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Egg and Olive Sandwich
Chop five hard-boiled eggs very fine. Stone and chop fifteen large olives and mix with the egg, moisten all with three tablespoonfuls of melted butter, season with salt and pepper, and mix to a moist paste. Spread on thin slices of lightly buttered white bread. Put two slices together and garnish with an olive.
A straightforward filling that needs only a few notes on proportion and handling. The one thing to watch is the butter: it sets hard once chilled, so temperature decides whether this spreads or crumbles.
- Melted butter, used warmThree tablespoons of melted butter binds the egg while warm and then firms up in the refrigerator, turning the filling brittle. Mix and spread while everything is at room temperature, or substitute an equal amount of mayonnaise if the sandwiches are to be made ahead.
- Fifteen large olivesThe recipe does not say which kind; green olives in brine are the likeliest reading for a book of this sort, and the pimiento-stuffed kind will do. Fifteen large ones come to roughly 1/2 cup once chopped, which is assertive against five eggs; start with two-thirds of that if you want the egg to lead.
- Salt with a light handBrine-cured olives carry a great deal of salt into the mix. Season at the end, after the olives are stirred in, and taste before adding any.
- Hard-boiled eggsMany older texts give long boiling times, ten minutes or more, which greys the yolk and makes it chalky. Twelve minutes standing off the heat rather than at a rolling boil, then straight into cold water, gives a yolk that still chops creamy.
- Chop, do not mash"Very fine" means knife-chopped or pressed through a coarse sieve. A food processor turns five eggs to paste in seconds and loses the texture the olives are there to play against.
- The breadThin slices of a close-crumbed white sandwich loaf, buttered to the edges — the butter is a moisture barrier, not a flavouring, and keeps the filling from soaking through before serving.
- YieldEnough for about eight to ten sandwiiches on standard slices, or two to three dozen quartered tea sandwiches with crusts trimmed.
Books of this kind were a small publishing boom in the first decades of the twentieth century, when the afternoon tea table, the card party and the boxed lunch all wanted something more considered than bread and cold meat. Chopped hard-boiled egg was the workhorse of the genre: cheap, bland enough to carry anything, and firm enough to slice cleanly. Olives were the fashionable partner — cookbooks of the period reach for them constantly as a mark of the up-to-date, in the same spirit that later decades reached for paprika or curry powder. The instruction to garnish the finished sandwich with a whole olive is pure period presentation: the filling announces itself from the outside.