A couple of the most viral recipes this spring have been simple, vintage sandwiches that call for white bread and cream cheese. The first old-fashioned lunch to catch fire was the cucumber sandwich, watched and liked by millions on TikTok. “Do you really need a recipe for a cucumber sandwich?” asked TikTok creator Amy Flanigan in her video (with 1.3 million views). “Yes. Yes, you do.” Now, closely following the popularity of the cucumber sandwich, allow us to introduce its close cousin: the cream cheese and olive sandwich.
The cream cheese and olive sandwich, surprisingly, does not owe its fame to TikTok. The one who kicked off this trend is food writer Elazar Sontag, who wrote about it in Bon Appetit, based on a sandwich he ate at S&P, the revival of the classic New York lunch counter. “What I didn’t expect was for so much nostalgia,” wrote Sontag. When he posted his version on Instagram, he says that “Friends and strangers streamed into my comments and DMs to share stories of their parents and grandparents making some approximation of this dish when they were little.”
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