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Olive Sandwiches
Olive sandwiches can be made by spreading slices of bread with layers of olives, cut in small pieces and covered with a mayonnaise dressing.
A one-line formula that assumes the cook already has bread, olives and a bowl of mayonnaise on hand. The only decisions left are which olives and how finely to chop them.
- Olives meant greenIn American cookbooks of this period an unqualified "olive" usually means a brined green Spanish olive; canned ripe black olives were a newer product. If you want the flavour the book most likely intended, use pitted green olives.
- Chop, do not paste"Cut in small pieces" suggests a chop rather than a purée; a purée bleeds brine into the bread.
- Drain firstBlot the chopped olives on a towel before mixing. Undrained brine thins the mayonnaise and the filling slides out under the top slice.
- Mayonnaise ratioEnough dressing to bind, not to flood: about 2 tablespoons mayonnaise to a half cup of chopped olives. Hold back and add more only if the filling will not hold together.
- SaltAdd none. Between the brine and the dressing the filling is already at the top of its salt range.
- The breadThin-cut white bread with the crusts trimmed suits this kind of filling, though the recipe specifies nothing. Butter the slices lightly before the filling goes on if you plan to hold them more than a few minutes; the fat keeps the bread from going damp.
- Yield and holdingA half cup of chopped olives fills about four sandwiches. Make them within an hour or two of serving and keep them covered with a damp cloth in the refrigerator.
- Raw-egg mayonnaiseIf you make the dressing from scratch rather than using a jar, note that it is uncooked. Use pasteurized eggs if serving anyone who should avoid raw egg.
Olive sandwiches belong to the great American sandwich boom of the 1890s and 1900s, when mayonnaise-style dressings, sliced sandwich loaves and the fashion for afternoon tea and ladies' luncheons together produced page after page of thin, crustless, filled bread. Spanish green olives had become widely and affordably available in the United States in the same decades, arriving in barrels and glass jars and turning up in salads, canapés and relishes as a mark of a stylish table. That is why a recipe this brief could stand on its own: the compiler needed only to name the combination, since every element in it was something a household would already have in the pantry. The same pairing of chopped olive and mayonnaise persists in olive nut spread and in the pimento-olive cream cheese sandwich.