hi! did you know you can put cheese in bread

Senior year of college i started dating a third year law student and suddenly became interested in tailgating. He had a few friends who lived in crumbling but beautiful old homes off the UNC campus and before every home game they would smoke a bunch of pork shoulders in one of those big, maybe steel, black smokers on their lawn while friends drank from solo cups and played cornhole and wore Carolina Blue. One of their friends even had a Model T Ford? We drove around in it one day.

This, of course, was also around the time that I started getting into cooking, mostly because after dating said boyfriend for a few months my body had softened and I wanted to unsoften it. I figured cooking was a better solution than the lean cuisine diets of years past. So I bought a few cookbooks and spent countless hours on those recipefinder sites—I don’t even remember what they were called, they were just galleries upon galleries of thumbnails that you could save to your “i like this” folder. It was 2009. I even made the “husband winning peanut butter cookies”, because listen, I was in a sorority, it was a different time. I think a family friend bought me the “Cooking for Two” America’s Test Kitchen cookbook for Christmas. 

To go with the barbecue and slaw and beer, then, I would wake up early on those saturday mornings and cut and mix and bake. The constants I remember were banana chocolate chip muffins—no idea where the recipe came from, but any run of the mill version of this food is going to be good—and pimiento cheese, the recipe pulled from an old Gourmet story about Parker and Otis in Durham.

Your mom loves Parker and Otis. There’s a little retail section where you can buy Le Creuset and cookbooks and adorable potholders, and then there’s a little deli section where you can buy prepared salads and sandwiches. The grilled pimiento cheese is the thing to order, with optional bacon, rich and tall and crisp-edged thanks to unyielding amounts of butter. The trick to their pimiento cheese is two types of cheddar (both sharp and extra sharp) and a few shakes of celery salt, which lifts things up a little bit, you know, with all of its celery-ness. It’s all really fucking good.

So I’d bring a bowl of pimiento cheese to the boys’ party in hopes that it would make them like me. It became My Thing, which is always a fun landmark of the “getting into cooking” phase—anyways, making a big serving of pimiento cheese for yourself is no fun. A few years later I forced Kristen to write about the recipe and it felt like a full circle and a victory. (THIS LINE!!!: “There's also an underdog spice at play: celery salt, which takes a heartbeat of sharp tang and breathes a little herbal depth into it.”) 

If you’re online you’ve likely heard of brilliant unicorn Molly Yeh, who just published a wonderful book this fall. It’s a very fun book, which is a thing we should all be grateful for while our world goes to shit; it will make you giggle and it will make you want to bake. There’s a pimiento cheese babka in there, and when I saw it I made a squeally little noise. I made it this past Saturday for a party, because it’s purely a party food. It’s a dense and intense thing and getting through it yourself before it staled would require a whole lot of resolve or a whole lot of weed. 

It starts with challah dough, which I’ve only ever fucked up in the past, and which I only slightly fucked up this time, because I was a little less gentle during the shaping process than I should have been. The recipe is generous enough to shine despite your fuckups, and thank God. You make the dough, you let it rise, you look at how pale and glisten-y it is, like a sweet eggy pillow, and then you roll it out into two rectangles which you slather with pimiento cheese. (Molly uses chopped onion and paprika and cayenne in hers, all of which I am extremely into.) Then you roll it up and slice it and wrap it all over itself, so you make catacombs of air and cheese inside your little loaf.

The bread itself was lush and wonderful, and the pimiento cheese did its job of making a good thing better. (I don’t think I need to sit here and tell you that it was good?) It was a hit; people lost their shit over it a little bit, and I can’t wait to make it again, maybe for my family at Christmas, because it’s a festive shock-and-awe type of thing, and we Bulls love an indulgent baked good.