There are plenty of foods that are connected to the place where they were created. Take Buffalo wings. The city is right in the name, although the history of what may or may not have been the creation of the Buffalo wing is fascinatingly complicated .
Similarly, not only is pimento cheese a huge deal in the Georgia-based Masters tournament , but it's so well-established as a so-called "Southern pate" that this classic is also commonly called "Carolina caviar." But the origins of pimento cheese are about as far away from the country kitchen of a beloved Southern grandmother as it's possible to get. To dispel any doubts, yes, it absolutely came from New York during a convenient confluence of events.
That included the creation of cream cheese (which happened in the 1870s) and the introduction of pimento peppers from Spain. Those things weren't combined in a delightful accident to make an equally delightful spread, but by the turn of the century, practitioners of the Domestic Science movement were sharing recipes that we'd recognize as pimento cheese. The Domestic Science movement was in full swing when it developed pimento cheese, but it had already been around for a long time.
It kicked off in the 18th century, when there was a surge of textbooks, articles, and literature being written for housewives (and future housewives) that were more than just cookbooks. They combined cutting-edge scientific discoveries about subjects like nutrition, wellness, medicine, chemistry, biology,.
