Home › Salads › Cheese and Pimiento Salad
Cheese and Pimiento Salad
Stuff canned pimientos with cream cheese, cut into slices, and serve one or two slices to each person on lettuce with French dressing. Watercress or endive may be used instead of lettuce.
A three-line assembly recipe that depends entirely on the texture of the cheese and the neatness of the slicing. Both need a note.
- The cheese"Cream cheese" in an American cookbook of this period could cover a range of soft fresh cheeses, from a commercial cream cheese or Neufchatel to a homemade fresh curd; none of them was the gum-stabilized block sold today. Modern block cream cheese works, but beat it soft first; whipped tub cheese is too slack to hold a slice.
- Chill before slicingThis is the hinge. Stuff the pimientos, roll them tightly in plastic or waxed paper into a log, and refrigerate at least two hours until firm. Slicing at room temperature gives you smears rather than pinwheels.
- SlicingUse a thin, sharp knife wiped between cuts, and cut rounds about half an inch thick. Any thinner and the cheese pulls away from the pepper.
- Canned pimientosSold in small jars, whole or in pieces — you want whole, drained and patted very dry, or the water will loosen the cheese. Roasted red peppers from a jar are the closest substitute and are usually larger, so expect more slices per pepper.
- French dressingIn this period the term means a simple shaken vinaigrette of oil, vinegar, salt and pepper, roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar — not the sweet orange bottled dressing that later took the name.
- Yield and servingOne good-sized pimiento yields about four slices, so figure two peppers for four people at one or two slices each. Dress the greens rather than pouring vinaigrette over the cheese rounds, which will slide.
- Seasoning the fillingThe original leaves it plain. Salt, a little paprika, or chopped chives or olives beaten into the cheese are all in keeping with the book's period and make the difference between a garnish and a course.
Stuffed-pimiento salads spread through American cookbooks in the 1910s and 1920s alongside the canning industry that made them possible: pimiento peppers were grown and canned commercially in Georgia from the early 1900s, and the small jar of whole pimientos became a pantry staple. The appeal is obvious he while the red ppepper and green leaves supply the color a plated luncheon salad was expected to have. The whole genre belongs to the era of the ladies' luncheon and the tea room, where a salad was judged largely on how well it held its shape on the plate.