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Cheese Sandwiches (Unbuttered slices of white)
On unbuttered slices of white bread, spread a thick layer of cream cheese, then a thin layer of olives cut into small pieces.
A two-ingredient sandwich that depends entirely on the state of the cheese and the cut of the olives. A few notes on what the words meant in 1900.
- Cream cheeseIn this period the term covered fresh, unripened soft cheese sold loose or in foil-wrapped bricks, closer in texture to today's Neufchâtel than to stabilised block cream cheese. Modern full-fat block cream cheese works; let it come to room temperature or it will tear the bread.
- The olivesAssume brined green olives, the Spanish sort, not oil-cured black or canned California ripe olives, which were not yet common. Pit them, chop fine, and blot the pieces dry so the brine does not soak the crumb.
- Why unbutteredThe instruction is explicit in the text. Butter under a fresh cheese spread can make the sandwich greasy, and in period sandwiches butter often served as a moisture barrier as well as a flavouring; cream cheese may be doing that job here. The recipe itself gives no reason.
- The breadA white sandwich loaf is what is implied, though the recipe specifies nothing beyond 'white bread'. Day-old bread cuts cleaner than fresh, and crusts were often trimmed for tea sandwiches.
- ProportionsNo quantities are given. As a rough guide, 8 oz of cream cheese with a much smaller quantity of chopped olives will fill a dozen or so thin sandwiches; the recipe wants a thick cheese layer and only a scattering of olive.
- ServingCut into fingers or triangles, cover with a barely damp cloth, and refrigerate no more than a couple of hours before serving. They dry at the edges quickly.
Sandwiches of this kind belong to the American tea-table and the ladies' luncheon rather than to a meal proper, and cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s carry pages of them: nut, lettuce, ham, anchovy, cheese. One development lay behind them. Commercially made fresh cream cheese had become a reliable branded product in the northeastern United States by the 1880s, sold wrapped and consistent in a way that a home-made curd cheese was not. The result is a recipe that reads less like cookery than like assembly, which is exactly what the genre was: a hostess's formula, one line long, for something that could be made in quantity ahead of time.