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Government Sandwiches
Mash a cream cheese, and add chopped olives and pimientos in equal parts. Season well with salt and paprika. Spread between slices of bread, remove crusts, and cut in fancy shapes or roll.
A three-ingredient spread that lives or dies on moisture control. Everything else here is assembly.
- The hinge: drain everythingOlives and jarred pimientos both carry brine, and brine turns crustless white bread to paste within the hour. Chop them, then press them dry in a towel before working them into the cheese.
- "A cream cheese"Small packaged bricks of about 3 ounces were a common retail size, though cream cheese was also sold loose and in other sizes. Use about 3 oz of full-fat block cream cheese and let it soften at room temperature; whipped or tub-style cheese is too loose to hold the chopped filling.
- Equal parts, by whatThe original does not say whether the olives and pimientos are measured against each other only or against the cheese. Read it as equal parts olive to pimiento, roughly a third of a cup of the two combined per 3 oz of cheese, and adjust to taste.
- OlivesPlain pitted green olives are the likeliest reading, since the pimientos are listed separately; Spanish or Manzanilla work. Oil-cured black olives will overwhelm the paprika.
- PaprikaSweet Hungarian or plain sweet paprika is meant, used for colour and mild warmth. Smoked paprika was not what an American cook of this period would have had to hand and will read as bacon.
- RollingRolled sandwiches need very fresh, thinly sliced bread, lightly flattened with a rolling pin first. Roll each one, secure with a toothpick, and chill 30 minutes wrapped in a damp cloth so they hold their shape.
- Yield and holdingOne 3 oz cheese fills about six sandwiches, or two to three dozen small fancy shapes. Make the spread a day ahead if convenient, but assemble no more than a few hours before serving.
Meatless cookery of this sort is often associated with the American home front of the First World War, when the U.S. Food Administration under Herbert Hoover urged households to observe meatless days and wheatless days and to stretch scarce protein "u2014 a campaign popular enough that "Hooverize" entered ordinary speech. Whether the name "Government Sandwiches" carries any such connection is not clear from the recipe itself, which is undated: cheese, olives and pimientos made a filling that looked like party food, and the instruction to trim crusts and cut in fancy shapes suggests the afternoon-tea and club-luncheon repertoire. Pimientos themselves were a fairly recent convenience, canned Spanish sweet peppers having become widely available in American groceries in the first decades of the century, and they turn up constantly in sandwich fillings of the 1910s and 1920s for their colour as much as their flavour.