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Pimento Sandwiches
Beat a cream cheese with two tablespoonfuls of thick cream until soft, and add a pimento that has been put through a purée sieve. Spread fancy shaped pieces of rye bread with this mixture, sprinkle with a few caraway seeds and make into sandwiches.
A spread rather than a project: the only technical demand is getting the pimento smooth enough that it colours the cheese instead of sitting in it as wet flecks.
- Cream cheese quantity"A cream cheese" in books of this period usually means one small foil-wrapped block, commonly the 3-ounce size. A modern 8-ounce brick will need roughly two and a half times the cream and two or three pimentos.
- Thick creamHeavy or whipping cream, unwhipped. Two tablespoons per 3 ounces of cheese is what makes the mixture spreadable without tearing soft bread; add it a little at a time and stop when it will move under a knife.
- PimentoJarred or canned pimientos are still sold, usually as sliced or whole roasted sweet peppers packed in brine. Drain them well and blot dry, or the liquid will loosen the spread and soak the bread.
- Purée sieveA food mill, or a fine sieve pressed through with a wooden spoon. A small food processor or an immersion blender in a cup does the same job in seconds.
- CarawayA light sprinkle only, and on the spread rather than the bread, so the seeds stick. Whole caraway is assertive; a quarter teaspoon covers a dozen small sandwiches.
- "Fancy shaped pieces"Cut rounds, diamonds or triangles with a cutter from thin-sliced rye, working from the whole slice before spreading. Dense deli rye holds a shape better than soft sandwich rye.
- Assembly and holdingThese are tea sandwiches, not a packed lunch. Make them no more than two or three hours ahead, cover with a barely damp cloth and refrigerate, or the moisture in the pimento will grey the crumb.
- YieldOne 3-ounce cheese fills about ten to twelve small sandwiches, which is a plate for four to six people alongside other items on a luncheon menu.
Pimiento and cream cheese belong to the early twentieth-century American luncheon table, and both halves of the pairing were products of new industry: canned Spanish-style pimientos, grown commercially in Georgia from about 1911, and mass-market cream cheese sold in small foil blocks. Together they gave hostesses a coloured, spreadable filling that needed no cooking, which is why the combination turns up in sandwich after sandwich in books of this era. The rye bread and caraway suggest that this particular version may be aiming at a central European note rather than the Southern pimiento-cheese line that used grated cheddar. Its place in a book called Cook and Be Cool is straightforward: nothing here requires heat, which was the whole point of a summer menu before air conditioning.