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Waukesha Cheese Sandwich
Cream one brick of Waukesha cheese with a little sweet cream, add a pinch of salt, a few chopped pecan nut meats, and a few chopped olives. Place between thin slices of lightly buttered rye bread.
A spreadable cheese filling of the sort that filled tea tables and club luncheons around 1900. Two things need translating: the cheese itself and the size of a "brick."
- Waukesha cheeseThis most likely means Wisconsin brick cheese; Waukesha County was a well-known source, though the name may equally point to a particular local maker. Brick cheese's name is usually explained either by the loaf shape or by the bricks used to press the curd; accounts differ. Young brick is mild, buttery and slightly tangy; aged brick turns pungent and sticky, closer to Limburger. Buy the young kind unless you want a very assertive sandwich.
- How much is a brickA whole brick cheese was a loaf of several pounds, so a household buying "one brick" may well have meant a retail-cut piece rather than the whole cheese. The measure is genuinely ambiguous; work from about 8 oz of cheese, which fills six to eight sandwiches, and scale from there.
- Sweet creamSweet cream means fresh unsoured cream, in contrast to the sour cream and clabber also common in the period. Heavy or whipping cream is right. Add it a spoonful at a time -- the filling should be spreadable but stiff enough not to weep into the bread.
- Creaming the cheeseBrick cheese does not cream easily when cold. Let it come fully to room temperature, then work it with a fork or a food processor before any cream goes in. Cold cheese plus cream gives you lumps suspended in liquid.
- The olivesGreen olives in brine, most likely, and possibly pimiento-stuffed. Drain and blot them dry before chopping, or the brine will thin the spread and salt it twice over. Taste before adding the pinch of salt, since both the olives and the cheese bring their own.
- PecansToast them briefly at 350F and cool before chopping. Untoasted pecans soften quickly in a moist filling.
- The breadAmerican deli rye, seeded or not, sliced thin. Butter the bread softened, not melted -- the butter layer is there to keep the cheese from soaking in, and melted butter defeats that.
- Making aheadThe filling keeps three or four days covered in the refrigerator and improves after a few hours. Assemble the sandwiches the same day they are served.
Brick cheese is a Wisconsin invention, generally credited to the cheesemaker John Jossi in the 1870s, and its name is often said to come from the shape it was pressed into rather than from any place, though accounts differ. Southeastern Wisconsin, Waukesha County included, was thick with small factories making it, and by the turn of the century the cheese was shipped widely. That it turns up here paired with pecans, olives and rye tells you something about the period's sandwich fashion: the chafing-dish and luncheon-club era treated soft cheese as a base to be enriched with chopped things, much as cream cheese would be treated a generation later. Waukesha itself was better known nationally for its mineral springs.