Appetite for golf

 I'm back to the reruns for a few days while I "onboard" some new tech gear. Here's one about golf sandwiches...

Golf, the game where people take a nice long walk and chase a little ball with a set of clubs, holds little interest for me, but that's ok.  Plenty of people are into it, and this past weekend we saw the highest point in the golf pantheon, the Masters Tournament in Augusta, GA.

It's always fascinating to me to see the people in the gallery down there, so rapt in their attention to the golfers, chowing down on pimento cheese sandwiches - the great local tradition.

Here's an interesting angle on those sammies: they only cost $1.50, and for those who attend football games, baseball games, and so forth, it's traditional to shell out thirty or forty semoleons on a sandwich and a couple of beers. The people who run things in bigtime sports figure they have a captive audience, so why not gouge them for the money. They even make you walk through a meat detector on the way in to make you aren't smuggling in a ham and cheese.

It's just the opposite down at Augusta National. They figure they can sell you a sandwich at or below their cost because (here's the hitch) they've got you paying  $2,000 for a single day, and more than $10,000 for the four-day pass.

In case that made your eyeballs fog up, the people you see on TV in their festive pants have paid 10,000 American dollars to stand there and watch other people, dressed similarly, play golf.

For your dollar fifty, you get a sandwich served in a green biodegradable plastic bag...but the purveyor changed a few years ago. Used to be, Nick Rangos, a caterer from Aiken, S.C. made the sandwiches, but for reasons no one seems to know (or be prepared to discuss) he lost the contract in 1998, after forty-five years. 

The golf course awarded the contract business to a local fried chicken chain called Wife Savers, who already had the fried chicken concession at the course. BUT - here's the twist. 

Instead of hiring someone who worked for Rangos and knew the recipe, or buying the recipe itself, the people at Augusta had neither, and Wife Savers's first attempts at recreating the cheesy spread did not measure up to the original. They got lucky when a woman who worked at the course had frozen some spread for the year before, and skilled food scientists went to work, analyzing the food in minute detail like they were on one of those CSI shows or something. 

And they finally duplicated the original, and it sells like hotcakes even today. And when you think about it from a nutritional standpoint, it's a perfect BLD (breakfast, lunch, and dinner). You get starches and sugars in the bread and protein from the cheese and indigestion if you gobble it too quickly.

It's what they call Southern Comfort food.

And, courtesy of a woman down there who knows about the sandwich, here is a good way to make yours at home:

Ingredients

2 cups sharp cheddar cheese, shredded

1 cup Monterey jack cheese, shredded

4 ounces cream cheese, softened to room temperature

1/2 cup mayonnaise

4-ounce jar pimentos diced in jar, drained

1 tablespoon onion, very finely minced

1/4 teaspoon garlic powder

1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon black pepper

Instructions

Combine all ingredients in a medium bowl and mix until smooth and creamy. Refrigerate for at least an hour to allow to firm.

Serve on white bread.