Home › Salads › Cheese and Olive Salad
Cheese and Olive Salad
Mash a cream cheese, and season with salt and paprika. Add 4 finely chopped olives, 4 lettuce leaves finely cut, and a piece of canned pimiento to give color. Press in original shape of cheese and let stand two hours. Cut in slices and serve on lettuce leaves with French dressing.
A pressed cheese log dressed up with olives and pimiento — closer to a modern cheese ball than to a salad, but it slices cleanly if you chill it hard. Two details in the original text mislead a modern cook: the size of the cheese and the meaning of "French dressing."
- "A cream cheese"In this period cream cheese was sold as a small individual cake, roughly 3 ounces — the size of the old Neufchâtel-style foil-wrapped bar. One 8-ounce brick of modern cream cheese will make two to three times the recipe; use about a third of a brick, or scale the olives and pimiento up accordingly.
- Press in original shapeThe instruction simply asks you to reshape the mixture into the block or cake the cheese came as; the original wrapper is one way, but not necessarily what was meant. Pack the seasoned mixture into a small ramekin, a rinsed foil wrapper, or a length of plastic wrap rolled into a cylinder; anything that gives it a defined shape to slice.
- Let stand two hoursThe recipe does not say where; stand it in the refrigerator rather than at room temperature. Cold is what makes the log firm enough to cut — softened cream cheese with chopped wet ingredients folded in will smear under a knife.
- OlivesMost likely green brine-cured olives. Drain and blot them dry, and blot the pimiento too; excess brine loosens the cheese and it will not hold a slice.
- Canned pimientoStill sold in small jars, usually beside the olives. A piece of drained jarred roasted red pepper is the same thing in effect — sweet, soft, and used here purely for color.
- French dressingIn American cookbooks of this era French dressing means a plain vinaigrette: about three parts oil to one part vinegar, salt and pepper, whisked or shaken. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing that later took the name.
- Cutting the slicesUse a thin knife dipped in hot water and wiped between cuts, or a length of dental floss drawn through. Rounds of about half an inch hold together best.
- YieldAs written, from a single small cheese, this serves two as a light salad course or four as an appetizer portion — two or three slices apiece on a lettuce leaf.
This comes from the era when the salad course in American home cookery was as much about arrangement as about greens: something molded, sliced or stuffed, set on a lettuce leaf and passed with dressing. Cream cheese was the workhorse of that style — cheap, mild, and willing to take on chopped olives, nuts, dates, celery or pimiento — and it turns up repeatedly in salad chapters of the period. Canned pimiento, much of it imported from Spain in the early years of the century, was a standard way to put a spot of red on a white dish.