Mother!”77:
In the spirit of the 50’s and the development of labor saving devices and
techniques for the home, Bob knew that families would be interested in
obtaining Pimento Spread without having to grate the cheese or Chicken
Salad without cooking and pulling the meat from the bone. Mr. Miller
purchased Harry Ross’s share of the business and with his eye toward
quality and freshness, started providing people throughout the southeast
Cole Slaw, Pimento Spread, Chicken Salad, and Chili without all the
hassle and time it took to make these items from scratch.78
Enthusiasm for food processing and convenience foods, Levenstein argues, was
“paralleled by appreciation for that most visible new way of buying it, the supermarket,”
which had its start in the 1930s but whose growth was stalled by “Depression economics
76
Harvey Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1993), 108.
77
Ibid.
78
“Thumbnail Sketch of Ruth’s Salads,” company history, courtesy of Bill Rudisill, Ruth’s Salads,
February 8, 2010.
27
and wartime shortages.”79 As Levenstein explains, following the war, early supermarkets
like A&P, who operated and distributed from large central warehouses in order to reduce
costs, turned small corner markets into modern supermarkets.80 As a result, by 1956 “the
independent corner market, while still visible, was a relic of the past. Full-fledged
supermarkets accounted for 62 percent of the nation’s grocery sales, while smaller, selfserve ‘superettes took in another 28 percent of the food dollar, leaving the 212,000 small
food stores to share 10 percent of the market.”81
In 1952, George Bell, former president of Star Food Products, took his first
container of sandwich filler to Big Apple, a local chain in Reidsville, North Carolina.82
But the largest contract for Star’s came four years later when Otto Caudle, one the
company’s founders, placed their product in A&P grocery stores. Star’s contract with
that chain extended from Winston Salem to the coast and was what Bell refers to as “the
backbone of our business.”83 Hester also remembers the importance of getting into a
grocery market. He worked for Made Rite when Ralph W. Ketner, the co-founder of a
small grocery in Salisbury, North Carolina named Food Town, approached Made Rite
about packaging cups of pimento cheese to be sold under a private label. Hester was
surprised that his company said yes: “That was quite an unusual thing for us to do
because the volume was so small.”84 But the volume steadily increased. Food Town
became Food Lion, and with the slogan, “The Lowest Food Prices in North Carolina,”
79
Levenstein, 113.
Ibid.
81
Levenstein, 113-114.
82
Bell, interview, October 16, 2009.
83
Ibid.
84
Hester.
80
28
expanded from seven stores in 1968 to 800 by 1991.85 “You know what happened there,”
says Hester. “That thing just exploded, and so because we were in on the ground level
with that particular kind of product, everywhere they went, we went.”86
With the national trend toward convenience products building throughout the
1950s, Star Foods, Made Rite, and Ruth’s were valued in that they retained ties to the
local. Though industrially produced, Burlington, Greensboro, and Charlotte were listed
on the labels, which built a loyal base of North Carolina customers. In addition, the
product lines and recipes that these companies stuck with at the beginning were familiar;
pimento cheese wasn’t new, just its packaging and widespread availability had changed.
Pimento cheese was also unique among convenience products in that, though it was used
as a utilitarian food, for the white and black working-class it was also a “fancy” food
served at luncheons and church teas. And when pimento cheese first became widely
available to the working-class, it largely retained the quality of the initial recipes that
helped it attain its status as a fine food. Bell recalls that Star Foods initially purchased
hoops of cheese locally from a broker in Winston Salem. Not until the 1970s and 1980s
did “cheese food” replace cheddar and other actual cheeses as an ingredient in many
spreads in order to lower costs. Or as Jason Griffith, current Vice President at Star’s,
explains, that cheaper roasted red bell peppers gradually replaced pimientos in many
mixes.87
As noted earlier, pimento cheese never lost its status as a delicacy and was a
familiar food served at weddings and teas. This image of pimento cheese as a fine food
85
Troy L. Kickler, “Food Lion,” North Carolina History Project, http://www.northcarolinahistory.org/
encyclopedia/147/entry (accessed May 31, 2010).
86
Hester.
87
Jason Griffith, interview by the author, Burlington, NC, Spring 2009.
29
was cultivated among many of its early producers. Eugenia Duke, for instance, was
adept at straddling pimento cheese’s duality. At the same time that she sold sandwiches
to the textile mills, company stores, and pharmacies, she operated the Duke Tea Room at
the Ottaray Hotel in Greenville, where she presided as president and treasurer until
1922.88 Built in 1909, the Ottaray was named after the Cherokee word for “mountain”
because the hotel towered over downtown from its spot at North Main and Elford
streets.89 The hotel accommodated well-to-do businessmen that visited the area in
connection to the textile industry. As Bainbridge writes, “It began (what didn’t?) because
of textiles . . . New York financiers and selling agents, New England textile machine
manufacturers, traveling salesmen (called drummers because they ‘drummed up’
business), and internationally known performers began to make regular visits to this
suddenly assertive small city. But there was no place to house them.”90 Bainbridge goes
on to say that when the hotel opened, it “immediately became the social center of
Greenville and travelers’ preferred destination.”91 Thus, Duke, from the first floor
tearoom that she leased from the Ottaray, was at the center of that activity and status, and
so was pimento cheese as a dainty sandwich.
Nearly two decades later in 1941, a white woman named Jessie Thomas Buie,
grandmother of North Carolina author Tim Tyson, drew upon pimento cheese’s duality in
a similar way.92 With the help of her sister, Esma Runkle, she ran the Biscoe Sandwich
Shop, adjoined to the bus station in Biscoe, North Carolina. There, Buie and Runkle sold
88
Bainbridge, “Duke Sandwich Company.”
Judith Bainbridge, “The Ottaray Hotel Graced City for more than a Half Century,” City People, The
Greenville News, November 16, 2005.
90 Ibid.
91 Ibid.
92 Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name (New York: Random House, 2004), 24.
89
30
sandwiches to troops who were stationed at nearby Fort Bragg or passing through town
on one of the many bus lines. Tyson describes this in his book, Blood Done Sign My
Name, in the following passage:
By December 7, 1941, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt told
Americans that the Japanese had bombed the American fleet at Pearl
Harbor, Jessie Thomas Buie had already saved enough money to open the
Biscoe Sandwich Shop, which sat right beside the bus station in the little
mill town. Those years were the heyday of bus travel, and tiny Biscoe was
situated at the intersection of the major routes connecting Charlotte to
Raleigh and Greensboro to Wilmington. As the country mobilized for
war, soldiers, draftees, and workers poured through the bus station,
hundred and hundreds each day. Many of them bought Jessie’s yeast rolls
stuffed with pimento cheese, chicken salad, or egg salad, each one
carefully wrapped in wax paper with a napkin tucked into the fold. 93
For travelers or troops in a rush, sandwiches were a cheap and tasty “grab-and-go” option
for a snack or meal. But the shop also had two different types of seating for those who
could linger longer. Buie’s daughter, Martha Tyson, recalls the set-up, saying, “They had
booths and in the back they had a large dining room with white tablecloths . . . and linen
napkins cause that’s just the way they were. They wanted it done right.”94 For Buie,
doing right also applied to the way that pimento cheese sandwiches were served at
different settings. At the shop, for instance, she was known to slice bread diagonally,
while at home or for others, she removed the bread’s crust and cut it in a circle. “If she
was taking pimento cheese sandwiches to a church supper or to a home where somebody
had died or something, she always cut them round . . . with a glass,” Tyson describes,
adding, “I guess she thought that they were fancier.”95 As for her mother’s recipes and
ideas of proper etiquette, Tyson attributes prescriptive literature of the time rather than
93
Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name.
Martha Buie Tyson, interview by author, Raleigh, NC, May 18, 2010.
95
Ibid.
94
31
her upbringing: “She just devoured women’s magazines.”96 Levenstein writes about the
influence of such publications in Paradox of Plenty. He argues that in the 1930s:
The housewife’s traditional bedrock of useful household information, her
mother’s and grandmother’s recipes and advice, seemed outdated and
irrelevant. Whether she was a middle-class woman, thoroughly apprised
of the demands of the New and Newer Nutrition, whose home and
marriage differed markedly from her mother’s, or a working-class one
who could afford a greater variety of foods than her mother ever could, or
the child of immigrants wanting to cook the ‘American’ way, she felt that
she had to base her food choices on much different principles than those of
twenty or thirty years earlier. By 1930s, then, the mass media had
replaced family wisdom as the major source of culinary advice for
American housewives.97
Tyson confirms this idea concerning her mother’s recipes, methods of food preparation,
style of entertaining, and ideas of cleanliness and order. “She taught us to fold a
handkerchief with the hems right together . . . and she would say, ‘If you sweep the porch
and you don’t pick up the mat and sweep under it, you might as well not sweep the
porch,” says Tyson, adding, “All of these things, I’m sure she read cause her mother was
not like that. She didn’t learn them from her mother—a lot of women’s magazines about
what to do and what is proper and things.”98 Tyson also credits the three African
American cooks that worked with her mother to perfect the businesses’ recipes: sisters,
Mary and Doodley Clegg, and their mother, Sallie Mae Clegg.
The daughter of a Biscoe sharecropper, Buie begged her father to let her attend
college, but “What seemed much more likely,” Tim Tyson writes, “was that Jessie would
end up working in the textile mill.”99 Instead, Buie secured a job at Efird’s Department
Store in Charlotte. Though she later married Charles Buie, who became a supervisor at
96
Ibid.
Levenstein, 31
98
Martha Tyson.
99
Tim Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name, 24.
97
32
Aileen Mills in Biscoe, she managed to remain outside of the mill through her restaurant.
In this way, she was like Duke and many other women across the Carolina Piedmont,
including Ruth Ross of Charlotte and Karlie Keith Fisher of Raleigh, who used food to
escape the drudgery of home or other unwanted employment. They created prosperous
businesses, but businesses lodged in the domestic sphere, a seemingly innocent location
that failed to threaten traditional gender roles of the era. Of Duke’s initial business Smart
notes:
She created a little thriving entrepreneurship and a real exit out of her
house. She eventually moved it to a smaller location downtown. As a
matter of fact, if you were sitting here in the lobby of this manufacturing
plant you’d actually see a picture from 1919 with a little Duke truck with a
Duke’s logo on the side of it. And that was right in front of the little store
there. And the story behind that truck is actually in one day—demand had
grown so strong for her sandwiches—that she actually sold 10,000
sandwiches in one day. Now that’s before there was any automation or
anything, you know, equipment to help with that. But the story with that
day is that when she sold those sandwiches, she had enough money to go
buy her a truck. It was sometime around 1918, 1919.100
Though 10,000 sandwiches seems either an exaggeration or possible nod to the unnamed
workers who must have helped Duke in her early days, Smart’s comment speaks volumes
about both the need that Duke’s business filled and her success as a business owner.
Smart adds about Duke, “Here’s a woman in 1917 who was an entrepreneur and was, you
know, a business leader in a time before she even had the right to vote. She was one of
those people that just had that kind of determination.”101 Tyson describes her mother in a
similar way as a “go-getter” and an “independent kind,” noting, “In [her] day, people
were mostly teachers or nurses or something, but she was not educated, [and cooking]
was something she knew how to do . . . Her motivation was to show that she could do—
100
101
Smart.
Ibid.
33
she was sort of ahead of her time—that she could have a job and do well, as well as a
man could. My father, as far as I know, had a good job, but she supplemented that.”102
Tyson recalls that the shop was so successful that the profits it garnered from just three or
four years in business paid for her brother to attend a year of boarding school, and all
three Tyson children to attend college. “One motivation [for the shop] was to educate all
of us. She was determined.”103
Tom Fisher describes his great-grandmother, Karlie Keith Fisher, a white woman
who started the Fisher/Rex bakery in her basement kitchen in 1928, with the following:
“She was the doer in the family. She made things happen.”104 Karlie’s husband,
Frederick Norman Fisher, was an industrious man. He’s said to be the first person to put
handles on mattresses.105 But when his wife, a graduate of the North Carolina Governor
Moorehead School for the Blind, began a home bakery and eventually a restaurant in
downtown Raleigh, he dropped his own work to assist her. Karlie Fisher began by
making sandwiches—peanut butter snack crackers—and expanded to include sandwiches
on sliced bread like pimento cheese and chicken salad, as well as pies and cakes. The
Fisher/Rex brand also resold candy by Wrigley’s and others, becoming one of the largest
candy distributors in the southeast.
For women like Fisher, Tyson, and Duke, food—what was considered part of a
woman’s domestic domain—was a window not only into work, but business ownership,
financial independence, and creativity; as proprietors, they ran their businesses as they
saw fit. But in a manner similar to what Joann Radner describes in Feminist Messages,
102
Martha Tyson.
Ibid.
104
Fisher.
105
Ibid.
103
34
the business plans for each of these women were coded, whether intentional or not.106
“I’m going to make sandwiches” was a homegrown business model that, grounded within
a domestic sphere, afforded room to grow and proved hugely successful, and it’s a model
that women entrepreneurs have used with continued success. Celebrity cooks, authors,
and television stars Paula Deen and Martha Stewart, for instance, both began their
businesses in home kitchens. Of her start in Savannah, Georgia in 1989, Deen says,
“With Jamie and Bobby [Deen’s sons] as my delivery boys, we began delivering home
cooked bag lunches straight to the offices of local business people. We soon added a
catering service, and, as the business continued to grow, we were able to expand into a
full-service restaurant.107
Brownie Wise, the visionary retailer of Tupperware, also followed a path to
success through the kitchen. A single mother and Tupperware salesperson in the 1950s,
Wise invented the Tupperware party sales format that is linked to the brand’s success.108
As vice president of Tupperware Home Parties Incorporated, Wise empowered thousands
of women and served as model business woman who, as Alison Clarke describes
“transition[ed] from housewife to leader of a multimillion dollar enterprise, appearing in
women’s magazines and business journals across the land.”109 Her most infamous
portrait was in 1954 as the first woman to appear on the cover of Business Week. Bob
Kealing writes of Wise’s work, “To some, the ‘Tupperware Lady’ in her hose, hat, heels,
and gloves seemed to personify the female stereotype of the plastic, Father Knows Best
106
Joan Radner, Feminist Messages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
Paula Deen, “Restaurants,” http://www.pauladeen.com/restaurants (accessed May 27, 2010).
108
Alison J. Clarke, Tupperware: The Promise of Plastics in 1950s America (Washington: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1999).
109
Clarke, 2.
107
35
1950s. The Tupperware phenomenon had the opposite effect. One sale at a time,
housewives established an economic niche outside the household.”110
As vice president, Wise travelled to conferences, demonstrations, and Tupperware
Homecoming Jubilees, among other events, as a spokesperson for the product. Her
success and style were an inspiration for other women who wished to find similar work
outside of the home, but as the face of the Tupperware brand, she also made plastic
containers highly desirable as a consumer product. Thirty years earlier, Eugenia Duke’s
image was central to marketing her specialty foods. Around Greenville, she was known
for her style, which included large hats and pearls. And around 1919, after bottling her
mayonnaise and selling the recipe to the C.F. Sauer Company out of Richmond, Virginia,
Duke stayed on as the product’s face and spokesperson. “Eugenia is interesting,” says
Smart. “Her marketing and advertising was her personality and her ability to
communicate with people. When C.F. Sauer bought the mayonnaise part of her business,
they actually kept Eugenia on as kind of a travelling voice. They kept her on to help
them travel to trade shows, show the product, talk about it, and do that kind of stuff.”111
What’s unique about Duke compared to Wise, however, was that the company and
product were hers from the beginning. About Duke Smart adds, “I always say there
wouldn’t be Duke’s mayonnaise today if it wasn’t for that pimento cheese because that
was one of her staples. It was one of the things that started her own business.”112 But it
clearly wasn’t Duke or the cheese spread alone that built the company or led to its
110
Bob Kealing, Tupperware Unsealed: Brownie Wise, Earl Tupper, and the Home Part Pioneers
(Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2008), 6-7.
111
Smart.
112
Smart.
36
success; businesses like Duke’s were the result of many hands, particularly those of
family members.
According to Simerly at Moody Dunbar, “the vast majority of the pimiento cheese
sold in the United States is produced by family-owned companies.”113 This has been the
case since the early 1900s, when wives, husbands, children, and in-laws, among others,
worked together to build or maintain a business. Bainbridge sums up the responsibilities
often felt or taken on by business owners’ children, writing of Duke’s daughter, “Poor
Martha Duke. In the fall of 1917, while other Greenville girls were attending tea dances,
playing cards or presiding at dainty ladies’ luncheons, she was spreading sandwiches in
her family’s Manly Street apartment. She invited her friends to watch (and probably lend
a hand). They called her ‘The Sandwich Queen.’”114 Sherry Hudgins Tapp, whose
father, Stan Hudgins, was the name, the cook, and the businessman behind Burlington’s
Stan’s pimento cheese, talks about the tools she constructed in attempts to make her work
go faster. This included taping a potato masher to an electric drill, something of a
makeshift mixer that she employed to try to quickly combine ingredients. Aurelia Curtis,
whose parents—Louise and Otto Caudle—opened Star Food Products, remembers the
work that followed the family home—particularly, the wax-coated paper cups that
contained their manufactured salad spreads. “You’d line up the kitchen table with paper
towels, get all cleaned up, and stamp lids. I can remember the way they smelled,
probably because of the cellophane.”115 She also recollects her mother testing recipes in
their home kitchen. So does Curtis’ sister, Lee Harless, who recalls with disdain the
113
Simerly, email.
Bainbridge, “Duke Sandwich Company.”
115
Aurelia Curtis, interview by author, Burlington, NC, October 12, 2009.
114
37
pimento cheese sandwiches that her mother made her to take to school, where she tried to
trade with friends. Although president, Norman Mabry, and vice president, Jason
Griffith, today own the majority of Star Food Products, Bell and his family members’
presence is still strongly felt.116 Upon his brother-in-law’s death in 1963, Bell stepped up
as sales manager, and later, upon his sister’s death, he took over as president.117 And as
adults, Curtis, Harless, and their brother, Charlie Caudle, took on administrative roles at
Star’s.
In the specialty salad businesses, employees obviously weren’t limited to the
owner’s family members. Local men and women held jobs as managers, cooks, line
workers, and deliverers, among other positions, too. But oftentimes, multiple members
of one local family were employed at a business. Rodney Nolan, who worked for the
Cleveland Sandwich Company for 25 years, says that the company “provided a living for
a lot of people for a lot of years—a lot of community people,” adding, “Probably 50
percent of the people who worked here were family: husbands and wives, brothers and
sisters . . . It was just one big family.”118
Hester says that a majority of the workers at Made Rite in the 1960s were middleaged women. “They were people that had raised children and were kind of ready to do
something else as far as—they had raised their kids, they were able to do different
things.”119 He also explains that the roles of men and women were largely divided; men
did “the stocking stuff, anything that was heavy, and moving things around,” while
women “did most of the food prep and making stuff.” At Ruth’s Salads, gender also
116
Griffith.
Griffith.
118
Rodney Nolan, interview with the author, Boiling Springs, NC, October 5, 2010.
119
Hester.
117
38
appears to have played a major part in the roles that employees were given. Black and
white photographs from the 1950s and 1960s that hang in the company’s hallway depict
men, the majority of whom are white, as the business’ truck drivers. Pictures from the
same era show both men and women preparing and packaging food in the company’s
kitchen, though all of the workers are black. At Star Foods, working-class blacks and
whites of both sexes worked alongside each other to prepare food, though Bell says that
there were more women and blacks in food prep positions over the course of the
company’s early years. At Made Rite, Hester says, “We had black managers as well as
white managers, and lady managers. It was diversified. It wasn’t so much color or creed
as, can you do the job? Can you get the work done?”120 But, of course, the racial turmoil
of the 1960s did affect Made Rite. The company was threatened with a bomb and
evacuated. For Star Food Products, racist views also affected the company, becoming an
issue in how products were marketed. Bell recalls a billboard advertisement that caused a
heated debate in one of its locations in eastern North Carolina. “This was in the late
sixties and early seventies. Anyway, we produced some billboards that had a white child,
a black child, and a yellow child, and the wording on it was, ‘Star’s is for Kids—All
Kids.’ Well, we had a bit of a ruckus east of Raleigh.”121
Today, the factory production lines reflect changes both in the South’s racial and
ethnic demographics and the food industry. The chapter that follows examines how
pimento cheese is currently produced, who is making it, and how it continues to function
as cheap, convenient food for much of the working class.
120
121
Ibid.
Bell, interview, October 16, 2010.
39
CHAPTER 3
Pimento Cheese and the Factory Line:
Current Production Amid the Decline of the Textile Industry
Tuesdays and Thursdays are for cheese—six to eight thousand pounds of chopped
cheddar that make their way through five machines in order to produce pimento cheese.
At Star Food Products in downtown Burlington, North Carolina, an area known at the
turn of the twentieth century as the “Hosiery Center of the South,” a network of wires and
pipes connect the stainless steel equipment, which runs on alternating rhythms of air and
electricity. A steady hissing of valves versus the clink of metal echoes the city’s
industrial past. It’s a sound that keeps time and moves the work along—what in 26
minutes amounts to mixing and packaging close to one thousand 25-ounce cups of
cheese.
The company’s three kitchens have come a long way since 1953 when Parthenia
“Shorty” Gray filled cups by hand and Ruth Ellison snapped lids onto the products. At
that time, if one of the few pieces of kitchen equipment broke, Donny O’Penny was there
to fix it. “He was a jack of all trades,” says Bell.122 According to Bell, in addition to
serving as the handyman, O’Penny cleaned up, worked on the line, delivered products to
town, and ran errands for the business. Today, if something fails on the German-made
mixer, an engineer is flown in from Germany to fix it. Workers like Hector Gonzalez,
122
George Bell, interview by author, Burlington, NC, May 25, 2010.
the line supervisor, have learned to cope with the other temperamental machines at Star’s.
An employee at Star’s for fifteen years, Gonzalez started as a cabbage chopper preparing
foods to make slaw, but moved to the line within his first year. Once there, he admits
that it took him two years to grasp everything on one instrument. Now he’s a line pro,
often able to detect and correct potential breakdowns before they happen on some of the
major machines: the filler, packager, wrapper, and stamper. The last machine is a
freestanding computer that labels “best if used by dates” and is notorious as the smallest
and most finicky of instruments. “We got to treat her like a woman—treat her well,”
Gonzalez says of it, understanding that nobody wants to hand stamp numbers with the
current volume of production.123 To prevent such a catastrophe, a hairdryer is kept in a
small compartment on the stamp’s base and is used to warm the machine on cold days.
While observing the production line in operation one Tuesday, I missed the cue
that something had gone wrong. My ears weren’t attuned to catch the offbeat of a 6.5ounce cup of cheese that jammed the wrapper. Gonzalez promptly shut down production
before too much damage was done. A handful of containers fell to the floor, and,
recalling an earlier conversation with Gonzalez about the wrapper’s 80-sensor system, I
was filled with a sudden sense of panic. No one else seemed to mind. One worker
picked up the pile of misplaced spreads while Gonzalez fixed a fuse. Ten minutes after
the incident’s start, production fell back into place and left me reeling over the
complexity behind a simple tub of cheese.
During his tenure at Star’s, Gonzalez has seen a number of machines come and
go. When he started, the filler was a two-cupper, meaning that it moved two plastic
123
Hector Gonzalez, interview by author, Burlington, NC, Spring 2009.
41
containers side by side along the line’s belt in order to be filled. Once, at the back of the
factory’s loading dock, Gonzalez scooted a tower of cardboard boxes out of the way,
enabling me to peer into a dark corner where the old machine was laid to rest. “It was a
real good one,” he explained before rattling off statistics for the newer, faster 3-cup
model.124 But the speed of the five machines, of course, depends on the pace set by
Star’s workers—approximately six on the line, and two on prep. At the mixer, for
instance, two men hoist forty-pound blocks of cheese into an open vat before, in one
continuous motion, they lift twenty-five pound bags of mayonnaise with one hand, tear
them open with another, and squeeze the binder into the basin. Gallon buckets of diced
pimientos go in next, followed by pitchers of water. The last task, sifting in a mix of
spices, provides some respite until the vat empties and it’s time to throw in more cheese.
“That’s why we keep the big guys on the mixer,” Gonzalez, one of the smallest men on
the crew, laughs.125
Gonzalez moved to North Carolina from the state of Nayarit in Mexico when he
was fourteen. After high school, he returned to Mexico for a year to help his grandfather
farm—mainly corn, though they also raised a few cows. Gonzalez describes the work as
hard and dirty, and also more isolating than his work at Star’s, where he’s been since
returning to the States. Like Gonzalez, most of the men and women on the factory line at
Star’s today are natives of Mexico, many even from Nayarit, and are part of an increasing
Hispanic population in the Piedmont. Out of Star’s products, Gonzalez admits that
pimento cheese is not his favorite; he prefers Brunswick stew and chicken and
dumplings. But among the company’s current pimento cheese offerings—regular,
124
125
Ibid.
Ibid.
42
gourmet, private stock, pickle, and jalapeno—Gonzalez likes the jalapeno variety best.
Star’s is one of many companies that offer a jalapeno mix. According to Bell, the variety
was first introduced approximately twenty years ago.126 It was around this time that the
Hispanic population in North Carolina increased at an impressive rate. The North
Carolina Rural Economic Development Center reports, “During the 1990s, North
Carolina had the fastest growing population of Hispanics in the United States, 394
percent, representing over 300,000 new residents.”127 And as John T. Edge and Joe Gray
Taylor explain in the introduction to the Foodways edition of The New Encyclopedia of
Southern Culture, “Movements of new populations into the South . . . transform regional
foodways today.” That is definitely evident in some of the newer “hot” varieties of
pimento cheese, spreads that reflect changing tastes and desires in the region.
Pimento cheese has experienced changes throughout the decades that are tied to
national food trends, too. According to Hester, “It kind of depends on what marketing
tells you or what research indicates is a hot sell item.”128 In the 1980s, one such item was
a low fat option. Hester says of his company’s evolving options, “We came out with a
light line of products back when the industry was going crazy over light or reduced
calorie or reduced fat.”129 James Mellegren, Senior Editor for The Gourmet Retailer
magazine, explains the beginnings of the no-fat movement, saying, “in the early 1980s—
we discovered fat. Fat became the enemy. Consuming fat would make you fat and,
conversely, cutting fat out of your diet would make you slim, beautiful, and desirable.
Food manufacturers responded immediately to this groundbreaking discovery, and before
126
Bell, interview, May 25, 2010.
North Carolina Rural Economic Development Center, Inc., “North Carolina Population,” Rural Data
Bank, http://www.ncruralcenter.org/databank/trendpage_Population.asp (accessed June 10, 2010).
128
Hester.
129
Hester.
127
43
long, grocery shelves were brimming with low-fat products.”130 Ruth’s offers a Lite
Pimento Spread that declares, “50% less fat, 33 1/3 Fewer Calories than regular pimento
spread” on its label. In order to achieve those statistics, according to Rudisill, the product
consists of “low fat salad dressing” instead of mayonnaise, and “a lower fat content
shredded cheese.”131
A recent development in the pimento cheese industry involves gourmet and
private stock labels, names and statutes that allude to the qualities of cheeses used in
manufactured mixes. Star’s introduced its private stock label onto the market
approximately ten to fifteen years ago, says Bell. The private stock label, $3.99 per
twelve-ounce tub, uses sharp cheddar in its mix, and is a product that Bell was inspired to
make after having seen bottles of whiskey labeled with a similar term.132 “Every once in
a while I had seen—somebody was real proud of what they had and called it private stock
on there . . . So, I threw that out.”133 Star’s first offered a private stock option with its
chicken salad, which is now the company’s overall bestseller. It was received so well by
consumers that Star’s decided to offer a quality pimento cheese variety, too. As a result,
says Bell, Star’s now captures two markets of consumers: “the price and the quality.”134
According to Bell, quality cheese used to be a given. He explains that when
Star’s began, it only incorporated high quality, local ingredients. For pimento cheese,
Star’s “used cheddar cheese cut round . . . bought it in hoops” from a broker in Winston
130
Mellgren, James, “30 Years of Gourmet Retailing: A Brief History of Time,” Gourmetretailer.com,
September 20, 2009, http://www.gourmetretailer.com/gourmetretailer/content_display/esearch/e3i1952237
c625535ff46839c862133f7e4 (accessed June 10, 2010).
131
Rudisill.
132
Bell, interview, May 25, 2010.
133
Ibid.
134
Ibid.
44
Salem.135 As for the chicken salad, he says, “We started out cooking roosters and
deboning them and chopping the meat.”136 But twenty or thirty years later, Bell says that
Star’s fell prey, like most of its competitors and customers, to a “cheap mentality.” “The
quality of the product got lowered,” he admits. “Rather than raising the price and keep
the quality, you cut the quality and kept the price down. And believe it or not, people
kept buying it!” Of the cheese he adds, “I don’t know, we got to where we were watering
it down and we started putting a little bit of cheese food—a little more and a little more—
and finally, our regular pimento doesn’t have any sharp cheese. We use about half and
half now—half imitation and half, maybe American.”137 Rudisill says something similar
of Ruth’s regular pimento spread: “It’s made with some imitation, some real cheese.”138
The low quality of both companies’ basic spreads are the result of a national trend toward
producing cheap, manufactured foods, as well as a desire to keep costs low in order to
stay afloat; the customers and industries that have long purchased food from Star Foods
and Ruth’s both depend on and expect affordable, convenient products. Griffith says that
the current recession has been good for Star’s business, explaining that more people make
sandwiches or foods to carry to work in a bad economy. It seems plausible, too, that the
newer “private stock” spread has expanded Star’s consumer base, capturing a market that
doesn’t buy the more processed, value-driven products.
Griffith’s statement about people taking food to work echoes Rudisill’s perception
that in Charlotte, there are “still . . . lots of manufacturing people—people that carry their
lunch to work”: both statements signify a marked shift in the way in which foods are
135
Ibid.
Ibid.
137
Ibid.
138
Rudisill.
136
45
largely taken to workplaces today by employees, rather than purchased on-site. 139 One
reason for this change is that the textile industry, which once provided a huge market for
vending services and pre-packaged sandwich makers like Made Rite and Duke’s,
experienced massive closings in the 1980s and 1990s. As William E. Schmidt for the
New York Times News Service reported in 1984, the South’s textile industry experienced
the beginnings of a major decline in the 1980s due to foreign markets and overseas
production.140 Of North Carolina in specific, he wrote, “nearly 15,000 textile jobs have
been lost in the last year, more than 4,000 in the last month alone, as a result of growing
pressures on the industry, especially the result of competition from foreign imports.
There are 213,700 textile jobs in the state, the lowest total since records were begun in
1947.”141 The industry continued to decline in the 1990s. Jeff Gammage reported in the
Philadelphia Inquirer that 31,000 textile jobs had “vanished” between 1995 and 1997.
Ragsdale, who worked at Wiscasset in Albemarle, recalls that his mill closed during that
time. Regarding the end of his work, he says:
I ain’t retired. They shut it down . . . I worked down there—well, I had
twenty-two years in there that last time, and they come around and say,
‘Hey, when the cotton’s off the floor, you ain’t got a job.’ And that was it.
No ifs, ands, buts, or ‘Hey, we going to be shutting down.’ They didn’t
have to warn you back then at the time. It took us probably three months
to get, you know, run the cotton up. And they sold the machineries to
some outfit down in Mexico.142
At Made Rite, employees like Hester also lost jobs due to the decline of the textile
industry and its shift to Mexican and Asian markets. Reser’s Fine Foods, a refrigerated
139
Ibid.
William E. Schmidt, “South Worries About Decline of Tobacco and Textiles,” Gainesville Sun,
December 30, 1984.
141
Ibid.
142
Ragsdale.
140
46
salad manufacturer headquartered in Beaverton, Oregon, purchased Made Rite in 2002143
and as Hester explains, was not “interested in the sandwich business.”144 Hester says:
At the time that this was bought the sandwich business had suffered a
dramatic blow . . . because the textile industry took a blow when
NAFTA145 came along—all of the jobs went overseas or to Mexico and
the textile plants closed and all of the sandwich businesses just evaporated.
We still had the business with the convenience stores and the Food Lion
business, but the day to day routine of making products for the textile
industry and for vending machine sales was really, really shot.146
Reser’s only wanted the refrigerated sandwich fillers and took the recipe for some of
Made Rite’s packaged salads, including pimento cheese, which is now sold in
supermarkets under the Sedgefield label. According to Maria Brown, who works in sales
at Reser’s, Food Lion is the major buyer and distributer of Sedgefield’s products,
meaning that the southeast still provides the largest market for the northwest company’s
products.147 Hester doesn’t eat Sedgefield’s pimento cheese. It doesn’t taste like the
recipe that he helped developed. So he occasionally buys Stan’s pimento cheese, which
tastes more like the product he remembers. In addition to missing his own product,
Hester also misses the daily interactions with his fellow workers. He’s now part of a
group of approximately fifteen Made Rite employees that meet occasionally at Libby Hill
Seafood in Greensboro. “When you work with people as long as some of us worked
together,” Hester explains, “you get to—it’s like a family environment—you get to know
them.”148 He adds, “You may not know their family immediately, but you know they’ve
143
Reser’s Fine Foods, Reser’s Corporate Fact Sheet, http://www.resers.com/wpcontent/uploads/2008/12/Resers-Corporate-Fact-Sheet.pdf (accessed June 10, 2010).
144
Hester.
145
The North American Free Trade Agreement, which became effective in 1994, ended trade restrictions
between Mexico, the United States, and Canada.
146
Hester.
147
Maria Brown, telephone conversation with the author, June 4, 2010.
148
Hester.
47
got kids and you hear a little bit about what their kids are doing, and what they’re
involved in, and then when a company like that disperses, it’s like—you lose that
connection with those folks.”149
Tom Fisher explains that one of the hardest things about closing Fisher/Rex in
2009 was “putting forty people out of work that’s put their heart and soul into it.”150
Equally difficult, says Fisher, was closing an eighty-two year old family business: “It was
just really hard. It was. You put your heart and soul into something your entire life and
then it’s your turn at bat and something like this happens. And you’ve got three other
generations behind you that you don’t want to disappoint—even though they’re all gone,
they’re up there looking down on me.”151 Worry and stress over the company’s end led
to severe anxiety, nightmares, and deteriorating health for Fisher, who suffers from
diabetes. Smart, for whom the Duke Sandwich Company has been a part of his family
since his grandfather, Alan Hart, bought the business from Eugenia Duke in 1920, feels
equal pressure and responsibility to keep the company going and to retain a line of
quality foods.152 “A 93-year-old company. Now that’s a great honor but also a huge
responsibility. I mean, the last thing, you know, you don’t want it to go down under your
watch.”153 But a changing market and complex food safety standards have made it
difficult for small, family-owned companies to stay in business.
Fisher closed his factory’s doors after a voluntary company recall and years of
financial struggle. In October of 2009, the North Carolina Department of Agriculture and
149
Ibid.
Fisher.
151
Ibid.
152
Duke Sandwich Company, “About Duke Sandwich Company,” http://www.dukesandwich.com/index.
php?option=com_content&view=section&layout=blog&id=3&Itemid=8 (accessed June 10, 2010).
153
Smart.
150
48
Consumer Services found a strain of Listeria monocytogenes, bacteria that causes
Listeriosis, in some of Fisher/Rex’s sandwiches.154 Fisher explains the difficulties that
the recall posed, saying:
Usually when you have a recall . . . you shut your trucks down and clean
up, and they come back and re-inspect, usually in three days you’re back
in production. But this time they said they weren’t coming back for at least
a week to re-inspect. They made us throw away $100,000 in food, and
then now not to come back for at least a week. But it wound up being
three weeks, and that’s another $200,000 of revenue that I lost because I
couldn’t produce anything.155
The lost time and revenue was more than the small company could handle. Fisher/Rex
was already a struggling business in large part due to its major market: convenience
stores. Similarly, when it closed, Made Rite was also primarily selling its sandwiches to
convenience stores rather than industry commissaries or vending machines. At those
stores, Fisher says, their customers were still working-class people:
People who eat a ready-made sandwich, they’re in a hurry . . . Most people
who ate what we produced were in a hurry and that’s why they were
shopping at a convenience store. And it’s usually people who can least
afford it. The convenience store is the most expensive store you can eat
out of. But usually people who could least afford it—students and
construction workers—people on low income—ate our food. You aren’t
going to see anyone wealthy going into a convenience store and buying
sandwiches.156
While the convenience store provides a place for consumers to purchase cheap,
convenient foods, Fisher says that it was a difficult market to handle as a small business.
Large convenience store chains favored national distributors with tractor-trailers and
large delivery routes. Of the Kangaroo chain with whom Fisher/Rex used to work, Fisher
154
WRAL, “Recall Forces Sandwich Company Out of Business,” Wral.com, October 14, 2009,
http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/6211465/ (accessed June 10, 2010).
155
Fisher.
156
Ibid.
49
explains, they “wanted one supplier for sandwiches everywhere. Well, with 1,600 stores
in six states, seven states, there’s no independent sandwich company that can cover that
kind of mileage with route trucks. Too many miles to manage the people and make a
profit.”157 Fisher also says that in the convenience store market, there is no consistency
with the types of products that management or consumers prefer: “When you sell
sandwiches there’s not much loyalty . . . the operators of the stores would change
periodically just to give their customers something new. You could be doing nothing
wrong, but they just want something different every now and then.”158 Since the 1990s,
however, a demand for meat-filled sandwiches has made the convenience store a bad
market for salad sandwiches like pimento cheese:
In the 90s things kind of shifted and it just went to all meat. People are
just less and less health conscious. But in the 70s and even in the early
80s there were still tons of county stores around. Farmers and people they
had working in there—salads [sandwiches] would sell well in there.
They’d eat a chicken salad sandwich or pimento cheese sandwich . . .
Most of the country stores are gone now. Once you got to the modern
style convenience stores where sandwiches were sold, it was mostly
construction workers . . . eating sandwiches to fill their gut. And the
heavier it was, the better they liked it. So that kind of did in the volume in
pimento cheese and egg salad and chicken salad.159
Fisher says that he actually preferred to make salad sandwiches: “There’s more profit in a
salad than there is in meat sandwiches.”160 But he stopped producing pimento cheese in
the 1990s and focused more on products that customers preferred, like ham. Before the
company closed it offered pimento cheese again, but Fisher explains that demand for
packaged sandwiches was down. One of the best selling products was a different
157
Ibid.
Ibid.
159
Fisher.
160
Ibid.
158
50
convenience food—the burrito. The popularity of this portable filled tortilla is, of course,
not limited to the American South. This was made most clear in 2006, when, according
to The Boston Globe, the Panera Bread Company sued Qdoba Mexican Grill for
“violating its sandwich exclusivity clause” in the White City Shopping Center in
Shrewsbury, Massachusetts.161 A judge eventually ruled that a burrito is not a sandwich,
but that definition obviously means very little to a time-pressed consumer on a budget. A
burrito is cheap, tasty, and convenient, which makes it more than suitable competition for
the sandwich. Ron Paul, president of Technomic Inc., a restaurant consulting group,
makes this clear in his comments to the The Boston Globe. The lawsuit “shows you how
competitive the business is when a bakery café feels like it’s in direct competition with a
Mexican chain. They’re fighting for a share of the stomach.”162 Companies like Don
Miguel, which is headquartered in Anaheim, California, made the burritos that
Fisher/Rex bought and resold. According to Fisher, Fisher/Rex was “the third biggest
burrito distributor in the southeastern United States.”163
In the line-up of cheap, toteable foods like burritos enjoyed by the working-class
laborers, and others for that matter, Griffith and Rudisill’s comments confirm that
pimento cheese still has a place in the market. Families and workers in the Piedmont
continue to depend on pimento cheese because it’s cheap and reliable; individuals, like
my mother, buy it out of habit; and others purchase pimento cheese because it is a
familiar, regional product in a rapidly changing food landscape. Although many of the
Piedmont’s iconic industries have closed that earlier provided a market for consumers of
161
Jenn Abelson, “Arguments Spread Thick,” Boston.com, November 10, 2006, http://www.boston.com/
business/articles/2006/11/10/arguments_spread_thick (accessed June 10, 2010).
162
Ibid.
163
Fisher.
51
pimento cheese, the spread has found continued relevancy in new work sectors. As the
final chapter examines, pimento cheese is still there for work.
52
CHAPTER 4
“Real Cheese, Real Southern and Really Good!”
A white hand moves on and off the top of the screen at AugustasCreations.com
and sets a table for the viewer against a wood-grain background. One by one, a thatched
green placemat, a glass of water, a spoon, a fork, a knife, and a white ceramic dinner
plate appear. On the center of the plate, served in place of a meal, are the intentions of
Augusta’s’ business, which read:
What began 40 years ago with a love for helping my mother in the kitchen
has grown into an innovative solution to homemade meals for busy
people. Augusta’s Creations takes ‘gourmet-to-go’ to a new level—
offering simply the best family recipes and meals and delivering them to
your door. Redefine ‘dinner time’ and create time to relax and enjoy your
family and friends. Augusta’s Creations offers delicious meals for your
family as well as the solution to corporate gifting, holiday gifting and
special meals for friends and neighbors. When you send a homemade
meal, you know you are giving a gift you’d love to receive!164
In order to view Augusta’s actual homemade products, one has to click on an option for
“Gourmet Selections” at the top of the screen. That link opens a page that contains a
slightly upscale place setting, one with a tri-folded napkin and wine. On the dinner plate,
four small icons appear and showcase the business’ products: Augusta’s Original
Pimento Cheese, Augusta’s Jalapeno Pimento Cheese, Augusta’s Buttermilk Pie, and
Augusta’s Chicken Pot Pie.
164
“Welcome to Augusta’s Creations,” http://www.augustascreations.com (accessed June 10, 2010).
Augusta’s got its start in the fall of 2007 at the first day of the three-day Charlotte
Southern Women’s Show, an annual event that provides a temporary marketplace for
hundreds of retailers in the Charlotte Merchandise Mart (now known as The Park).
There, 250 pounds of pimento cheese, handmade and hand-packed by Suzie Augusta
Lowe, a white, single mother looking for a way to support her family, were available
among a wide range of items. Of those, the Southern Women’s Show website writes,
“From savvy shopping to creative cooking ideas / healthy lifestyle tips. Plus . . . trendy
fashion shows, great celebrity guests, and fabulous prizes.”165 Lowe wasn’t sure how her
grandmother’s pimento cheese recipe would fit in among the other exhibitors. At $4.99
for a 7-ounce tub, it was an expensive product.166 But the quality of the sharp cheddar
that she used required a high cost in order to clear a profit, which she did. The spread
sold out the first day, sending Lowe back into her Charlotte kitchen until 3:00 a.m. each
night to prepare and package spreads to sell through the end of the event. Feeling more
confident, Lowe upped the price of the spread a dollar and signed up for a Junior League
show the following month in Raleigh, where she also sold out. Today, Augusta’s is
available at specialty stores throughout the Charlotte area, as well as 200 North Carolina
Harris Teeter supermarket locations.167 Augusta’s came onto the market when
homemade, local, and gourmet products’ popularity were rising—clearly a marked
difference from the needs and desires that prompted businesses like the Biscoe Sandwich
Shop or Made Rite Sandwiches. But gourmet is the new and growing retail niche for
pimento cheese.
165
Southern Shows, Southern Women’s Show – Charlotte, http://www.southernshows.com/wch/
index.php?general_info=1& (accessed June 10, 2010).
166
Suzie Augusta Lowe, telephone interview with author, June 5, 2010.
167
Lowe.
54
According to James Mellegren, Senior Editor of The Gourmet Retailer, a shift
toward quality foods in the United States began in the 1970s out of a response to “the
years after World War II” when “Americans became obsessed with labor-saving devices,
canned and frozen food, cake mixes, and all manner of convenience-foods.”168 As for the
origins of the gourmet movement, Mellegren points to “two seminal events—Jacqueline
Kennedy entering the White House and the launch of ‘Mastering the Art of French
Cooking’ by Julia Child, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle,” a book that introduced
Americans to French cooking and gave them the tools necessary to regain control of their
kitchens and stop relying on packaged or processed foods.169 Also highly influential,
Mellegren explains, was when Joel Dean and Giorgio DeLuca opened their specialty food
store, Dean & Deluca, in 1977 in New York City. Through that store, says Mellegren,
Dean and Deluca “literally introduced America to specialty foods like balsamic vinegar,
sun-dried tomatoes, pesto and the concept of extra virgin olive oil . . . When Craig
Claiborne and Mimi Sheraton began to write enthusiastically in the New York Times
about this exciting new shop, chefs and avid home cooks began flocking to SoHo, and
there was no turning back. It was D-Day for the gourmet industry.”170 Claiborne’s
writings also made the case for the fact that quality foods did not have to be French in
origin or style. Rather, he claimed, America was full of good foods, cultivated and
prepared in its distinct regions. Claiborne, a native Mississippian, made a strong case for
the South. Georgeanna Milam Chapman, who has written extensively about Claiborne,
explains, “Claiborne’s insisting that Southern food was the best regional cuisine in
168
Mellegren.
Ibid.
170
Ibid.
169
55
America validated it to a national audience.” She adds, “Consequently Claiborne
directed Southerners towards an aspect of their heritage they could all unapologetically
celebrate and proudly claim.171 Of course, Claiborne was not the only person elevating
regional food to a national stage. Chapel Hill’s Bill Neal, whom Claiborne wrote about
in works like Southern Cooking, rose to iconic status for creating gourmet dishes out of
traditional Southern recipes. Edge has written of Neal’s influence, “Bill Neal was one of
the first chefs who, by way of what he cooked in his restaurants and what he wrote in his
books, said to eaters and readers, ‘These foods are of merit.’ We’re a region with many
foibles and deep-seated problems. Yet blacks and whites can take pride together in what
we wrought at the stove and what we served on the plate.”172 Neal served pimento
cheese with crackers as an appetizer on the menu at Crook’s Corner. Of that item, he
wrote, “Pimento cheese is the pâté of the South, a moveable feast that goes to picnics,
football games, and beach weekends. A grilled pimento cheese sandwich is a Southern
drugstore classic that evokes as much debate as the topics of jambalaya and juleps.
Everyone is fiercely loyal to one version or another; this one pleases the patrons of
Crook’s Corner.”173
The market for gourmet foods that began in the 1970s and regional foods in the
1980s has continued to expand. A recent report compiled by the Specialty Food Trade
(NASFT) and Specialty Food Magazine shows that the gourmet industry has prospered in
recent years, despite the poor economy. According to Anna Wolfe, an Editor at The
171
Georgeanna Milliam Chapman, “Craig Claiborne: A Southern Made Man” (master’s thesis, University
of Mississippi, YEAR) 119.
172
Sara Engram, “Some South for Your Mouth: How Corn Bread Cuisine Became Haute,”
Dukemagazine.duke.edu, http://www.dukemagazine.duke.edu/dukemag/issues/030405/south1.html
(accessed June 10, 2010).
173
Moreton Neal, Remembering Bill Neal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 105.
56
Gourmet Retailer, gourmet and specialty foods are one of the fastest growing segments in
the food industry, representing 13.1% of foods sold at retail locations.174 In addition, she
cites statistics compiled by the Specialty Food Trade (NASFT) and Specialty Food
Magazine to reveal “Cheese and Cheese Alternatives” as “the largest specialty food
category.”175
Increasingly, the availability of gourmet and specialty foods is no longer limited
to independently owned businesses. A 2006 report by The Hartman Group, an agency
that researches consumer trends including food, explained that gourmet products had
reached the masses: “Gourmet foods are no longer the sole domain of specialty channels.
Gourmet is just as comfortable on the shelves of the traditional supermarket.”176 The
“private stock” and “gourmet” labels by companies like Star’s and Ruth’s are obviously a
response to such a movement. But the real growth in the business of pimento cheese is
with companies like Augusta’s who have opened in the past five years and solely offer
self-titled “gourmet,” “homemade,” or “southern” pimento cheeses. Far from a food for
work, these new products are marketed as a restyled, traditional condiment that can be
used for more complex dishes than a sandwich. Again, market appeal is strongly tied to
the product’s iconic place in twentieth century southern cuisine. Lowe makes the former
clear when she explains of her brand:
The price prevents it from being Ruth’s or Stan’s. You know, it’s not
really something you’re going to send with your first grader to lunch. It’s
more of a, you know, top of burger or create gourmet shrimp and grits
with it, or just enjoy it with a glass of wine because it is rich and different.
174
Anna Wolfe, e-mail message to author, June 7, 2010.
Ibid.
176
“Foodies Open to Supermarket Shopping,” Gourmetretailer.com, December 12, 2006, under “Report,”
http://www.gourmetretailer.com/gourmetretailer/esearch/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003495951
(accessed June 10, 2010).
175
57
Most people use it as an appetizer although it is great as a sandwich. But
it just by taste is a gourmet product.177
A 7-ounce plastic tub of Augusta’s Creations brand Pimento Cheese sells for $5.99, a big
difference from Star’s “private stock” spread, which costs $3.99 for a 12-ounce tub at
Food Lion. But besides price, Lowe’s suggested use of pimento cheese as something for
the “top of a burger” alone signifies just how dramatically the market for manufactured
pimento cheese has recently changed. Whereas packaged pimento cheese used to be a
substitution or alternative to meat, it is now a product that adds value to other dishes.
Palmetto Cheese, a company headquartered in the Lowcountry of South Carolina that
contracts Duke’s to co-pack its products, costs a little less than Augusta’s; a 12-ounce
container at Harris Teeter rings up for $6.99. But the spread caters to a similar market
and purpose. Like Augusta’s, Palmetto Cheese suggests some uncommon uses. The side
of a Palmetto Cheese tub asserts, for instance, “Delicious on crackers, sandwiches, hot
dogs, hamburgers, quesadillas, scrambled eggs, and grits. Try it with pepper jelly, too!”
The most unconventional suggestions, however, appear on PalmettoCheese.com. There,
the main page includes a link to YouTube where viewers can watch installments of an
online cooking show that teaches innovative ways to incorporate Palmetto Cheese into
home cooking. The tag for the first show advertises, “In episode 1 of Cooking with
Palmetto Cheese we will show you how to make Palmetto Cheese Egg Rolls, homemade
egg rolls stuffed with our delicious pimento cheese.”178 In addition, the “Serving Tips”
section of the website includes a range of recipes for dishes like Palmetto Baked Clams,
Pimento Cheese Biscuits, Palmetto Cheese Cordon Bleu, Pimento Cheese Stuffed
177
178
Lowe.
Palmetto Cheese, http://www.palmettocheese.com (accessed June 10, 2010).
58
Meatloaf, Jalapeno Ranch Potatoes, Palmetto Cheese Straws, and Palmetto Cheese
Cookies.179 Such uses for pimento cheese are obviously aimed at home preparation and
consumption; pimento cheese shrimp and grits or scrambled eggs hardly conjure thoughts
of eating on the go. Thus, unlike the early products by Eugenia Duke or Star’s, whose
appeal was the time saved in preparing foods for work or elsewhere, newer manufactured
pimento cheeses tout a convenience for home. In addition to demonstrating how the food
can be consumed, “home” is also a theme in marketing the ways in which the new
products are produced. The slogan for Augusta’s Creations, for instance, is “Homemade
Made Easy.”180 Similarly, much of the printed materials for Palmetto Cheese promote its
“homemade texture.”181
The homemade appeal of Augusta’s and Palmetto Cheese are part of what The
Hartman Group, in its 2006 report concerning gourmet supermarket shopping, lists as an
increase in shoppers who look for products that contain “jargon . . . like artisanal,
regional, fresh, seasonal, cured, procured, heirloom, hand-crafted, small batch and single
estate.”182 Palmetto Cheese is marketed similarly with its slogan, “Real Cheese, Real
Southern and Really Good!” printed across the top of its tub. Of all of the packaged
pimento cheeses written about in this work, it appears that Palmetto Cheese is the only
product that labels itself as a southern specialty on its actual container. In addition,
PalmettoCheese.com is full of information about the spread’s southern status, as are some
of the other products’ websites. The home page for StarFoodsProducts.com, for instance,
includes a flashing red and yellow banner that boasts “Delicious Southern Favorites –
179
Ibid.
Lowe.
181
Palmettocheese.com.
182
“Foodies Open to Supermarket Shopping.”
180
59
Order Now!” while the description for Star’s Private Stock Sharp Pimento Cheese Spread
reads, “Nothing conjures up that Southern feeling like pimiento cheese.”183
But the most blatant case for southern “hand-crafted” is the half-tone black and
white image of an African American woman printed on the front of the Palmetto Cheese
container. Wearing a white apron, the woman looks straight at the viewer and poses as if
she was caught in the process of preparing the spread. Her right hand is poised above a
large mixing bowl and loosely grips a long fork or spoon that disappears into the bowl’s
basin. Below her reads, “The Pimento Cheese with Soul.” Whether intentional or not,
the woman’s image taps into a politically loaded reservoir of imagery that began during
slavery and links black women with southern food. Cultural historian Sherri Innes
explains that such images often reference a “Mammy” figure who imparts wisdom and
cooks, and whose “legendary creativity with preparing food is attributed to her ‘magical’
powers with blending just the right foods and spices to delight those whom she feeds.”184
Though the African American woman on the Palmetto Cheese package remains
nameless—another racial practice in period southern cookbooks and advertising—her
image implies that a person made the product, not a machine. Using the name or image
of a person on a product label in order to lend it an air of credibility or authenticity has
long been a trope in advertising. As Business Wire wrote in 1996 for the 75th anniversary
of Betty Crocker, “Since her introduction in 1921, consumers have understood that Betty
Crocker's name and identity have been synonymous with helpfulness, trustworthiness and
183
Star Food Products, http://www.starfoodproducts.com/orderform.htm (accessed June 10, 2010).
Sherri A. Innes, Kitchen Culture in America: Popular Representations of Food, Gender, and Race
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 69.
184
60
quality.”185 It did not seem to matter that Betty Crocker, whose picture first appeared on
a package in 1936, was a created persona.186 But the woman on Palmetto Cheese, it turns
out, is a real person who directly influenced the product. To identify her, one has to visit
the company’s website, which is printed on the spread’s container. And online, it appears
that the woman’s photograph has sparked numerous inquiries—the first question listed
under “FAQ’s” is, “Who is the lady on the label?” The following answer is provided:
The lady’s name is Vertrella Brown. Vertrella was raised in the
Lowcountry of South Carolina in Pawleys Island. She has been a cook for
over 25 years and specializes in Gullah and Low Country Cuisine,
characterized by the use of seafood, rice, barbecue, and vegetable
casseroles. Although the recipe started with Sassy Henry, Vertrella Brown
added that soulful touch to Palmetto Cheese that helped define it as The
Pimento Cheese with Soul. Vertrella not only cooks for a living at a bed
and breakfast on the beach at Pawleys Island, it is her passion. Vertrella
has made thousands of guests, family, and friends happy with her unique
blend of soulful Lowcountry food.187
As the above description explains, the spread didn’t originate with Brown, but Sassy
Henry, a young white woman. She made pimento cheese to take to tailgating parties at
Atlanta Braves games with her husband, Brian Henry. The couple moved to South
Carolina’s Pawleys Island to run a bed-and-breakfast, the Sea View Inn. There, Sassy
Henry’s pimento cheese was received so well that they decided to package it. To perfect
the recipe, they called upon Brown, their family’s African American cook and friend.
Sassy says about Brown’s influence on the product’s current flavor, “She used the same
ingredients. It was my recipe, but we say [Brown] put her soulful touch into it and used a
little bit more of this or a little less of that and made it better.”188 On the Island, the
185
“General Mills Unveils the Betty Crocker f75th Anniversary Portrait,” Business Wire, March 19, 1996,
http://www.allbusiness.com/food-beverage/food-industry/7213128-1.html (accessed June 10, 2010).
186
Ibid.
187
Palmettocheese.com.
188
Jackie R. Broach, “Say Cheese!,” Coastal Observer, June 4, 2009, 19.
61
product is still handmade in small batches by Brown and her significant other, former
boxer George Easterling. Bryan Hunter, for an article in Southern Living, lists
Easterling’s kitchen equipment as “a knife, a bowl, a spoon, and his strong arm.”189 Last
year the company sold 550,000 containers in eight southeastern states, a level of
production made possible by Duke’s.190 Easterling explains, “It got to be too much for
me to mix it all by hand, so the Henrys decided to have it made by the sandwich
company. The company got the recipe and tried making some, but they said mine still
tasted better. Then they started doing it just like I do, except they have this special
machine that mixes it up.”191 Duke’s system is part industrial, and part hands-on. Of
this, Smart explains:
Obviously, as you get a little larger you get a little more automated and a
little more sophisticated, but one of the unique things is because of our
product that we manufacture and because . . . the product texture is so
critical, there are a lot of aspects that we still have some hand processes in.
Now we have, you know, big machinery and it does certain aspects of it,
but when it comes to the packing aspect, we have an assembly line team
that does packing because certain machines tend to break down our
product when you move product through those machines . . . piston-driven
or auger-driven type pump systems.192
Duke’s makes Palmetto Cheese’s regular and jalapeno varieties in its plant in
Simpsonville, South Carolina, and distributes it throughout the South to Food Lion, BiLo, Piggly Wiggly, Harris Teeter, and Publix.193 Like Palmetto Cheese, Lowe also hired
a manufacturer to co-pack her products due to an increase in production and distribution.
Still, Lowe serves as the face of her product—and thus, its associated cook—by
travelling to various events including the annual Fall Southern Women’s Show in
189
Bryan Hunter, “Behind the Scenes With…Palmetto Cheese’s George Easterling,” Southern Living, 15.
Hunter, 15.
191
Hunter, 16.
192
Smart.
193
Broach, 18.
190
62
Charlotte, which gave Lowe her start. At such venues, Lowe explains that customers
really enjoy the chance to meet her: “Every time I’m selling, you know, face-to-face,
people want to hear the story. They love that I’m a single mom and that I was looking for
some way to support myself.”194 But according to Lowe, the stories that people really
want to hear are their own:
They want to tell you their story—‘We used to have pimento cheese
sandwiches as children, or, ‘My grandmother made a recipe that had, you
know, that tasted a little different.’ There’s just a story behind pimento
cheese and it’s like asking somebody, ‘What are your Christmas Eve
traditions?’ People just love to talk about pimento cheese . . . there’s just
this passion about it.195
Kathleen Purvis, food editor for The Charlotte Observer, explains, “In the South, our
food isn’t just the things we eat. Our food is experiences, history, heritage. It’s as
personal as the sound of our mothers’ voices and as sweet as the smell of breakfast on a
cold morning.”196 Purvis’ understanding of food as “experiences, history, [and] heritage”
runs throughout the submissions to the 2003 Pimento Cheese Invitational published by
the Southern Foodways Alliance. In that collection, editor Melissa Booth Hall says that
the “contributors” expressed “strong, intimate, and specific connections with pimento
cheese,” often stories tied to a specific individual: “For many people, pimento cheese
evokes the memory of a person who loved them enough to cook for them. Through their
recipes, these contributors eulogize the mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, special friends,
194
Lowe.
Ibid.
196
Purvis, Kathleen. "“Peace and a Smile to the Lips”: Favorite Southern Food Dishes." Southern Cultures
15, no. 4 (2009): 29.
195
63
and neighbors who prepared the pimento cheese . . . From these recipes come the
memories and the stories.” 197
Johanna Seeger’s entry provides a good example. Of the pimento cheese
sandwiches that her Aunt Dot prepared in rural Georgia during 1963, she says, “Today
when I make my home-made pimento cheese sandwiches it takes me back to thoughts of
my family and my dear Aunt Dot. So the recipe for a great pimento cheese sandwich
may have more ingredients than pimento, cheese, mayonnaise, and bread. Aunt Dot’s
pimento cheese makes me long for those times in life when certain foods tasted better and
troubles could be eased by food for the soul.”198 For Elizabeth Mascarenhas of Raleigh,
North Carolina, pimento cheese evokes memories of her mother. She writes, “My
mother, Libby, made simple pimento cheese, lovingly and carefully. I can still see her
with a fork mashing it all together with the same strength and resolve that she used to
beat fudge on cold nights on the porch, the same determination that she used to get us all
up, dressed and out the door in time for Sunday School . . . The taste of it always brings
my mother back to me.”199 Nancy Potter, whose father owned a drugstore in
Murfreesboro, Tennessee, describes how pimento cheese brings “a flood of memories,”
particularly of the sandwiches her mother made to sell at the drugstore’s lunch counter: “I
can still see her standing in the kitchen grating a 5 pound box of American Cheese by
hand.”200 Potter’s statement is remarkably similar to one by Martha Tyson, who says of
pimento cheese and her mother’s Biscoe Sandwich Shop, “It’s just part of my memory. I
can see my mother grating cheese and taking her finger to get all the pimentos out of that
197
Melissa Booth Hall, ed., 2003 Pimento Cheese Invitational (Oxford, MS: Southern Foodways Alliance,
2003, 7.
198
Melissa Booth Hall, 28.
199
Melissa Booth Hall, 91.
200
Melissa Booth Hall, 32.
64
little jar. I think of her whenever I make pimento cheese.”201 Like her mother, Tyson
also prepares round-cut pimento cheese sandwiches to take to people who have had a
death in their family. Workers or relatives of those tied to the pimento cheese industry
obviously have their own unique stories and memories. As earlier mentioned, Caudle
and Harless recall their mother, Louise, testing recipes in their home kitchen, or hand
stamping “best if used by” dates on the labels. And Hester refuses to eat Sedgefield’s
new take on Made Rite’s recipe because it doesn’t taste like the product that he helped
create and fondly remembers.
As my mother’s story and my own experiences attest, specific brands of pimento
cheese are tied to deeply tied to memory. For my mother, Ruth’s pimento cheese spread
recalls her grandmother’s refrigerator and a staple work food. For me, Ruth’s and Star’s
both conjure my mother’s refrigerator and the bagged lunches that I carried to school. In
my fieldwork and research, I’ve come across a number of other brand loyalists. I wrote
about this experience in an article for The Independent Weekly, noting my own childhood
love for Star’s pimento cheese, and Griffith’s comment about receiving weekly “fan
letters” of sorts. The online posting of that piece garnered comments by other brand
loyalists. One reader responded, “The pimento cheese sandwich is my dad's favorite
sandwich. Even my mom, a New York transplant, swears by Stan's and won't buy
anything else.”202 Another reader wrote in support of the $1.50 sandwiches for sale at the
Masters Golf Tournament, claiming them to be part of a “unique and unforgettable”
experience—one that is obviously part of a different class narrative than those that Ruth’s
201
Martha Tyson, interview.
Wanderlustig [pseudo], comment on “The History of the Ubiquitous Pimento Cheese Spread,” comment
posted on May 28, 2010,http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/the-history-of-the-ubiquitous-pimentocheese-spread/Content?oid=1446214 (accessed July 22, 2010).
202
65
or Stan’s evokes.203 Hester provides an example of the latter, explaining that his mention
of Made Rite sandwiches generates a common response: “You talk to people today and if
you say Made Rite, they automatically know, “Hey, sandwiches in the vending machine.
Sedgefield pimento cheese and Sedgefield chicken salad—cause those were two of the
more popular high end products that we manufactured.”204 In addition to convenience
and price, this devotion to certain brands helped many companies thrive.
Smart says that from the beginning, a loyalty to and a love for Duke’s pimento
cheese expanded their business: “The Greenville area—what’s interesting—during that
time [when the company started] because of the military operations and a lot of things
going on in this market we had a lot of travelling people. And so, it kind of became a
brand and people got hooked onto it—these sandwiches. She [Eugenia] ended up getting
a lot of customers outside of this area also.”205 Of his own experience with the product in
the 1970s, Smart says, “We had so much demand because of people growing up on this
product all the years we’d been in operation and moving off throughout the country—we
got so much demand from Texas, Florida, Chicago, and all kinds of areas that we’d
started doing a lot of shipping at that point.”206 But brand loyalty—or pimento cheese
loyalty for that matter—doesn’t always have to do with a matter of taste. For many, it’s
an issue of authenticity, cultural inheritance, regional identity, and class legitimacy. Tim
Davis hits upon this point in the following excerpt from his essay, “Southern by the Grits
of God.”
203
Chapel Hill Peach [pseudo], comment on “The History of the Ubiquitous Pimento Cheese Spread,”
comment posted on May 27, 2010,http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/the-history-of-the-ubiquitouspimento-cheese-spread/Content?oid=1446214 (accessed July 22, 2010).
204
Hester.
205
Smart.
206
Ibid.
66
Picture me: I’m sitting in the parking lot of a rundown convenience
store—a “Stop ‘n’ Stab” as a friend of mine calls such establishments—
eating a shrink-wrapped pimento cheese sandwich and quaffing a twentyounce Coke. Not haute cuisine, to be sure. Not-so-haute cuisine, more
like it.
As I sat there and chewed the sandwich—made of that processed
pimento cheese spread author Reynolds Price claims tastes like bug
spray—my repast came back to haunt me. Not that the sandwich was so
bad, mind you. What bothered me is why I ordered the sandwich in the
first place. There were plenty of ham-on-ryes, ‘Italian’ subs, and other
hermetically sealed goodies to choose from. Yet I bought a pimento
cheese sandwich, so bland in its entire packaging, taste, and preparation
that I cannot think of a single adjective—the food writer and the
pornographer’s favorite part of speech—to describe it. It simply existed, a
Sartre of sandwiches.
I bought it, I decided, out of guilt.207
Davis discusses the issue of authenticity, explaining how certain dishes of food, genres of
music, or styles of art act as regional markers of identity. Eating a pimento cheese
sandwich confirms a certain status of identity to insiders and outsiders alike. A plastic
wrapped sandwich like the one that Davis consumed signifies him as southern, working
class, or “not above his raising,” associations southerners use to market themselves and
their products.
On the other end of the pimento cheese spectrum, and thus, the class spectrum,
too, is Julia Reed. Reed, a white, Mississippi native who has written about food for
publications including The New York Times and Vogue, grew up in the elite world of the
Mississippi Delta where “[g]iving a party was as natural as breathing, and almost as
necessary and frequent (there wasn’t a lot else to do, but the people were really
interesting).”208 Based on those experiences, Reed presents herself as an authority on
207
Timothy C. Davis, “Southern by the Grits of God,” in Cornbread Nation 4: The Best of Southern Food
Writing, eds. John Volberg Reed and John Shelton Reed (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2008),
279.
208
Julia Reed, Ham Biscuits, Hostess Gowns, and Other Southern Specialties: An Entertaining Life (with
Recipes) (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2009), xiii.
67
southern food and southern etiquette in her book, Ham Biscuits, Hostess Gowns, and
Other Southern Specialties: An Entertaining Life (with Recipes). In the prologue to that
work, Reed describes a dinner party that she threw for a friend (Michael Boodro, former
editor at Vogue) while living in New York City. There, for a group of mostly nonsoutherners, she “passed silver trays of ham biscuits (hot buttered Marshall’s biscuits
with a thin slice of ham, country or otherwise, tucked inside), along with pimento cheese
sandwiches (on Pepperidge Farm Very Thin wheat, cut into strips), watercress
sandwiches (rolled, with sprigs sticking out of one end), and cucumber sandwiches (on
rounds of regular Pepperidge Farm white with homemade mayonnaise).”209 The party
served as an outlet for Reed to express her authentic southern upbringing and to establish
her credibility as a white, southern lady. During the few years that I lived in Chicago, I
found myself in a situation somewhat similar to that of Reed. When I attended a potluck,
I often whipped up my grandmother’s pimento cheese recipe to share with my mostly
non-southern friends. My spread, presented in a Tupperware container rather than a
silver platter, projected a slightly different message than Reed’s. But all the same, it
served as a marker of my identity, and I let it, sometimes even intended for it to do so.
When I returned to the North Carolina Piedmont from my time in Chicago, I
immediately stocked my fridge with Star’s pimento cheese. My purchase was a lifelong
habit, but also a confirmation that I was home. What I didn’t know then that I know now,
however, is the memory and meaning contained in a tub of cheese: from the red clay hills
where the textile industry took root, to the workers who sustained it, the stories of
209
Reed, xi.
68
hardship and injustice that that have long defined the region, and the stories of ingenuity
and perseverance that continue to challenge and inspire, and, of course, to feed.
69
Appendix: Illustrations
Figure 1: Tubs of Ruth’s and Star’s pimento cheeses shelved at a Food Lion grocery in
Carrboro, NC. (Emily Wallace, 2009)
70
Figure 2: 1920s advertisement for Elkhorn Pimento Cheese by the J.L. Kraft &
Brothers Company as printed in The Ladies Home Journal.
71
Figure 3: The Hills Brothers’ pimento plant in Woodbury, Georgia. (Archival image
courtesy of Nancy Vandiver, date unknown)
Figure 4: Stationary from Woodbury’s annual Pimiento Festival. (Archival
image courtesy of Nancy Vandiver, date unknown)
72
Figure 5: Nancy Elrod competes for the title of Pimiento Queen in Woodbury’s 1962
Pimiento Festival. In front, a bouquet of pimiento peppers. (Photo courtesy of Nancy
Vandiver, 1962)
73
Figure 6: Program from the 1964 Pimiento Festival in Woodbury, Georgia. (Archival
image courtesy of Nancy Vandiver, 1964)
74
Figure 7: A promotional photograph staged in conjunction with Woodbury, Georgia’s
annual Pimiento Festival. (Image courtesy of Nancy Vandiver, 1960s)
Figure 8: Pimiento Queen contestants ride through Woodbury, Georgia on the “Queens
for a Day” float. (Courtesy of Nancy Vandiver, 1960s)
75
Figure 9: 1963 Pimiento Queen contestants: Susan Rudder, Nancy Elrod, and Libba
Sorrells. (Courtesy of Nancy Vandiver, 1963) 76
Figure 10: A street sign in Woodbury, Georgia pays tribute to the once burgeoning
pimiento pepper industry there. (Nancy Vandiver, 2010)
77
Figure 11: Eugenia Duke. (Courtesy of Duke’s Sandwiches, 1920s)
Figure 12: Duke’s sandwiches are sold from a dope cart in a Greenville, South Carolina
textile mill. (Courtesy of Duke’s Sandwiches, 1950s)
78
Figure 13: Duke Sandwich Company’s Poinsett Highway location in Greenville,
South Carolina, where customers can purchase pre-wrapped pimento cheese
sandwiches to take to go, or sit down for a meal. (Emily Wallace, 2010)
Figure 14: A grilled pimento cheese sandwich at Duke’s. (Emily Wallace, 2010)
79
Figure 15: Sandwich label from the Cleveland Sandwich Company in Boiling Springs,
North Carolina. (Courtesy of the Cleveland Sandwich Company, date unknown)
80
Figure 16: James L. Beason, Sr. (right) in his office in the Cleveland Sandwich Company
in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, which his father, Belton Gibson Beason, began in
1925. Pictured at the left is Cleveland’s office manager, Carl Hamrick. (Courtesy of the
Cleveland Sandwich Company, date unknown)
81
Figure 17: Sandwich production at Cleveland Sandwich Company. (Courtesy of the
Cleveland Sandwich Company, date unknown)
82
Figure 18: (Far left to front right) Clara Mae Beason, Ethel Green, Jeanette Fox, Polly
McSwain, and Virginia Hamrick at the Cleveland Sandwich Company. (Courtesy of the
Cleveland Sandwich Company, date unknown)
83
Figure 19: Cleveland Sandwich Company delivery trucks. (Courtesy of the Cleveland
Sandwich Company, date unknown)
84
Figure 20: (Left to right) Rodney Nolan, Jane Nolan, and Jimmy Beason in the former
packing room at Cleveland Sandwich Company. In the foreground is one of the tables
where sandwiches were made. (Emily Wallace, 2010)
Figure 21: An early advertisement for Fisher/Rex sandwiches. (Courtesy of Tom
Fisher, date unknown)
85
Figure 22: A waiting area at Ruth’s Salads displays photographs and awards from the
company’s past. (Emily Wallace, 2010)
86
Figure 23: Employees in front of one of Ruth’s Salads’ early locations.
(Courtesy of Bill Rudisill, mid-1950s)
Figure 24: Sandwich spread production in an early kitchen at Ruth’s
Salads. (Courtesy of Bill Rudisill, mid-1950s)
87
Figure 25: Home of Ruth’s Salads, Charlotte, North Carolina. (Emily Wallace, 2010)
88
Figure 26: Bill Rudisill, a manager at Ruth’s Salads. (Emily Wallace, 2010)
89
Figure 27: Star Foods Products, Burlington, North Carolina. (Emily Wallace, 2009)
Figure 28: Sign outside of Star Food Products. (Emily Wallace, 2010)
90
Figure 29: Hector Gonzalez, line supervisor, at Star Food Products. (Emily Wallace,
2010)
91
Figure 30: Cheese production on the line at Star Food Products. (Emily Wallace, 2009)
Figure 31: Edilberto Urias checks lids on tubs of pimento cheese as they move down the
line at Star Food Products. (Emily Wallace, 2009)
92
Figure 32: A rotating blade—post pimento cheese production—that chops and blends
ingredients in the mixer at Star Food Products. (Emily Wallace, 2009)
Figure 33: Jose Serafin Jaimes eyes the level of pimento cheese before it is shot into
small, plastic tubs. (Emily Wallace, 2009)
93
Figure 34: Pimento cheese on the factory line at Star Food Products. (Emily Wallace,
2009)
Figure 35: Pimento cheese on the factory line at Star Food Products. (Emily Wallace,
2009)
94
Figure 36: Pimento cheese on the factory line at Star Food Products.
(Emily Wallace, 2009)
95
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Oral Interviews by Author
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Tyson, Martha Buie, Raleigh, N.C.
Vandiver, Nancy Elrod, Woodbury, G.A.
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