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Good Sandwich Filling
1 cup sweet milk. 1 tablespoon flour. 1 teaspoon salt. Dash of cayenne pepper. 1/2 lb. Cream cheese. 1 can pimentos.
Cook milk, flour, salt and pepper and cheese over hot water until very thick. Add pimentos cut in pieces. When cold, spread between bread. Lettuce with minced celery and nuts makes a nice filling. Let lettuce show on edge of bread.
Olives and pimentos cut up with dressing make good sandwiches. A paste made of baked beans and tomato catsup, used between slices of brown bread, with thin slices of pickle, is liked by bean eaters. Sweet sandwiches made with jams, jellies, wafers, plain or combined with something else.
This is a pimento cheese spread built as a thick white sauce, followed by a run of quick sandwich suggestions. The cooked base is the only part with real technique in it.
- "Sweet milk"Simply fresh, unsoured whole milk, as opposed to the buttermilk or sour milk that older recipes call for separately. Use whole milk; skim gives a thin, watery base.
- "Over hot water"A double boiler, or a heatproof bowl set over a pan of simmering water. It matters here: cheese held over direct heat will break and turn grainy, and the mixture must cook long enough to lose the raw-flour taste.
- Cream cheese in 1920Cream cheese at this period -- the term then covered fresh soft cheeses generally, sold loose or in foil bricks and often looser than what we buy now. Modern block cream cheese works; let it come to room temperature so it melts smoothly into the milk.
- The flourOne tablespoon to a cup of milk makes only a thin sauce on its own. The body comes from the half pound of cheese, so do not expect it to thicken like a bechamel before the cheese goes in.
- SaltA full teaspoon for this quantity reads high to modern palates, particularly with salted cheese and canned pimentos. Start with half and correct at the end.
- A can of pimentosModern jars are commonly about 4 oz net, less once drained, which is roughly the proportion wanted here. Drain them well and blot dry, or the liquid will thin the cooled spread and soak the bread.
- CoolingThe recipe says to spread it cold. Warm, the mixture is soft and awkward to handle; chilled, it sets firm enough to spread without tearing soft bread.
- Yield and keepingA couple of cups or so, enough for a good number of sandwiches. Being a fresh dairy spread, it belongs in the refrigerator and should be used within three or four days.
Mrs. Wilson wrote for the Ladies' Home Journal and her books are full of this kind of entry: one properly worked recipe followed by a list of ideas a cook could improvise from. The pimento-and-cream-cheese combination is generally traced to the first years of the twentieth century, when two new grocery items arrived more or less together — factory-made cream cheese in foil bricks and canned sweet peppers, first imported from Spain and later grown in the American South. Both were novelties of industrial food, not heirlooms, and the pairing spread through magazine cookery of exactly this sort before it settled into its long career as a Southern staple. The rest of the page is a snapshot of what a sandwich meant in the 1920s, when afternoon teas, box lunches and bridge parties made cold fillings a daily concern: lettuce left deliberately showing at the edge of the bread, and baked beans mashed with catsup for the household's bean eaters.