Velveeta Chef
Moved by some deep tectonic shift in her memory, Eileene suggested we have sloppy Joes tonight. This is surprising in two respects. One, she has never been a fan of sandwiches generally, and especially not for supper. And two, she couldn’t really remember what sloppy Joes were. Or that I used to make them fairly often when we were first going out. Perhaps it’s because she preferred to eat her sloppy with rice, instead of the traditional bun.
But mine not to question why. My pleasure, actually; they’re tasty and very easy to prepare, though I really had to search my memory for my own recipe, never written down. I took a walk down to the A&P to get some buns and cheese. I add cheese partly to mellow the seasonings, but mostly to act as a binder, keeping the sloppy less… well, sloppy.
Which brings me to my point. A few years ago, I was shocked to learn that some major chefs make regular use of Velveeta. They do not—heaven forbid!—slice or grate it directly onto food, but they do find it invaluable for soups and sauces. Like the package says, it’s real cheese; it just doesn’t have the fine qualities of better cheeses because it isn’t aged patiently, which means it develops little in the way of flavor and nothing in the way of texture. As long as the flavors are coming from somewhere else, Velveeta serves as a pliant canvas.
I didn’t use Velveeta, but settled for American, which is practically the same thing, in individually wrapped slices. It might be bad cheese, but it does the job and tasted swell, for me as well as the professionals.