Cream Cheese & Olive: The Spread that Knows No Bounds

In 1953, when my family moved to Columbia, Tennessee, from Buffalo, New York, we were strangers in a strange land for a few years … especially when it came to food:

Okra.

Grits.

Poke salat, which our cleaning lady brought to us by the heaping bag-full from her garden.

White beans and cornbread, often served for lunch at McDowell Elementary, the public school I attended.

And then there was the mysterious orange concoction called pimiento cheese.

All caused consternation for my mother, father and older sisters.

Especially the pimiento cheese.

It was served so often at church and social gatherings that my parents and their friends, who had also been transferred to Columbia from “up north,” made jokes about it. “They’ll be serving it at Communion next,” remarked one jokester friend, a Philadelphia colleague of my dad’s at the plant the DuPont company had built in Columbia.

For a while, at least, the Yankee transplants just didn’t get what all the fuss was about when it came to pimiento cheese.

Instead, I took cream cheese and olive sandwiches in my lunch box to school–thank you very much.

A few of my classmates also brought lunch from home, but I never saw cream cheese and olive among their daily fare. So, I grew up thinking that the spread was a sort of Yankee alternative to the orange stuff that my local friends had on their sandwiches. Something that set me apart … and not necessarily in a good way.

Learning my American history, I felt like Ulysses S. Grant in a cafeteria full of Robert E. Lees.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered … just last week … that many of Ted’s and my friends who were born in the South also enjoyed cream cheese and olive sandwiches when they were kids.

All rightie, then!

“We were raised on cream cheese and olive sandwiches, along with cream cheese and pineapple sandwiches. Love ’em both,” wrote one Atlanta-born-and-raised friend in response to my Facebook post about making cream cheese and olive tea sandwiches for an event at our church … a culinary experience that was a trip down memory lane for me. I hadn’t had a cream cheese and olive sandwich since my summers home from college in the early 1970s.

Other Southern friends chimed in with similar sentiments. And then I found a cream cheese and olive spread recipe in a recent edition of Southern Living magazine, that arbiter of taste for all things Southern.

“The Best Southern Spread Starts with a Block of Cream Cheese and a Jar of Olives,” the headline proclaimed, with the subhead: “This old-fashioned snack is a Southern grandmother specialty.”

What a relief!

All those years in grade school in Columbia, maybe I wasn’t such a sandwich weirdo after all. It was a delight to learn, at age 71, that cream cheese and olive spread isn’t only delicious … it’s egalitarian, too. And a favorite part of the childhood memories of many friends above and below the Mason-Dixon line.

The Recipe

Herewith is the oh-so-simple recipe (if you can even call it that) for my mom’s cream cheese and olive spread:

• Two 8 oz. blocks of Philadelphia cream cheese, softened
• 1 cup of coarsely chopped green olives stuffed with pimientos
• Stir ingredients together, adding brine from the olive jar as needed to reduce the thickness so the mixture spreads more easily.

That’s all, folks! The spread was such a staple at our house that my mother rarely embellished beyond the basics … though one could, if so inclined, add some ground black pepper, garlic powder, a few dashes of Worcestershire sauce, chopped pecans or walnuts to the mixture.

But for me, the simple version is the best. Though I am mulling over what it would be like to use the deliciously different smoked kalamatas on the olive bar at Whole Foods. Hmmm, we might be on to something here.

Ambassador Beulah

I must add that my mother gradually introduced Southern foods to my family’s table … with mostly good results. Canadian-born Beulah, it seemed, had fallen in love with the South long before my dad and sisters did. She loved the people, becoming fast friends with many of the moms of the local kids I went to school with. She loved the artistry of performers like Patsy Cline, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Boots Randolph, Minnie Pearl.

She learned to fry okra. Cook grits for breakfast.

Then she befriended a local lady who not only was an artist like herself, but also invited Mom to join her and a few other ladies to paint one day a week in the old smokehouse on the family’s farm outside Columbia.

On those days when she painted at Eunice Ridley’s place, Mom would come home smelling like a country ham and happier than I’d ever seen her.

In her 40s, Beulah had found her milieu.

Years later, a DuPont transfer up north again didn’t sway her. As soon as Dad reached retirement age, back to Tennessee they went in 1976. And they happily lived out their golden years there.

Like the rest of us in the family, Mom even grew to like pimiento cheese.

Up to a point.

Though her favorite was still cream cheese and olive on a slice of good rye bread.

What’s your favorite sandwich spread? Feel free to share the recipe and a photo. And any Proustian associations, too. I’d love to hear about it.

Author’s Note: The photo of my mom with the painting is from The Daily Herald, Columbia, Tennessee, probably printed in 1969.