Perfection Pimento
You’ve read the exposes. Pimento cheese invented in New York in the 1870s, not the South. New York cream cheese drove its creation. It’s southern boom was promoted by Duke’s Mayonnaise. One wonders where the pimento was in all of this. Well that, interestingly enough, is where the South mattered. For it wasn’t until the Perfection Pimento was launched upon the world in Georgia in about 1914 that the pepper flavor so important to Pimento cheese came into balance.
Before the pepper was called a pimento, it was the pimiento, the generic Spanish name for pepper. The name was anglicized by dropping the second “I” in the 1880s. Sometimes the question of spelling was by-passed entirely by calling it the “Sweet Spanish” pepper as Hovey & Company did in his 1869 catalog. The seeds circulated among the major seed houses during the last decades of the 19th century and had a following among farmers and gardeners.
Pimiento is the Spanish heart shaped red sweet pepper that was used in Hispanic cuisine much as bell peppers were used in American cookery. Grown for the last half of the 19th century by the Hispanic community in eastern cities, Florida, and in the Southwest, it also enjoyed some popularity with kitchen gardeners in the American east as a salad pepper. Nationally, however, it came to market not so much as whole produce but as a processed ingredient in composite preparations: “salsa de pimiento” was a common pantry item sold in jars in Hispanic groceries at the outbreak of the Civil War; sliced roasted pimiento frequently appeared as an added to canned anchovies; roasted, skinned and mashed it was mixed with mayo and cream cheese for pimiento cheese. Sometime in the 1870s or 1880s Europeans began roasting and skinning pimentos, selling them canned whole, or slicing them to stuff olives. (The first American ads for pimento stuffed olives date from 1900.) In the South the particular interest of the pimento was for pepper ketchup, a popular condiment of the post-Civil War period.
In 1904, S. D. Reigel, a Spalding County, Georgia, seedsman became interest in the improvement of truck vegetables being grown in his state. One dimension of his project entailed securing the entire range of peppers grown by Moore and Simon, seedsmen of Philadelphia. Among these offerings was something listed as a pimento, though Moore did not generally offer seed for general sale of this variety. Reigel grew it out and was greatly disappointed in the flavor and texture. Examining recently important Spanish canned pimentos from Valencia, Reigel saw instantly they were made from “a better strain or type than those we purchased from the Philadelphia Seed house.” Securing the aide of the U. S. consul to Spain, Reigel secured in 1909 Spanish seed used in the Valencia canned peppers. Selecting the lines that did best in the Georgia soil and climate, Reigel quickly stabilized what he deemed a marketable pimento. Pimento Seed was offered to the market in 1911. Sometime in the period 1911-1913 Riegel found a sport among his Valencia seedlings, with more pronouncedly thick flesh in the fruit. This would be the progenitor of the Perfection variety. In 1914 Mark Reigel, S. D.’s son, and one of the Experiment Station crew, perfect a roasting and peeling mechanism, enabling the large scale canning of pimentos. [Henry Perkins Stuckey & James Albertine McClintock, Pimento and Bell Peppers Bulletin 140 (Griffen, GA: George Experiment Station, 1921), 33-34. ] That same year Riegel distributed seed for his Perfection Pimento.
PERFECTION PIMENTO The great canning Pepper. In a class by itself. Unexcelled for making Pimentoes. Bright red when ripe, perfectly smooth, no ridges. Top shaped. Flesh the thickets of any, averaging one-fourth inch or more. Very productive and continuous bearer. We are headquarters for this variety, being the first to introduce it into the United States, our seed stock being imported from the Pimento factories at Valencia, Spain. Listed by practically all of the seedsmen. [S. D. Riegel &Sons: peppers Specialists (Griffen, GA, 1921), 1]
The Perfection Pimento became the breed standard for this pepper in the United States in the 20th century, the recognized leader in eye appeal, processability, and flavor. It would be the ancestor of many strains of improved pimento, numbers of which bore the Perfection name to recall parentage. Truhart Perfection, Truhart Perfection D, and Pimento Select. Because of a vulnerability to root-knot nematodes the Perfection has been muscled out of many fields by the Truhart NR variety. Usual story—not as tasty as the Perfection, nor as beautiful.