Jennie Benedict was a native of Louisville, Kentucky, who studied with Fannie Farmer in Boston and helped start the Louisville Businesswoman’s Club in 1897. Miss Jennie opened a tearoom and soda fountain and was a successful caterer as well as a beloved community volunteer (serving at the King’s Daughters Home for Incurables). She died in 1928, but her name lives on in the mid-South, thanks mostly to the cheese she invented. Benedictine isn’t really a unique kind of cheese. It’s simply cream cheese mixed with chopped green onions, mayonnaise, and—Miss Jennie’s stroke of genius—green food coloring. Usually lots of it, enough that the finished product looks like something the family Frankenstein might offer as an hors d’oeuvre. It is a hostess food, rarely found on restaurant menus but frequently used in dainty crustless sandwiches or, in a much heartier configuration, as costar in a Benedictine and bacon sandwich.