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Beef Olives

Beef Olives are beef steaks rolled with forcemeat, bread crumbs, and fried, served with a brown wine sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 22,662 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Beef Olives

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rolls

  1. Flatten the steaks with a rolling pin.

  2. Dredge the steaks with white pepper and coarse sea salt.

  3. Prepare forcemeat by mixing veal, ham or bacon, parsley, sweet herbs, and bread crumbs, then beat in an egg.

  4. Spread a little forcemeat over each steak and roll them tightly, securing with a skewer.

Coat and fry

  1. Dip each roll in egg yolk, then coat with bread crumbs.

  2. Fry the rolls in oil until pale brown.

Serve

  1. Serve with brown sauce mixed with white wine and seasoned with cayenne.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  2. White wine + peppertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,433 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Bread + white winetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together827 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Veal + breadtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,056 recipes

    Shared aroma: cis-3-hexenol (green, grassy).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Handsome steaks
Thin beef wraps the forcemeat and holds the filling inside each roll while cooking.
Forcemeat
Soft, savoury filling that stays moist and tender inside the rolled beef.
Egg
Binds the forcemeat and, as yolk, helps the bread crumb coating stick.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden-brown outer crust when the rolls are fried.
White wine
Adds acidity to the brown sauce, brightening its rich, meaty flavour.

The step that matters

Fry the rolls until pale brown. Frying over heat that is too high browns the crumb coating before the beef cooks through, while too low a heat leaves it greasy. Gentle, steady heat cooks the beef evenly and gives a crisp coating.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, egg, bread, sauce, white wine, pepper):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, egg, bread, sauce, white wine, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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