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Cream Cheese and Olive Sandwich
Work cream cheese until smooth, add one-half quantity of chopped olives, season with salt, and moisten with mayonnaise. Place between thin slices of lightly buttered rye bread.
A four-line filling that depends almost entirely on proportion and texture. The only real decisions are how finely to chop the olives and how much mayonnaise to add.
- What "cream cheese" meantIn 1909 this is the soft, fresh, unripened cheese sold in foil-wrapped bars — Philadelphia-style or Neufchatel. Full-fat block cream cheese is the right modern substitute; whipped tub cheese is already loose and will make a sloppy filling once the mayonnaise goes in.
- The proportion"One-half quantity" most likely means half as much chopped olive as cheese, though the recipe does not say whether by weight or by volume. Read as volume, eight ounces of cheese takes roughly half a cup of chopped olives — a generous ratio that gives a filling which is olive-forward rather than merely flecked.
- Which olivesThe recipe does not say. A brine-cured green olive of the Spanish type, pitted, is the likeliest reading for an American book of this date, and stuffed pimiento olives would also suit. Chop them fine and blot them dry, or the brine will thin the cheese.
- Salt with careThe olives bring their own salt. Mix, taste, and salt only after the olives are in.
- Bring the cheese to room temperatureCold block cheese will not work smooth and will tear the bread. Leave it out half an hour, then beat it with a fork or paddle until it is genuinely creamy before anything else goes in. A tablespoon or two of mayonnaise is usually enough to loosen it.
- Why the bread is butteredThe thin film of butter is a moisture barrier between a wet filling and thin-cut bread — worth doing even though the filling is already rich. Softened, not melted, spread edge to edge.
- MayonnaisePeriod mayonnaise was made at home with raw yolks. Commercial jarred mayonnaise is made with pasteurised egg and is both safer and more stable for a sandwich that may sit an hour or two.
- YieldEight ounces of cheese with half a cup of olives fills about six rounds of sandwiches, or roughly two dozen small tea-sandwich fingers with the crusts cut off.
Eva Greene Fuller's sandwich book belongs to a brief, very productive moment when the sandwich stopped being a scrap of cold meat between bread and became a category of its own, driven by the ladies' luncheon, the card party and the afternoon tea. Cream cheese was central to that shift: fresh unripened cheese in small foil-wrapped bars had been sold in American groceries since the 1880s, and it spread easily, took any flavouring, and needed no cooking, which made it the ideal base for the dozens of variations these books catalogue. Pairing it with chopped olives was one of the most durable of those combinations " it survives today in the pinwheel sandwich and in commercial olive-and-pimiento spreads. The rye bread here may well be a small signal of the period's urban American taste, where rye from Central and Eastern European bakeries had arguably become common enough in cities to be specified without comment, though that reading is inference rather than documented fact.