The making of a documentary about legendary Southern chef Bill Neal teaches his son, Matt, new things about his late father

Matt and Sheila Neal moved into the Carrboro home where Matt's father,
Bill Neal, lived. In the attic they discovered boxes filled with items from
Bill's life, some of which was used to create footage for the film
"They Came for Shrimp & Grits: The Life and Work of Bill Neal."
Indy Week photos by Alex Boerner.

Matt Neal has been interviewed many times about his famous father, the chef Bill Neal.

He has answers about how Neal, a small-town North Carolina boy who taught himself to cook by working his way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, achieved so much in so little time. By his mid 30s, the elder Neal had helmed two essential Triangle restaurants and written a book, Bill Neal's Southern Cooking, that became a landmark of the region's cuisine. He was arguably the cook who made shrimp and grits a staple of contemporary Southern cuisine.

The gracious co-owner of Neals' Deli in Carrboro has even decided there's no point in getting offended when asked about the end of his parents' decade-long marriage or his father's romance with Gene Hamer, a colleague at La Residence and partner at Crook's Corner. He's even accustomed to being asked how it felt when, in 1991, his charismatic father died from AIDS at the age of 41.

click to enlarge

• Kate Medley and her fellow filmmaker, Jesse Paddock, left, recently completed the film "The Came for Shrimp & Grits: The Life and Work of Bill Neal." 

So when Matt agreed to be interviewed yet again last spring for a documentary about his father commissioned by the Southern Foodways Alliance, he expected not to be surprised by revisiting the familiar turf. What caught him off guard, however, was the filmmakers' interest in a casual reference to his father's writings, stashed away in a box in the attic.

Durham filmmakers Kate Medley and Jesse Paddock were surprised, too, that this wealth of materials had been sitting, almost forgotten and entirely unexplored, in Bill Neal's post-divorce home so long. Matt, who lives their now with his wife, Sheila, and two children, escorted Medley upstairs. What they found became the key of They Came for Shrimp and Grits: The Life and Work of Bill Neal, a short but dense and powerful documentary that explores and expands the scope of Neal's accomplishments.

"The family was very generous. They gave us full access," recalls Medley, who works as a photographer and filmmaker for Whole Foods Market. "Matt had boxes of things in his attic that he'd never looked at. It was a treasure trove of handwritten recipes, writing and correspondence and sketchbooks. There also were medical bills and records."

The scope of unpublished documents in the boxes dumbfounded Matt, offering new insight into the father he'd lost nearly a quarter-century earlier. They covered not only his food writing but also drafts of pieces about other interests—gardening, travel, his declining health. While Matt lived and worked elsewhere before returning to live at his dad's old house, renters had miraculously left the boxes intact.

"Most of it is cookbook notes, menus, journals, sketches. In some cases, I really remember what he was writing about, or when it was," says Matt, now 44. "I thought I had about a third of what I actually had."

Medley and Paddock finished the 13-minute documentary just minutes before the film premiered last month at the annual SFA symposium in Oxford, Mississippi. (A local screening is in the works for January in Chapel Hill.) Neal is open to working with them on an extended version of the documentary. After all, they helped him learn about his own late father.

How the sausage was made: Filmmaker Jesse Paddock holds the rescued sausage recipe of Bill Neal.

"They were sensitive and smart to the story," he says. "I found it very moving and engaging, though I'm a bit biased."

John T. Edge, the executive director of SFA, agrees that the film represents a balanced look at Neal's brief, brilliant life and a significant achievement for Medley. She previously produced a series of SFA shorts called Counter Histories, regarding the role of food in the civil rights movement.

"Last year, we asked her to explore the burdens of racism and the heroic stories of Southerners who fought that bastard Jim Crow," Edge explains. "This year, our assignment required more subtlety. She juggled narratives of fame, creativity, sexuality, family and mythology. She accomplished all with aplomb and sensitivity."

Medley and Paddock interviewed many people who were part of Neal's culinary circle, some of whom are still active in the area's food scene. There's Moreton Neal, his former wife and the author ofRemembering Bill Neal: Favorite Recipes From a Life in Cooking, and Crook's Corner chef Bill Smith, who succeeded Neal in that role just as he'd done previously at La Residence.

Last May, Gene Hamer, Crook's owner and Neal's former partner, was inexplicably omitted from a panel discussion on the 30th anniversary and enduring impact of Bill Neal's Southern Cooking at a UNC conference. They Came for Shrimp and Grits corrects that, allowing Hamer to offer red-eyed recollections of his last conversation with Neal and his sense of his friend's lingering presence at Crook's.

They Came For Shrimp & Grits: The Life & Work of Bill Neal from Southern Foodways on Vimeo.

New York Times food writer Kim Severson presents a thoughtful assessment of Neal's role as a magnet for exceptional talent, even if he famously declined to give a break to Magnolia Grill's Ben and Karen Barker. (Still, the couple later required all Magnolia cooks to study Bill Neal's Southern Kitchen.)

And those who did put in time with Neal at Crook's before achieving renown elsewhere share insights about Neal's passion for promoting regional foodways and his seemingly manic temperament in the kitchen. John Currence of City Grocery in Oxford, Mississippi, for instance, speaks with palpable regret about never mending fences after an argument with Neal that ended with the younger chef flinging a cup of hot coffee at his boss. But there are many references to Neal's influence in Currence's cookbook, Pickles, Pigs & Whiskey.

"You can still see that it really hurts him," notes Matt. "But John has paid his own dues in the meantime. He's really pushed and promoted my dad's legacy."

Neal's importance extends far beyond his recipes, though. He believed food could say a lot about who someone was and where that person was from. He made the claim in 1986 to Bill Friday during an episode of North Carolina People in a rare video appearance that opens They Came for Shrimp & Grits. Young and confident, Neal contends that, whether a conscious decision or reflexive habit, the food we choose to consume connects each of us with a time and place. Now a tenet of foodways studies, that notion was still novel at the time. In only 13 minutes, They Came for Shrimp & Grits gets to the core of Neal's decades of impact.

"It's really touching for me and my family," Matt says. "It's like when Dean Smith's players started missing him again; they, like others, talk with praise. They don't have to do that, but they've all gone out of their way to do so."

This article appeared in Indy Week with the headline "A simmering history."

Emily Wallace on the life and legacy of Eugenia Duke, creator of Duke's Mayonnaise

Emily Wallace will be the guest speaker for Culinarary Historians of Piedmont North Carolina (CHOP NC) at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill. The event is free and open to the public. (Note: The post first appeared in Indy Week).

Emily Wallace is that girl you sat next to in college, the down-to-earth brainiac who saw connections before you did and didn’t stress out when research papers were assigned. Even her doodles were more clever than yours.

Equally intrigued by vast cultural movements and minutia, Wallace quickly distinguished herself in the field of Southern studies— no surprise to those who knew her. She currently serves as communications director for the UNC Center for the Study of the American South and is editor of its acclaimed journal, Southern Cultures.

But what a relief it is to know that, like the rest of us, she can still be caught off guard.

As part of her ongoing research on pimento cheese—her master’s thesis topic, in which varied recipes say much about place and food politics—Wallace ventured last summer to Richmond, Va., to tour the C.F. Sauer Co. plant. It’s where Duke’s Mayonnaise is produced in faithful memory of its inventor, homemaker-turned-entrepreneur Eugenia Duke.

Duke’s mayo has stirred passionate debate over the years, especially during peak tomato sandwich season. Its otherwise mild-manned devotees have been known to argue over fences with neighbors, cast a wary stink eye at plates of deviled eggs at church suppers and even wear their heart’s desire tattooed on their sleeve.

“My drawing was nothing compared to what they showed me,” says Wallace, who reportedly blushed the color of ketchup to learn she was among an ardent subset of Duke’s lovers who expressed their affection via creative arts.

The slather that Duke created in the 1910s, years before women earned the right to vote, has a slightly sweet and distinctive tang from cider vinegar and became a signature of her fledgling Duke’s Sandwich Co. business. The woman-owned enterprise, which by then employed her husband, other family members and locals, expanded in 1923 to satisfy consumer demand for bottled, take-home jars of her mayo. In 1929, when the business became too big to manage independently, she sold it to Sauer. Duke later launched a similar operation in California, cleverly named Duchess Sandwich Co.

To many, Duke’s mayo is one of the things that define Southern cooking, both in homes and some of the most savvy chef-run kitchens. The familiar yellow-capped jar also tends to find a place in the refrigerators of Southern transplants, even among those who grew up elsewhere using Hellman’s or, bless your heart, Miracle Whip.

Wallace learned much about Duke’s and the strong set of emotions it inspires when she prepared a presentation on the topic for last fall’s annual symposium of the Southern Foodways Alliance, which likewise spotlights her creative drawings and informed writing. Her talk generated lively, point by point Twitter relays and spirited analysis. Joe Yonan, food editor of The Washington Post, later published her remarks under the headline Duke’s Mayonnaise: The Southern spread with a cult following. The story includes the recipe for a decadent chocolate cake that uses Duke’s in the moist batter.

Wallace will recount much of her research in a talk for Culinary Historians of Piedmont North Carolina (CHOP NC). She also will share more recent discoveries from an interview conducted with Eugenia Duke’s great-granddaughter, who lives in Charlotte.

“She’s 86 or 87 now and she remembers how driven Eugenia was,” Wallace says. “I’ve learned a lot from her and have continued to stay in touch, which is rewarding.”

A Spoken Dish: Mini-documentaries capture evocative taste memories

Durham photojournalist and filmmaker Kate Medley will be the featured speaker of Culinary Historians of Piedmont North Carolina (CHOPNC) at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill. The event is free and open to the public.

Kate Medley spends a lot of time in her car. As a photographer and filmmaker for Whole Foods, the Durham resident travels to visit stores between New Orleans and New York, pausing along the way to document farmers, cooks and culinary landmarks.

To pass time, she was thinking one day about community cookbooks, those tried and true compendiums that celebrate the best of locally-grown foods and the home cooks who prepare and serve them with love. These cherished volumes were once the cornerstone of church fundraisers and a go-to source for potluck dinner recipes. But in the current context of global online food communities and apps that provide technique tutorials on your smart phone, they seem out of step.

“I was really intrigued by a vision of what a community cookbook could look like today,” recalls Medley, a trained photojournalist, during a drive from Mississippi to North Carolina. “How could I apply the tools of my craft to a tradition that is especially celebrated in the South?”

The outcome was A Spoken Dish, a collection of taste memories and family traditions from diverse voices in Southern food and culture. She stayed close to home to launch the project in June 2013, choosing Chapel Hill teacher and cookbook writer Sheri Castle and Sean Lilly Wilson, owner of Durham’s Fullsteam Brewery, as her first subjects. The short vignettes range from one to two minutes.

In an especially endearing clip, Castle shows her pickling rock, pulled from the ancient New River and used by three generations of family cooks. She knows there are “perhaps more sanitary and conventional ways” of submerging food in brine now, but the treasured stone serves as her “good luck talisman.”

“I believe in my rock. It has history and place,” Castle says, adding it has a natural minerality that may help with the fermentation process. “So many quarts and gallons and crocks of good food have been made with this rock. Who am I to stop it?”

Medley knows how lucky she was to start with Castle, a natural-born storyteller who has shared tales of her Appalachian youth and exhaustive culinary research with major publications and institutions, notable the Southern Foodways Alliance (SFA). Wilson manages to draw a giggle from the otherwise silent presence of the filmmaker with a claim that he keeps a potato ricer in his back pocket. Through years of trial and error, he’s found it to be the best tool to extract fruit from paw paws and persimmons used to infuse his craft beers.

“Sheri and Sean both were gung-ho to be my guinea pigs,” Medley says. “They really brought it to the table. They helped me see what this project could become.”

Castle, who calls Medley an “observer of the first order,” says the documentarian was “wisely vague” when she pitched the concept. “With the camera rolling, she offered a few prompts and then turned me loose,” Castle says. ‘”We spent a juicy hour together and she whittled it down to five short cogent pieces, each a sufficient documentary.”

Sponsored by Whole Foods, SFA and Georgia Organics, the project has continued to grow. It features about 55 clips from men, women and even children from across the South. They describe with passion everything from how to make biscuits or cook a pig’s ear to post-Katrina life and horticultural literacy.

“It’s all about how we, by way of these Southern stories, celebrate the diversity of the South and the diversity of what lands on our plate,” says Medley, who films, interviews and lightly edits conversations for the website. “It’s really the same format as the community cookbook: someone’s favorite family recipe or memory with a few sentences about whatever puts it in a context that is meaningful.”

A new set of 35 segments will debut on March 6 with a reception at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art; they will be added to the website a few days later.  The new clips will expand the project’s scope to represent speakers from six states in nearly 90 vignettes.

Among them are Lolis Eric Elie, New Orleans native and author of the acclaimed Treme cookbook; Becky Currence, mother of Oxford, Miss., chef John Currence, on classic Louisiana gumbo; and Ray Robinson, owner of the iconic Cozy Corner Bar-B-Q in Memphis.

A Spoken Dish, which may next explore the Lowcountry of South Carolina, is just one way that Medley documents culinary culture. An exhibit of her photos, Southern Food from the Backroads & Byways, was shown in 2012 at the UNC Center for Southern Studies.

“Apart from the bread-and-butter of my job, I always try to have a few personal projects brewing that are exploring different factors of community storytelling,” she says. “There’s so much out there. I just need more time, right?”

Chef Ashley Christensen working on first book

The story first ran in INDY Week.

Ashley Christensen and Edward Lee at a Stir the Pot
event held September 2011 at Christensen's Raleigh home.

Ashley Christensen pre-ordered a copy of Smoke & Pickles, a book by her friend Edward Lee, so she could be among the first to read it.

“You’re immediately engaged based on what a great storyteller he is,” Christensen says of Lee, who she met a few years ago through the Southern Foodways Alliance. “He’s a brilliant writer. His food is beautiful, thoughtful and bold. Those are things that, in combination, create something very special.”

Christensen said she was struck by Lee’s honesty in sharing so many personal stories and how they shaped him as a chef. “As chefs and restaurateurs, you are always on display,” says Christensen, who has welcomed hundreds of strangers to her Raleigh home for fundraising events. “I believe the book will make a lot of people think differently about how they approach the process, about not keeping the public and readers at arm’s length.”

Christensen intends to use a similar approach with her first book. She hopes to sign with an agent this week, a crucial step in getting the project to a top publishing house.

“Ed's and my books will be very different, but I want to share stories as he does to show how my thought process works,” she says. “I learned to cook by throwing dinner parties. It will be based on how that can explode into other things we can make.”

Christensen has been working hard to document the recipes that dazzle diners at Poole’s, Beasley’s Chicken+Honey and Chuck’s. Some already have been featured in food magazines.

“Like Ed, my goal will not people telling people how to measure,” she says. “I want to teach them how to think about cooking, the history of how food got here and why the relationship between chefs, farmers and artisan providers is so important.”

Lee, a three-time runner-up for James Beard honors will be celebrated Wednesday evening by Chef Colin Bedford with a special dinner at Fearrington Village in Pittsboro. The event starts at 6 p.m. Tickets are $85, which includes dinner, a beer tasting, gratuity and a signed copy of Smoke & Pickles.

‘Hardcore hillbilly’ finds nexus of Southern food and storytelling

Sheri Castle will be the guest of Culinary Historians of Piedmont North Carolina (CHOP NC) at 7 p.m. Wednesday, March 20, at Flyleaf Books. She will talk about the strong link between Southern foods and storytelling and sign copies of The New Southern Garden Cookbook.

A natural-born storyteller and instinctive cook, Sheri Castle poses a classic chicken-and-the-egg conundrum: Which came first, the pencil or the whisk?

Chapel Hill food writer and teacher Sheri Castle

The award-winning food writer and teacher grew up on the fringe of Appalachia in the western mountains of North Carolina, where she tended her grandmother’s garden and learned to cook the seasonal foods it produced in her kitchen. A precocious child, she entered her first recipe in a national contest at age 4. She didn’t win, but it was the start of a journey that led to an appreciation of the strong bond between Southern food and storytelling.

“Because Southern food is so evocative, particularly for a Southerner, it is practically impossible for us to tell you about a food without telling about its context,” she says. “When we tell about a recipe, it’s almost never about the ingredients. It’s about how you found the ingredients, how it works and doesn’t, and who it reminds you of.”

Not surprisingly, many of Castle’s fondest cooking memories track straight up steep mountain roads to her grandmother’s home.

“I am a hardcore hillbilly, and I use the term with the deepest affection,” says Castle, who arrived in Chapel Hill 34 years ago as the first in her family to attend college. “Even as a very, very small child, I understood that there was a connection between who people were and what they ate. I knew I was part of something special.”

As a “mountain kid” eager for adventure, Castle wrote stories and devoured books that fueled her imagination. She also spent quality time sitting on the front porch stringing beans and apples while talking and sharing stories.

“There is a very defined sense of place deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains,” she says, drawing comparisons to distinct rituals of the South Carolina Low Country or New Orleans. “Place defines what you eat, and who you are. I am very thankful today that I grew up with those traditions.”

Her appreciation of the links between Southern food and storytelling was well expressed in her 2011 The New Southern Garden Cookbook (UNC Press)  An in-demand cooking teacher known as much for her wit as her carefully tested recipes, she was featured this month at the prestigious Hilton Head Food and Wine Festival.

Like O. Henry, another North Carolina native, Castle deploys quirky, well-drawn characters to pull you in for an unexpected twist; in her case, a dollop of culinary anthropology.  Her smart humor and astounding baking skills were on full display last summer when she preached to the choir at a decadent breakfast gathering of the Southern Foodways Alliance’s (SFA) “field trip” to New Bern. SFA director and culinary legend John T. Edge watched Castle from the edge of a church community center, where he tried to balance a plate of pie on his knees while laughing with the audience.

John T. Edge

“I admire the heck out of Sheri,” says Edge, who offered a ringing endorsement last week. “She tells honest stories about her people and her place with humility and humor. She's smart, but she's no show off.”

Edge says Castle “reveals truths” with her takes on classics like leather britches, Appalachian-style beans dried on string, and biscuits with chocolate gravy, the latter of which was posted on the upscale Gilt Taste blog. Her contributions to Gilt Taste’s “Eats Shoots and Leaves” column earned her a writing award last year from the International Association of Culinary Professionals.

Growing up in a remote place with brutal winters gave Castle enough indoor time to imagine herself elsewhere, like the stylish city homes of characters in soap operas that her grandmother enjoyed.

“That’s how I discovered there were people who ate dinner as opposed to supper,” she says. “Even though I knew it wasn’t very accurate, I could see a big difference between what those fancy rich people were eating for dinner and what I saw on my plate.”

Castle’s comment is no reflection of poverty. Rather it was one of a series of incremental discoveries that both beckoned experimentation – as an increasingly worldly eighth grader, she begged for and received The Joy of Cooking for Christmas – and reinforced her appreciation of the plenty at her grandmother’s farm.

When she was old enough to drive down the mountain, she often returned with food stuffs her curious teacher had never seen:  tofu and duck, and broccoli, asparagus and okra. “None of that was agreeable to our growing season, which was more like New England,” she says. “It made me feel good to share things with the woman who taught me to cook.”

Castle trained as a journalist but worked writing technical manuals and advertising. While on maternity leave with her daughter Lily, who will leave the nest for college in the fall, she decided against going back. Her generous employer offered a career transition package that allowed her to attend the Culinary Institute of America.

“I talked them into letting me take cooking classes for a couple of years without doing the whole program,” she laughs. “I cannot image what sort of yarn I spun for them to let me get away with that.”

After taking additional classes in San Francisco, Castle returned home determined to teach people to cook. True to form, she marched into the Raleigh Williams-Sonoma and stated that she wanted to teach there. That was on a Tuesday; four days later, she led the first of countless Saturday classes.

She loved instructing home cooks but the itch to write returned. A satisfied student was an editor at The Spectator, a now-defunct local weekly where Castle was invited to write a food column. She soon was published nationally and carved a career as a recipe tester and ghost writer for big names in the food world.

Recipe testing is more complex than simply trying one and saying whether it’s good or bad, Castle explains. “If you are developing recipes for someone, you have to cook like them, not me. And if the recipe doesn’t work, you fix it.”

While taught to be polite at home, Castle has mastered unimagined levels of tact working with clients – none of whom she can identify due to contractual obligations. She has worked on about 20 book projects, including 13 complete works published under other people’s names.

“I’ve learned how to write not only in the style of my client but in the voice and style of their publishers,” she says. “However, if I knew then what I know now, I’d be a with-er, not a ghoster.  It’s hard because I can’t use any of that experience to market myself.”

Castle says writing her own book was the most taxing of all her projects. She has accumulated enough stories and recipes to fill another collection, but she’s not sure when she’ll start.

“I have never been more proud of anything or done something that utterly sucked my brain out of my nose,” she says. “It really is exhausting. I have some ideas, but it’s the one thing I just can’t talk about.”

Win a copy of 'The Truck Food Cookbook' by John T. Edge

John T. Edge will talk about his new book, The Truck Food Cookbook: 150 Recipes and Ramblings from America's Best Restaurants on Wheels, at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Regulator Bookshop, 720 Ninth St., in Durham. The Only Burger food truck, which is featured in the book, will be selling food outside, and Fullsteam will be selling beer inside.
Want to win a copy of his new book? Comment below about your favorite food truck and register (at top right) to receive Eating My Words by email by 4 p.m. Wednesday. The winner will be selected randomly. If you attend the event you can claim it there; if not, it will be *mailed. (*Must have U.S. address if mailing is necessary.)

John T. Edge (Photos (c) Angie Moser)

Food truck culture is fairly new to Raleigh, where wrangling over local ordinances led to a popular presence and fan base developing first in Durham. But the phenomenon of stand-up dining is well established in both major U.S. cities and street corners around the globe, where it sometimes fares better and is more responsive to consumer demand than traditional brick-and-mortar establishments.

Where carts once offered little more than hot dogs and pretzels, full-outfitted truck now provide freshly-made fare that combines a globally-inspired culinary sensibility with the best of local and seasonal food stuffs. Their popularity have even inspired competitive cooking shows on TV, and Durham's popular and award-winning Only Burger was a runner-up on Food Network's The Great Food Truck Race.

Only Burger's fame is on the rise with its inclusion on The Food Truck Cookbook by John T. Edge, a food culture chronicler and one-time owner of a Dunce Dogs, a hot dog stand in Oxford, Miss, where he is director of the Southern Foodways Alliance (SFA) at the University of Mississippi.

Edge's insights and engaging writing style has earned one win and five James Beard Award nominations. He also writes the United Tastes column for the New York Times and is a frequent contributor to the Oxford American, Garden & Gun, and NPR's All Things Considered.

The book's 150 recipes serve as testament to the creative diversity on food truck operating across the country. Examples range from Morrocan Chicken Crepes and Fried Yucca with Garlic-Cilantro Sauce to Waffle Breakfast Tacos and Tamarind-Glazed Fried Chick Drummettes. 
 

North Carolina is well represented by Sweet Potato Cupcakes with Toasted Meringue by Daisycakes, also of Durham, and one of Only Burger's most popular menu options, the messy but fabulous Morning Burger.

Morning Burger by Durham's Only Burger.

Only Burger's Morning Burger

Reprinted with permission of Workman Press (c) 2012 from The Food Truck Cookbook by John T. Edge.

Makes 4 burgers.

4 hamburger buns
1 cup pimento cheese (recipe follows)
1 pound ground chuck
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
4 large eggs

8 slices Fried Green Tomatoes (recipe follows)

1. Toast the hamburger buns. Spread pimento cheese on the top and bottom halves of the buns. Set the buns aside.
2. Place the ground chuck, salt and pepper in a bowl and knead them gently with your hands until blended, Divide the meat mixture into 4 even portions and form each into a patty.
3. Heavy a heavy skillet or griddle pan over medium-high heat for 1 or 2 minutes. Place the patties in the skillet and cook for 3 to 4 minutes per side for medium-rare.
4. While the burgers are cooking, crack the eggs into a separate nonstick skillet and cook them sunny-side up over medium heat until all of the egg white are cooked but the yolks are still runny, about 3 minutes.

5. To assemble the burger, place a burger on the bottom half of each bun. Top each with a fried egg, 2 slices of Fried Green Tomato, and the top half of the bun.

Pimento Cheese

If you make the pimento cheese in advance and refrigerate it, remove it about 10 minutes before using..

1-1/2 pounds extra-sharp cheddar cheese, shredded

1 jar (4 ounce) pimentos, drained and diced

1 small serrano pepper, seeded and diced (about 1 tablespoon or more to taste)

1/3 cup mayonnaise, or more if you like a creamier consistency

1 tablespoon freshly ground pepper

1 teaspoon salt

Place the cheese, pimentos, serrano pepper, mayonnaise, black pepper and salt in a large mixing bowl and stir them together using a large spoon until a spreadable paste forms. If you are not going to use the pimento cheese immediately, place it in a an airtight container in the refrigerator. It will keep for up to 1 week.

Fried Green Tomatoes

Don't reserve these just for burgers.

2 large or medium-size firm green tomatoes

1 large egg

1 tablespoon milk

2 cups panko (Japanese bread crumbs)
1/2 teaspoon salt

3 cups canola or peanut oil, for frying

1. Cut the tomatoes into slices about 1/4 inch thick. Place the egg and milk in a small bowl and whisk until well blended. Combine the panko and salt in a separate shallow bowl or on a plate.

2. Heat the oil in a cast-iron skillet or deep sautee pan over medium-high heat until it pops loudly when a few drops or water are tossed in.

3. Dip the tomato slices into the egg mixture and then in the panko, turning to coat them all over. Being careful to not crowd the skillet, carefully add the tomato slices to the hot oil and cook, turning once, until golden brown, about 3 minutes. Using a slotted spoon, transfer the tomato slices to paper towels to drain.