It arrived the old-fashioned way: no email, no comment section, no return address. Just an envelope, postmarked, containing a printed copy of page 63 from our July/August 2026 issue and a copy of the Editor’s Letter, annotated, we suspect, with real conviction, signed simply, “Senior Citizen Cooks.”
The letter was polite but firm. Several ladies, all proud owners of the 1972 Cotton Country Cooking, the Junior League of Morgan County cookbook that’s been feeding North Alabama families for over fifty years, had gone looking for the pimento cheese recipe we ran alongside it. They couldn’t find it. Not in their original copy. Not in later editions either. And a Colby cheese blend, they noted, would have been “most unusual” for that era.
They were right to look. And they were right that it wasn’t there. Here’s the truth, straight from homeowner Leigh Cassady: the garlic cheese grits on page 63 did come from Cotton Country Cooking, a nod to her mother, Tolly Shelton, who appears in the book’s pages. But the pimento cheese was never meant to share that lineage. It came from somewhere just as storied, and just as Southern: a parking lot outside Bryant-Denny Stadium.
We tailgated with the Sexton family in Birmingham and shared a box with them later at Bryant-Denny. Pat always brought her pimento cheese to the parking lot where several people from Decatur parked and partied before Bama games. I begged and begged her for the recipe, and she finally gave it to me.
Leigh Cassady
That’s Pat Sexton, Mrs. Bill Sexton, whose pimento cheese, by Leigh’s account, was worth the begging. “Only at its best with Fritos Scoops,” Leigh adds, which feels like the kind of instruction that should come with a warranty.
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Call it the garnish on the story: a detail almost too sweet to be real. Word of the article made its way to Pat’s son, Britt Sexton of Decatur, by way of a friend in Birmingham who’d read the piece. Britt reached out, not to us, but to Leigh’s brother, touched that his late mother had been remembered in print. “Britt was very honored that I had credited his late momma,” Leigh says, “and sent a kind email to my brother. And Britt isn’t always so kind.”
We’ll take that as the highest compliment a pimento cheese recipe has ever earned.
So, to our Senior Citizen Cooks: thank you for caring enough to mail us a letter instead of scrolling past. You were right, and in being right, you helped surface a much better story than the one we told the first time, proof that in the South, a recipe is never just a recipe. It’s a parking lot before kickoff, a mother’s handwriting in a fifty-year-old cookbook, a name someone doesn’t want “muddled by a misunderstanding.” We’re glad to set the record straight, and gladder still for the reason why.
A transcription of the lovely letter we received from the ‘Senior Citizen Cooks.’
