Southern-Style Delis

Southern-style deli is what I’ve termed the style of restaurant that serves all the salads, specifically a chicken salad, pimento cheese, potato salad, probably a pasta salad, probably a fruit salad, and they serve a dish called a cold plate that has a scoop of each salad on a bed of lettuce, a salad sampler plate. They offer salads and sandwiches and sometimes soups otherwise, so you can get a chicken salad sandwich, for example. These types of delis proliferate all across the Southeast from Georgia to Mississippi, and often they are the only real lunch option in towns that seem even too small to support a restaurant, like in towns so small they don’t even have a McDonalds.

The chain Chicken Salad Chick is an attempt to create a franchise based on this style of restaurant. I’ve eaten there once, and it was fine, but of course it was missing that crucial element, the local color that tends to characterize these types of delis. Whereas the franchise restaurant gives you some kid who wants to be anywhere but there waiting on you, in the local places more often than not it is some retired school teacher who is doing it to be a out in the community, or otherwise the owner’s niece. In Arlington, Georgia, there’s Sweet Georgia Brown, which is an awesome little place. Dinner’s Ready by Chad is not to be missed if one finds himself in Warm Springs, Georgia, at lunch time. Finney’s in Tupelo, Mississippi, is another great example.

The common denominator is the cold plate, which serves up mayonnaise-based salads, so mayonnaise is the common denominator of that, the real linchpin of the operations. When I starting thinking about that, I realized that all of these salads couldn’t exist without shelf-stable commercial mayonnaise, which became available in the teens forward. From there, I imagine that the race was on to find out what could be mixed with it. Seems like chicken and cheese would have been early ideas, and thus your chicken salad and pimento cheese was born, and also potatoes for potato salad, and tuna salad, and so forth.

It was a mayonnaise-based free-for-all. Nothing was spared. If one could mix it up with mayonnaise, he did. It kind of makes me sad to think about it, if I’m being honest. That frontier is all tapped out; there’s nothing one can mix with mayonnaise that hasn’t already been tried. I mean, somebody crunched up a sleeve of saltines and created Cracker Salad. What are you going to do?

Do this: Get a sack of grated cheddar cheese, I like mine sharp usually but it doesn’t matter. Just get the cheddar and a jar of sliced pimentos and some good mayonnaise like Duke’s or Bama. Dump the cheese and pimentos into a big bowl, then mix in heaping spoonfuls of mayonnaise until it is that creamy pimento cheese consistency. That’s it, friends. That’s pimento cheese. You can eat it on crackers or in a sandwich right away, but it is better the next day after the flavors have melded in the fridge.

I would say, be really cautious about recipes that fancy it up. Some call for the addition of garlic, for example, and I couldn’t disagree more about that. Pimento cheese is one of the things that really doesn’t get much better by adding ingredients. Cheese. Pimento. Mayonnaise. It is permissible to substitute a portion of mayonnaise with some coleslaw dressing and/or Miracle Whip if one wants to sweeten it up. Adjust salt and add some fresh-ground black pepper, perhaps. Maybe a splash of Louisiana-style hot sauce, but watch it.