This is probably not a question you woke up asking yourself this morning. But these are the type of topics that constitute analytical thinking on my part.
It recently occurred to me that every social gathering I attended this summer — all 9 of them — featured a very slight variation on one particular snack…one I had never before experienced in all my years of hovering over snack tables at social events. Is this a coincidence? Or evidence of a culinary trend?
The snack in question is hot pepper jelly spread on a cracker with a lashing of cream cheese. (”Lashing.” Sounds so dramatic. So violent. I stole it from my friend Camilla, a chef in Australia who seems to use this word whenever she talks about cream, so it must apply here.) At first glance, this seems like the most pedestrian of nibbles. Hot pepper jelly, as tasty as it can be, still carries a whiff of “granny canning” about it, a cloying, excessively sweet concoction favored by the type of home cooks who wear bedazzled sweaters depicting scenes of the autumn harvest. Hickory Farms has a hot pepper jelly aisle, I’m sure.
I have never eaten hot pepper jelly in my life. It was never served at dinner parties, neither in the south or New York City. And now it seems that it’s everywhere. What’s more, I am becoming a master of it, both in preparation and gleeful consumption.
The obvious explanation for all the HPJ sightings is that, hello, this is the south, where one would expect to find a mother load of hot pepper jelly and cream cheese. But this doesn’t account for the preponderance of it of late. I think the real reason — and the reason I started canning so much of it – is that it serves as a vehicle for the surfeit of hot peppers growing in my garden. Everyone has a garden these days, and after one’s quota of salsa has been filled….what else are you going to do with all those jalapenos and poblanos and habaneros?
Hence, HPJ served with crackers and cheese. But it can’t be any cheese! Hot pepper jelly truly tastes best paired with good ole fashioned, ultra-processed Philadelphia cream cheese. Luscious European cheeses, such as Brie and Neufchatel, detract from the essential American-ness of this culinary show-stopper. Brownie points if you serve it with Wheat Thins.
I adore fiery food, so I make my pepper jelly with habaneros. I find the bone-numbing heat of this particular pepper neutralizes the sweetness of the jelly while highlighting the tanginess of the cheese. It is my latest gustatory fixation.
To serve, pour the jelly over a brick of cream cheese on a plate and surround with crackers Wheat Thins. Oh so tasty, oh so tasteful.
My favorite HPJ recipe is called Habanero Gold, and it’s from Ball’s Complete Book of Home Preserving. You can find a version of it here.
