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Neufchatel and Olive Sandwich
Chop half a dozen olives and a half-cupful of pecan meats fine; mix with a cake of Neufchatel cheese, moisten with a little cream, and place between thin slices of lightly buttered white bread.
A three-ingredient spread that depends entirely on proportion: the cheese should carry the olive and nut, not the reverse. Everything here is worth pinning down because the original gives no weights.
- A cake of NeufchatelAmerican Neufchatel was sold in small foil-wrapped cakes in this period, commonly around 3 ounces, though sizes varied by maker; today it comes in 8-ounce bars marked "1/3 less fat" cream cheese. Use roughly 3 oz for one batch, or scale the olives and pecans up threefold to use a whole modern bar. It is not the French Neufchâtel with a bloomy rind, which would overwhelm the filling.
- Which olivesUnqualified "olives" in an American book of this date most likely means brine-cured green olives, pitted. Half a dozen chopped fine yields about 2 tablespoons. Blot them dry before chopping or the spread turns loose and weepy.
- Pecan meatsHalf a cupful of pecan halves is about 2 ounces. Chopping them fine rather than coarse matters: large pieces tear thin bread when you spread and press the sandwich.
- The creamAdd it a teaspoon at a time. The spread should be soft enough to move under a knife without dragging, and no softer; too much cream and the olive brine together will soak the bread within the hour.
- Season itThe recipe assumes the olives bring all the salt. Taste before spreading and add a grind of pepper; a squeeze of lemon lifts the whole thing if the olives are mild.
- Bread and butterThe light buttering is structural, not decorative. It seals the crumb against moisture from the cheese.
- Yield and holdingEnough for perhaps four to six small sandwiches, crusts trimmed and cut in halves or triangles. The spread can be made a day ahead and refrigerated, but assemble no more than an hour or two before serving, covered with a damp cloth.
Eva Greene Fuller's Up-to-Date Sandwich Book belongs to the moment when the sandwich is often said to have stopped being a picnic expedient and become a fixture of the American ladies' luncheon and afternoon tea. Neufchatel is the reason a page like this exists: the soft fresh cheese was being made in New York State from the 1870s onward as an imitation of the French original, and by the 1900s it was sold nationally in small cakes cheap enough to treat as a spreading medium rather than a cheese course. Olives and pecans were both fashionable and newly available at grocers' scale, with Southern pecans moving north by rail. The combination of salt, fat and crunch on trimmed white bread is the formula of other recipes in this section, and it survives more or less intact in the cream-cheese-and-olive spread still sold in supermarket tubs.