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Sandwich Filling
Two cream cheeses and two bottles of stuffed olives, one cup of walnuts, all chopped together.
— Miss Fannie Warrington
Three ingredients and no method beyond "chopped together," which leaves the proportions to be worked out. The quantities below are the best reading of what a 1900s cook would have had on the shelf.
- "Two cream cheeses"Cream cheese was commonly sold then in small foil-wrapped cakes of about 3 ounces rather than the familiar 8-ounce brick, though larger packages existed too. On that reading two cheeses is roughly 6 ounces, so most of a modern brick, softened to room temperature so it will take the chopped solids without tearing.
- Two bottles of olivesBottled stuffed olives ran small by modern standards, perhaps a few ounces drained per bottle, which puts this somewhere around a cup or so of whole olives. The measure is genuinely imprecise; start with 3/4 cup chopped and add more to taste, since olives will dominate quickly.
- Drain hardThe hinge of the recipe. Olives carry a great deal of brine, and any of it left in the mixture will thin the cheese into something that soaks bread. Drain the olives, blot them dry, and chop them before they meet the cheese.
- Chop, do not process"Chopped together" means a knife or a hand chopper. A food processor turns the whole thing into a uniform pink paste and pulverizes the walnuts into oil; the filling is better with visible flecks of olive and nut.
- WalnutsOne cup of walnut halves is about 3 1/2 ounces. Toasting them briefly at 350F improves the flavor considerably and is worth the ten minutes, though the original says nothing either way.
- SeasoningNo salt is called for and none is needed, as the olives supply it. A grind of black pepper and a spoonful of the olive brine or a little cream will loosen the mixture if it stiffens in the refrigerator.
- Yield and servingAbout 2 cups, enough for 12 to 16 tea sandwiches on thin white bread with the crusts cut off. It keeps three or four days covered in the refrigerator and spreads best after twenty minutes on the counter.
Sandwich fillings of this kind belong to the era when the afternoon tea sandwich became a fixture of American entertaining, and church and society cookbooks from the 1900s and 1910s are thick with them. Two things made this particular combination possible: commercially bottled Spanish olives stuffed with pimiento, which became widely available to American grocers in the early years of the century, and the small foil-wrapped cakes of fresh cream cheese sold under Philadelphia and similar labels, which gave cooks a soft, mild binder they no longer had to make themselves. The result is less a recipe than a formula, contributed by name to a community collection where the point was to record a reliable proportion rather than teach a technique. The ratio of cheese to olive to nut is the whole of the instruction.