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Stuffed Celery Sandwich
Mix 1 cream cheese with 2 tablespoons celery chopped fine 1 tablespoon chopped, stuffed olives 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon paprika and Enough milk to make it the right consistency to spread. Cut Bread in circles 1/4 inch thick. Cut centers from one-half the pieces of bread. Spread bread with Creamed butter and with sandwich filling. Place a ring of bread on a whole circle of bread. Garnish each sandwich with a Slice of stuffed olive in the center.
A ring-and-round tea sandwich from the era when cream cheese came in a small foil-wrapped brick and no one felt the need to say how big it was. The work is all in the cutting and the spread's consistency.
- "1 cream cheese"The unit is a package. Small 3-ounce packages were the usual retail size for much of the early twentieth century, so about 3 oz is a reasonable reading; if you start from a modern 8-ounce block, scale the celery, olives and seasoning up to match.
- Spreading consistencyAdd the milk a teaspoon at a time and stop while the mixture still holds a peak. Too loose and it weeps into the bread within an hour, which ruins the clean edge of the cut-out ring.
- Creamed butterButter beaten until soft and fluffy, not melted. It seals the crumb against moisture from the filling, so do not skip it on the bottom circle.
- Cutting the roundsA day-old close-crumbed white loaf cuts far more cleanly than fresh bread. The recipe gives no sizes; use one cutter for the round and a smaller one for the center, and press straight down without twisting.
- Chop fine means fineCelery cut coarse will tear the thin bread as you spread. Take the strings off the stalk first and cut it to something near a 1/8-inch dice.
- Stuffed olivesUsually green olives stuffed with pimiento, by far the most common stuffed olive of the period. Drain and blot them or the brine will thin the filling.
- Yield and holdingThe quantity of filling is small, so expect roughly a dozen or so little sandwiches from a 3-oz package, depending on the size of your cutter. Assemble no more than an hour or two ahead, cover with a damp cloth over waxed paper, and keep them cold.
- Using the scrapsThe centers punched from the top rounds and the crusts make a second tray of open canapes with the same filling, or dry into crumbs. Cut-out sandwiches waste a great deal of bread otherwise.
Sandwiches like this belong to the American luncheon and bridge-party culture of the early twentieth century, when a hostess was judged on the neatness of her tray rather than the quantity on it. Commercial cream cheese, sold in small packages from the late nineteenth century onward, made a smooth spreadable filling available without a dairy or a cheesecloth bag, and it ran through the sandwich chapters of household cookbooks in combination with almost anything finely chopped: celery, olives, nuts, pimiento, dates. The ring-on-a-round construction here is pure presentation, meant to show a band of filling with a single olive slice at the center.