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Olivette
On a silver cracker plate place a nicely peeled hard boiled egg, add a couple of saltine wafers, and surround by a half dozen American Stuffed Olives. Serve with an olive fork and a cup of American Chicken Bouillon topped with whipped cream. Pass salt, pepper and celery salt to the customer when serving.
This is a fountain luncheon plate rather than a cooked dish: everything is assembled cold except the cup of bouillon, so the whole thing succeeds or fails on the quality of three components. Two points matter more than the rest — the egg and the bouillon.
- The egg"Nicely peeled" is the entire difficulty, since the egg is the centerpiece and shows every gouge. Twelve minutes at a bare simmer, then an ice bath, gives a firm yolk and a shell that slips; eggs a week or two old peel far more cleanly than very fresh ones.
- Bouillon means brothBouillon in this context is a clear, well-seasoned chicken broth, not a thickened soup; the recipe's capitalized "American Chicken Bouillon" points to a house or branded preparation served hot. A good unsalted stock seasoned to taste will stand in; bouillon cubes will read as very salty next to six olives.
- Whipped cream on soupThe cream would almost certainly have been unsweetened; whip it only softly so it melts into the broth rather than sitting on it like dessert. The recipe gives no quantity, so a spoonful or two per cup is a reasonable reading.
- "American Stuffed Olives"The capitals mark this as a named preparation, either a proprietary product or a formula given elsewhere in the book. Ordinary green olives stuffed with pimiento are the likely reading; the recipe calls for a half dozen, which is a serving rather than a garnish.
- Saltine wafersAny plain, crisp cracker will serve. The salt, pepper and celery salt are passed to the customer rather than applied in the kitchen, as the recipe directs.
- Celery saltCelery salt appears often in fountain-era seasoning lists, and here it is passed at table. Offer it in a shaker and let the customer judge.
- Yield and serviceOne plate serves one person as a light lunch. Assemble it to order — the egg sweats and the crackers soften within a few minutes on the plate.
By the time this book was written the American soda fountain had become a lunch counter as well as a drink bar, and manuals of the trade devoted whole sections to cold plates, sandwiches and hot bouillon drawn from an urn beside the syrup pumps. "Olivette" is often taken as a fountain coinage, in the same spirit as the invented names given to sundaes and phosphates in these lists, though it is also an existing French word for a small olive. The details are commercial ones: a silver cracker plate and an olive fork, all meant to make a little egg, crackers and broth look like a served meal. Bouillon topped with whipped cream, odd as it reads now, appears to have been a fountain nicety of the period, and it points to the fountain's ambition to compete with the restaurant rather than merely refresh a shopper.