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Russian Sandwich
Spread zepherettes with cream cheese and cover with chopped olives mixed with a little mayonnaise.
Place a zepherette over each and press together.
A cracker sandwich meant for a tea tray or card table, and the whole thing turns on assembling it late. Everything else is a matter of substitution.
- ZepherettesZephyrettes were a thin, crisp, lightly salted wafer cracker sold in the early 1900s and long since discontinued. Plain water crackers, thin butter crackers or unsalted tops are the closest modern stand-ins; avoid anything thick or heavily seasoned, since the cracker is meant to shatter rather than crunch.
- Assemble at the last minuteThe recipe gives no timing, but cream cheese and mayonnaise will soften a thin cracker fairly quickly and the sandwiches slump into paste. Best filled shortly before they go out.
- Cream cheesePeriod cream cheese was a plain, firm, unwhipped block, closer to today's brick Philadelphia than to tub spread. Let it come to room temperature and beat it smooth before spreading, or the cracker will snap under the knife.
- The olivesBrine-cured green olives are a reasonable reading, though the recipe specifies only "chopped olives." Chop fine rather than slice, and drain and blot them well; wet olives will thin the mayonnaise and speed up the sogging.
- How much mayonnaise"A little" means just enough to bind the chopped olives into a spoonable paste; add it sparingly. Any more and the filling runs out the sides when the top cracker is pressed on.
- PressingPress gently and squarely with the flat of the hand. Thin wafer crackers crack easily on the diagonal, and a cracked lid looks worse than an uneven one.
- Yield and servingThe original gives none. Half a cup of chopped olives and four ounces of cream cheese will fill roughly nine or ten sandwiches of two small crackers each, enough for a few people as part of a tea spread.
Cracker sandwiches like this one belong to the brief, particular moment when the packaged thin wafer cracker met the packaged cream cheese, and both could be bought at a grocer's rather than made at home. Sandwich books proliferated in the United States in the first two decades of the twentieth century, aimed squarely at the afternoon tea, the bridge party and the church social, where food had to be small, dry enough to hold in the fingers, and assembled quickly by a hostess without a cook. The name "Russian" here almost certainly points at the seasoning rather than any Russian origin: mayonnaise sharpened with chili sauce or pimiento was the standard American shorthand for "Russian" dressing in this period, a term generally traced to the same years and commonly attributed to James E. Colburn of Nashua, New Hampshire. Zephyrettes themselves were a branded cracker of the era, thin enough that the name is often read as a promise of a breeze, and their disappearance from shelves is why this recipe now reads like a puzzle.