I can't believe my grandmother loved this recipe: 1975 Olive Nut Bread

In this episode of Vintage Recipe Roulette, we confront our worst fears, both culinary and existential.

The higher the hair, I mean bread, the closer to God.

In case this is your first time visiting the Department of Antediluvian Disquietude and you missed the first installment, this is the latest in a series of Vintage Recipe Roulette reviews using only recipes from Talk About Good, my grandmother’s 1975 community church cookbook. In just 164 pages, this collection of homestyle recipes encapsulates the unlikely intersections of 1800s frontier cuisine, post-war convenience foods, and the mid-century American fetishization of canned chow mein noodles. It is untested, unstandardized, and unmatched in its vintage glory in my opinion. Some of the recipes are amazingly good! And some are amazingly…not. Today, we make a frankly alarming quick bread with enough olives to choke a longhorn.

I adored my grandmother. Everybody did. Large swathes of my extended family called her “Auntie”, but her kids and grandkids all called her “Mom”. In a lot of ways, I am very unlike her. She was so dainty, so ladylike. She loved getting her hair done and wearing pantyhose with pink suits. In one way she was anything but radical and didn’t enjoy dark humor or counter culture, but in another deeply significant way, she was truly progressive. She was, and I don’t say this lightly, a more practiced Christian than any preacher I ever met. That’s not really a fair comparison — she had weathered the very most fearsome hardships by the time I knew her, and though the pain of them never left her, she leveraged it to extend her capacity for everyday compassion. It’s a difficult way to learn how to care for others, but very effective.

I try really hard to learn from that last bit in particular (doing my hair continues to elude me), but what I more easily have in common with her is a love of home cooking. She had a long list of things she could make without even glancing at a recipe — cornbread, biscuits, chicken fried steak and cream gravy — but she also loved recipes, most especially the ones out of Talk About Good. I grew up eating a lot of things from this cookbook, but especially the desserts. Jell-O salads, buttermilk pies, coconut cakes. There was Crisco involved, and lots of salt pork; when I make things from her repertoire now, I make adjustments for current nutritional recommendations, but my heart is in the same place.

Usually.

And that brings me to today’s recipe: Olive Nut Bread.

I don’t recall her ever making this recipe, and neither does my my mother, but it’s got her name right on it. I almost wondered whether it’s a mistake, but I feel like that would have been mentioned in the years we shared use of this book, and she did love olives.

Even beyond all that, though, I have grave concerns about this recipe. It’s very unusual — no added fats, a metric ton of olive, and while it has a lot less sugar than other quick breads like banana bread, it has a lot more than I would expect for something with so much olive. I would also be concerned about the amount of baking powder, quadruple the usual, if I hadn’t seen an even more outrageous ratio in Rosa Parks’ absolutely stellar Featherlite Pancakes.

I’m worried I might hate this recipe. If I do, what will it mean? That I didn’t really know her? That she held things back? That she had..*gasp*…bad taste?

It’s daunting but surely I can trust the foundations not to be shaken by a single disgusting recipe. Let’s make it! Here are the main ingredients:

Look how early in the morning I get up to entertain y’all.

The recipe as written has some oversights or typos, as most community recipes do. It doesn’t exactly specify mixing wet and dry separately and then combining, but that’s what it means. It does specify both the old way of measuring baking temp (moderate) and the new way (350 degrees), with a baking time, which I am very smug about. (Note: I’m using raw red pepper since I don’t usually keep pimento around — I just dice it and microwave for 30 seconds with a little vinegar when I make pimento cheese or something. And I’m using almonds because there’s a pecan allergy in the house.)

After mixing, I remain concerned. The batter is almost like a dough even though I barely mixed it together — sticky and stretchy, and very stiff. And y’all, I like olives, but this is OLIVES.

I’ve heard Mount Olive is beautiful, but I’m not sure I can scale this.

After mixing, I am even more concerned.

This has real head cheese vibes. Also I lied before, that was sunset lighting. Now it's dark. And foreboding

After baking, um…still very concerned. Although, I have to admit, it rose like a champ from all that baking powder.

It’s looking at me, Ray.

Slicing, though, does just a little bit to open my mind. It doesn’t look like an olivepalooza. And it smells kind of awesome? Just a hint of chili from the pimentos, a lovely savory aroma from the olives. The texture looks a lot like sandwich bread! (I brushed the top with butter after baking for a nice shine.)

And tasting? I love it. It immediately made me remember how viral this very heavily olived sandwich filling was a couple of years ago, and I had a slice with Neufchatel cream cheese. It was good both toasted and untoasted, and it’s not too sweet, although I will cut the sugar in half at least next time — it’s good but doesn’t need so much. You have to like green olives of course, but I think it’s wonderful. If you don’t like olives, it would make an amazing jalapeno cheese bread (maybe 1/2 c freshly diced jalapeno and 1 c diced cheddar instead of the nuts and olives, or actually you could leave the pecans in and I think it would work). It’s so easy, and thrifty, and most of the time, you’ll have the ingredients even if it’s been a while since you got to the store, especially if you have a pecan tree growing in the backyard. It reads like a Depression- or WWII-era recipe and is totally consistent with many other soda breads my grandmother made, even though the components are pretty different.

Not so scary now, is it? Cream cheese heals all wounds.

This got me to wondering…did my grandmother write this recipe, or was it one of the many she got off of a box or jar? At first, I thought it might be unique, and therefore likely hers. Most recipes for olive bread have yeast, and even the yeast-free quick breads have a lot more oil and eggs, and about half the baking powder. Eventually, though, I found almost the exact one on Cooks.com, which is a recipe clearinghouse site. They suggest serving with cream cheese! It’s circumstantial, but I think that probably means that someone somewhere submitted their grandmother’s olive bread recipe, and that it came off of a jar of olives for both our families.

Admittedly, I’m relieved to really enjoy this odd recipe, and to see our common threads running through after all. If I didn’t know her, I don’t know anybody.

But here’s the thing — I actually don’t. I can’t. No one can. You can make headway that’s worth doing for sure, but what you know of someone is always, irretrievably, colored by what you are, and what you’ve perceived. In a way, even with people we love most, the closest we ever get is in parallel, never really intersecting on every level. Knowing that makes me sad sometimes, but there are three aspects of looking at things this way that give me joy.

One is that we can get really close in some areas. It turns out I do know my grandmother’s cooking. I understand the foundations of her relationship with food even when it’s not exactly the same as mine, for example.

Another is that when we fully embrace not knowing everything, it leaves room for seeing things as they really are. If I believed I already knew everything about my grandmother, I would have assumed this recipe had her name on it by mistake, and I would have missed out on a beautiful point of connection.

The last is that because we are all this way, each only criss-crossing in passing or running alongside each other in spots, we are all also the same in fundamental nature. All of us. Even that person you don’t like, or don’t understand, or who doesn’t understand you.

And trying to get my heart around that? That’s a practice I can really sink my teeth into.

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And please feel free to share this post with any olive fiends you know…like your grandmother, probably.