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Olive and Cheese Sandwich
Thin slices of white bread lightly buttered, cut in hexagon shape. Between each two slices place a layer of Neufchatel cheese mixed to a paste with a little thick cream and mayonnaise dressing, and cover thickly with chopped olives.
A tea sandwich in the fussiest sense: thin bread, a soft cheese spread loosened with cream, and a heavy layer of chopped olives. The only technical difficulty is keeping the filling from soaking the bread.
- Neufchatel is not the French cheeseIn an American book of this period Neufchatel means the soft, unripened fresh cheese sold in small foil-wrapped blocks, close kin to cream cheese but lower in fat. Modern American Neufchatel is the same product; French Neufchatel, a bloomy-rind cheese from Normandy, will not make this paste.
- Use bottled mayonnaiseA 1900s household would have whisked its own from raw yolks. Since nothing here is cooked, use commercial mayonnaise, which is made with acidified or pasteurized egg.
- Proportions are left to youWork toward roughly 8 oz cheese, 2 tablespoons heavy cream and 1 to 2 tablespoons mayonnaise, beaten until it spreads without tearing thin bread. Add the cream first and the mayonnaise last so you can stop before the paste turns loose.
- Drain the olives hardChopped brine-cured olives release liquid for as long as they sit. Chop them, spread on a towel, blot, and fold them into the cheese rather than piling them on wet as the recipe suggests. The recipe does not say which olives; pimiento-stuffed green ones give colour and sharpness.
- Cut after filling, not beforeHexagons cut from single slices lose edge to the trimming twice over. Butter and fill whole slices, press gently, chill 20 minutes, then stamp out the shapes with a cutter so the layers cut cleanly.
- Butter has a jobThe thin coat of butter on each slice is a moisture barrier, not seasoning. Have it soft enough to spread without compressing the bread, and cover the surface to the crust line.
- Yield and holdingA standard sandwich loaf and this quantity of filling should give something in the region of two dozen small hexagons, depending on the size of the cutter. Hold them stacked under a damp towel in the refrigerator for no more than a few hours; assembled the day before, they will be limp.
Sandwich books were a small publishing genre in the first quarter of the twentieth century, when afternoon tea, card parties and "luncheons" created steady demand for food that could be cut into shapes and eaten standing. The cheese in question reflects a specifically American development: soft unripened cheeses sold under the Neufchatel name were being made in New York State dairies in the later nineteenth century, and the related cream cheese that followed is generally traced to the same industry. Olives are the other period marker. Imported Spanish green olives, and later California-grown fruit, had become cheap and fashionable enough to turn up chopped into a great many savory spreads of the era.