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Olive Sandwiches
Cut the meat off the stones and chop the olives very fine. Mix with mayonnaise dressing and spread on unbuttered white bread made with Five Roses flour and cut very thin.
A two-ingredient spread that depends entirely on the balance between olive and mayonnaise. The original assumes brined green olives and a homemade dressing thick enough to hold the chopped fruit together.
- Which olivesThe instruction to cut the meat off the stones means whole unpitted olives; plain brine-cured green olives are the likeliest reading. Pimiento-stuffed olives will also work, though they come pitted. Kalamata or oil-cured black olives will bleed purple into the mayonnaise and overwhelm the bread.
- Chop, don't puree"Very fine" means knife-fine, not a food processor. Machine-chopped olives release brine and turn the filling watery, and it will soak the thin bread within minutes.
- Drain wellBlot the chopped olives on a towel before mixing. This is the difference between a spread that holds and a sandwich that collapses.
- ProportionsThe original gives none. About 1 cup of chopped olives to 3-4 tablespoons of mayonnaise gives a spreadable paste; enough for roughly 12 to 16 small tea sandwiches.
- Unbuttered, and whyThe original specifies unbuttered bread without saying why; the likely reason is that the mayonnaise already supplies the fat. Adding both tends to make the filling greasy and dull the salt of the olive.
- Cutting thinA day-old loaf slices far thinner than fresh bread. Chill the loaf briefly, use a long serrated knife, and trim crusts after filling rather than before.
- The flourFive Roses was the brand this book was written to sell. Any all-purpose white loaf, homemade or bought, serves the same purpose.
- HoldingAssemble no more than an hour ahead, cover with a damp cloth and refrigerate. Raw-egg homemade mayonnaise in particular should not sit at room temperature on a tea table for an afternoon.
Dainty sandwiches occupy their own chapter in early twentieth-century Canadian and American cookbooks because the afternoon tea and the church social demanded food that could be made in quantity, eaten standing, and look deliberate on a plate. Olives were part of that vocabulary: imported in bottles, faintly expensive, and reliably salty against bland white bread. The Five Roses Cook Book, first issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company in 1913 and distributed to households that bought its flour, is a promotional cookbook, which explains why the flour is named in a recipe that involves no baking at all. Recipes like this one were compiled from contributions by home cooks across the country, and their brevity assumes a reader who already knew what a mayonnaise dressing should look like.