pimento cheese

Like background music behind the compilation of a lifetime of spring trips, boat days, and springtime weeks at home with my flower-babies, some planted and nursed from infancy, Banana Cake tastes of easy times, of breakfast casseroles, boiled shrimp and toasted, open-faced pimento cheese and cucumber sandwiches.

One takes me back to a Pimento Cheese Social at the Stitzel-Weller Distillery in Kentucky, one of my first Derby assignments.

Food and drink prices are happily stuck in the 1970s — $1.50 for a pimento cheese sandwich — a charming holdover from yesteryear.

Still, if you are tailgating, Milliken has a pro tip: Bring her spicy pimento cheese.

“I make a killer spicy pimento cheese, and bringing it to any tailgate party will jazz up any burger or hot dog—and make you look like a pro.”