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Ripe Olive Sandwich
Chop ripe olives fine, mix with a little mayonnaise, and place between thin slices of lightly buttered white bread.
Three ingredients and no measurements, which means the balance is entirely in your hands. The spread should hold together on the knife without weeping oil.
- Ripe olivesIn American books of this period "ripe olives" usually means fully ripened black olives of the sort California canners were then selling, mild and firm rather than salty and oil-cured. A can of pitted California black olives is a reasonable modern stand-in; brinier olives will overpower the mayonnaise and need a lighter hand.
- Drain and dryChop the olives, then blot them on a towel before mixing. Canned olives carry a good deal of packing liquid, and wet olives will slacken the mayonnaise and soak through the crumb within the hour.
- ProportionStart with roughly a tablespoon of mayonnaise to a half cup of chopped olives and add more only if the mixture will not hold. The mayonnaise is a binder here, not a sauce.
- MayonnaiseA 1909 cook would most likely have whisked her own from raw yolks and oil, though prepared mayonnaise was beginning to be sold. Commercial jarred mayonnaise is made with pasteurized egg and is the practical choice; if you make your own, use pasteurized eggs and keep the sandwiches cold.
- The butter is structuralThe butter -- A thin film of softened butter on each slice helps seal the crumb against the olive moisture, which should help the sandwich hold up if it is made a little ahead.
- Bread and cuttingThe recipe calls only for thin slices of soft white bread. Trimming the crusts and cutting into triangles or fingers is a serving suggestion, not part of the instruction. Assemble, wrap in a damp cloth or plastic, chill briefly, then cut for clean edges.
- YieldA half cup of chopped olives fills about four rounds of bread, giving eight to twelve small cut sandwiches.
The Up-to-Date Sandwich Book belongs to the moment when the sandwich is often said to have moved from a chophouse afterthought to a centerpiece of the ladies' luncheon and the afternoon tea table, hence the thin white bread, the trimmed crusts, and the hundreds of minute variations on a spread bound with mayonnaise. The ripe olive itself was a comparatively new American grocery item: California growers developed the canned black-ripe olive in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, lye-cured and air-oxidized, and by the early 1900s it was shelf-stable and fashionable enough to turn up in salads, canapes and sandwich fillings, though the industry was still young and small. A cook reaching for ripe olives in 1909 was reaching for something modern and faintly luxurious rather than for an ancient Mediterranean staple.