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Cheese and Olive Salad
Mash a cream cheese, moisten with cream, and season with salt and cayenne. Add six olives finely chopped, lettuce finely cut, and one-half a pimento cut in strips. Press In original shape of cheese and let stand two hours. Cut in slices, separate in pieces, and serve on lettuce leaves with Mayonnaise Dressing.
A molded cheese salad from the era when the salad course was as much about shape as flavor. Everything hinges on the cheese being soft enough to blend but stiff enough to hold a form.
- "A cream cheese"In this period cream cheese was commonly sold in small foil-wrapped bricks of about 3 ounces. One modern 8-ounce block is roughly two and a half to three of the originals; use 3 to 4 ounces and scale the olives and pimiento to taste.
- Cream, sparinglyAdd it a teaspoon at a time. The mixture must stay firm enough to slice after chilling, so aim for the texture of stiff frosting rather than a spread.
- Press in original shapeLine a small loaf pan or ramekin with plastic wrap, or roll the mixture in wrap into a log; the point is a solid mass that cuts cleanly.
- Two hours means coldRefrigerate, not room temperature. Two hours firms it adequately; longer chilling firms it further.
- PimentoA pimiento is a sweet red pepper, sold then as now in jars. Drain and blot the strips dry or they will bleed pink streaks through the cheese.
- OlivesMost likely green brine-cured olives, pitted and chopped fine. Six is a modest amount for a small cheese; taste before adding salt, since the olives and mayonnaise both bring plenty.
- Lettuce inside the mixtureThe finely cut lettuce folded into the cheese wilts and weeps if it sits too long. Cut it in thin shreds and use it the day it is made.
- YieldA 3- to 4-ounce cheese makes four to six small salads as a first course or a luncheon plate.
Molded cheese salads like this one belong to the early twentieth-century American salad course, when a dish was expected to arrive in a defined shape on a lettuce leaf with a spoonful of mayonnaise beside it. Commercial cream cheese had become an everyday grocery item in the United States by the 1890s, sold in small foil-wrapped cakes, and canned or bottled pimientos—imported from Spain before Georgia growers took up the crop in the early 1900s—gave cooks a reliable spot of red at a time when fresh sweet peppers were seasonal. The combination of cheese, brined olive and pimiento recurs throughout the period's cookbooks. Such small composed plates are often said to have been served after the meat course, though the arrangement of the menu varied.