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Egg and Olive (Hard-boiled eggs tablespoons)
4 hard-boiled eggs 2 tablespoons chopped olives SANDWICHES No. 1 Salt and pepper Olive oil and vinegar Chop the egg and mix with the olives; season and moisten with olive oil and vinegar. Spread between thin slices of buttered bread.
SANDWICHES No. 2
A sandwich filling of the loose-leaf era, given in shorthand because the cook was expected to fill in the proportions. A few things are worth pinning down.
- Quantities for the oil and vinegarThe original gives no measure. Start with about 2 tablespoons olive oil to 2 teaspoons vinegar for four eggs, added a little at a time until the mixture just holds together. Too much and the bread goes soggy within the hour.
- The olivesThe original does not specify a type. Early twentieth-century American recipes calling simply for "chopped olives" often mean brined green olives, sometimes the pimiento-stuffed sort. Drain and blot them; wet olives will thin the dressing.
- Salt with careBrined olives carry a great deal of salt already. Season at the end, after the oil and vinegar are in, and taste before adding any.
- TextureChop the eggs rather than press them through a sieve or mash them. The period intent is a coarse, visible mixture, not a smooth paste.
- BreadThe original asks only for "thin slices of buttered bread". A close-grained white sandwich loaf suits it, and buttering both slices helps, since with an oil-and-vinegar filling the butter acts as a moisture barrier as well as a flavouring.
- YieldFour eggs fill roughly six to eight rounds of sandwiches, or two to three dozen small trimmed fingers cut for tea.
- Make-aheadThe filling keeps a day covered and chilled, but assemble no more than an hour or two ahead; period sandwich instructions often advise keeping the finished sandwiches under a damp cloth.
Sandwich fillings of this kind belong to the American vogue for sandwiches in the early twentieth century, when tea sandwiches, club luncheons and church suppers created demand for dozens of small chopped fillings built on a hard-boiled egg. Olives figure heavily in that literature: bottled and canned Spanish olives, plain and pimiento-stuffed, were cheap and widely distributed by then. Oil and vinegar, as here, is one of the two usual dressings for such fillings, the other being mayonnaise.