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Sandwich Spread
1/2 C Olive butter or chopped stuffed olives 2½ T salad dressing Mix all ingredients together and spread on sandwich bread. This will make about 2½ dozen sandwiches.
A two-line church-supper filler with at least one obvious typesetting casualty. Read the quantities before you shop.
- Olive butterA paste of olives ground fine; the name was used both for jarred commercial pastes and for home-pounded olive-and-butter mixtures. The recipe already gives you the substitute: finely chopped stuffed olives, drained well so the spread does not weep into the bread.
- Salad dressingIn cookbooks of this period this usually means a cooked or boiled dressing, or one of the tangy bottled dressings, rather than true egg-yolk mayonnaise. Mayonnaise works and is milder; a spoonful of Miracle Whip-style dressing is closer to what was intended.
- "22 dozen" is a misprintHalf a cup of chopped olives with two and a half tablespoons of dressing makes about two-thirds of a cup of spread, enough for a handful of sandwiches cut in halves, or a dozen or so small tea triangles. Two dozen at the very outside.
- "Mix all ingredients" suggests a missing line"Mix all ingredients" may point to a dropped line, though two items is all the recipe lists. If you want a fuller spread, beat 4 oz softened cream cheese into the olives and use the dressing only to loosen it.
- Ratio, not measurementWork by feel: add dressing a little at a time until the mixture just holds together and spreads without tearing soft bread. Olives vary a great deal in how wet they are out of the jar.
- Bread and holdingThin-sliced white sandwich bread, crusts trimmed, is the period standard. Spread butter on the bread first as a moisture barrier, assemble no more than a few hours ahead, and keep covered with a damp towel in the refrigerator.
Sandwich spreads of this kind belong to the age of the ladies' luncheon and the church social, when a sandwich meant something soft, small, crustless and savory rather than a meal. Fundraising cookbooks were typically assembled from members' own recipe cards, which is why entries run to a line or two: everyone contributing already knew what a sandwich spread looked like and only the proportions needed writing down. Olives were a fashionable savory note of the period, arriving in American kitchens in quantity as Spanish and Californian jarred olives became cheaper, and prepared "olive butter" was one of a family of ready-made pastes that let a home cook produce a fancy-tasting filling with little work. The chopped-olive-and-dressing formula proved durable enough to survive into the pimiento-cheese and olive-nut spreads still made in the South and Midwest.