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Olive Sandwiches
Take either ripe or green olives; remove the seeds; mince and mix thoroughly with Mayonnaise dressing. Spread between slices of whole-wheat or graham bread.
A sandwich filling of the kind that filled out tea trays in the early twentieth century. The original gives no proportions, so the balance is left to the cook.
- ProportionsRoughly two parts minced olive to one part mayonnaise by volume gives a spread that holds together without soaking the bread. Add the dressing gradually; olives release brine as they are chopped and the mixture loosens on standing.
- Ripe or green"Ripe" here means black or brown cured olives, milder and softer; green olives are sharper and saltier. Either works, but green olives usually need no extra salt in the mayonnaise. Some period recipes for this filling add a pinch of paprika or a little grated onion.
- PittingBuy whole olives rather than pre-sliced or pre-chopped, which are watery. Press each with the flat of a knife to split it and the pit comes out cleanly.
- Graham breadGraham flour is coarsely ground whole wheat including the bran and germ, named for Sylvester Graham. Any dense whole-wheat sandwich loaf stands in; the point is a firm, close-grained crumb that resists the dressing.
- The mayonnaiseIf you make it from scratch it will contain raw egg and is not for anyone pregnant, elderly, immunocompromised or very young. Pasteurized eggs or a good jarred mayonnaise avoid the question entirely.
- Assembly and yieldButter the bread thinly first as a moisture barrier, spread, trim the crusts, and cut into fingers or triangles. About a cup of minced olives fills six to eight sandwiches, or two to three dozen tea-sized pieces.
- HoldingMake the filling ahead but assemble within an hour or two of serving, covered with a damp cloth. Filled sandwiches left overnight go grey and limp.
Olive sandwiches belong to the era when the sandwich moved off the workman's lunch pail and onto the afternoon tea tray, cut small, crustless, and filled with something finely minced and bound with dressing. Commercial canning of ripe California olives was only being established at the very end of the 1890s, reaching volume in the following decade, which eventually put them within reach of ordinary households and made recipes like this one possible outside the port cities; loose-leaf cookbooks of the period are thick with olive, nut, and cheese fillings of exactly this pattern. The instruction to use whole-wheat or graham bread reflects the lingering influence of the Graham dietary reform movement, which had pressed the case for unrefined flour since the 1830s and by this date had settled into a general middle-class conviction that brown bread was the wholesome choice.