Home › Cheese › Sandwich (Mix one cream cheese)
Sandwich (Mix one cream cheese)
Mix one cream cheese with an equal amount of chopped pimolas; season with salt and cayenne, and moisten with a little mayonnaise dressing. Place between thin slices of lightly buttered white or brown bread.
A simple spread that needs only two clarifications: what a "cream cheese" was as a unit of purchase, and what pimolas were.
- PimolasA trade name of the period for green olives stuffed with pimiento, sold by the bottle. Any pimiento-stuffed Spanish olive works; drain and blot them before chopping or the spread will weep.
- One cream cheeseNot a measurement by weight but a single small cake of fresh cheese as then sold, commonly around 3 oz. Cream cheese of the period was generally softer and tangier than the stabilized blocks now standard, and was often made in the Neufchatel style.
- Equal amountThe recipe does not say whether by weight or by volume; taken by volume it works out at roughly 1/3 cup chopped olives to a 3 oz cheese. That is an assertively salty ratio by modern taste; start at half and work up.
- SaltTaste before adding any. Between the olives, their brine and the mayonnaise, most batches need none at all.
- MayonnaiseA tablespoon is plenty. Its job is to loosen the cheese to a spreadable paste, not to flavor it; softening the cheese to room temperature first means you need less.
- CayenneA pinch, meant as heat you notice only at the finish. Period cheese sandwiches lean on cayenne where a modern cook might reach for black pepper.
- The breadThin slices, lightly buttered. The butter acts as a moisture barrier as much as a flavor: without it a wet spread will soak into the bread, which matters for sandwiches cut ahead for tea.
- YieldAbout 3/4 cup of spread, enough for four rounds of sandwiches or roughly sixteen small tea-cut fingers.
Sandwich books proliferated in America between about 1900 and 1915, when the afternoon tea, the card party and the packed luncheon all wanted something small and fillable, and this collection belongs squarely to that wave. Cream cheese was the workhorse of the genre: cheap, spreadable, and neutral enough to carry nuts, olives, pimiento, chopped ham or preserved ginger in dozens of near-identical variations. "Pimola" itself is a period brand-word for the pimiento-stuffed olive, which is generally said to have come from Spain and was still novel enough to be named in recipes rather than described. That a cook could be told to take "one cream cheese" without further qualification suggests how familiar the small packaged cake had already become.