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Olive and Pepper Sandwich
Chop olives fine, add a little finely chopped green and red (sweet) peppers, a dash of mayonnaise dressing; mix and place between thin slices of lightly buttered white bread.
A three-ingredient spread with no quantities given, typical of sandwich books of the period, which assumed the cook could judge by eye. The only real decisions are the ratio of olive to pepper and how much moisture you allow.
- Working proportionsSomething like 1 cup pitted green olives to 1/3 cup combined chopped peppers, with the mayonnaise added a spoonful at a time only until the mixture coheres, should give a spread that holds together without soaking the bread; the original specifies only 'a little' pepper and 'a dash' of dressing. That would fill roughly six to eight sandwiches cut into halves or fingers.
- Which olivesIn American books of this period an unqualified 'olives' generally meant brine-cured green olives, commonly Spanish imports, sold loose from a barrel or in bulk jars. Pimiento-stuffed olives will work and shorten the recipe, but reduce the red pepper accordingly.
- Drain everythingThe hinge of the recipe. Olives and fresh peppers both weep, and a wet filling turns thin white bread to paste within an hour. Chop, then spread on a towel and blot before mixing with the dressing.
- "Green and red (sweet) peppers"Fresh bell peppers, not chilies and not the pickled peppers sold today in jars. The parenthetical 'sweet' most likely just signals sweet rather than hot varieties. Canned pimientos, available in the period, are an acceptable stand-in for the red.
- Mayonnaise dressingMayonnaise of the period was usually made at home with raw yolk and was often thinner and sharper than the jarred kind. Commercial mayonnaise works; a squeeze of lemon brings it nearer to what was likely intended.
- Butter is structuralThe thin film of butter on the bread helps seal the crumb against the oily, acidic filling as much as it adds flavour. Skipping it makes for a soggier sandwich.
- Cutting and holdingSandwiches of this kind were often trimmed of crusts and cut into triangles or fingers for tea and card parties. Made ahead, they keep a few hours under a damp cloth in the refrigerator; beyond that the peppers dull and the bread suffers.
Olive sandwiches belong to the brief American vogue for the dainty tea sandwich, often dated roughly to the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, when compact books of nothing but sandwich fillings sold well to hostesses and to the growing trade in club and luncheon service. Two things made a filling like this possible: cheap imported Spanish olives, which are generally said to have become widely available in this period, and commercially milled soft white sandwich loaves that could be sliced thin without tearing. Sweet peppers, both fresh and the canned Spanish pimiento that entered American cooking around the same period, were the fashionable colour note of the era, turning up in salads, cheese spreads and aspics wherever a cook wanted red and green against a pale background. The recipe's brevity is the point; the reader was expected to supply proportions, judgement and a steady hand with the bread knife.