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Beef Olives

Beef olives are small rolled pieces of steak stuffed with bacon and onions, boiled until tender.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 68,474 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Beef Olives

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the round steak into small, thin pieces.

  2. Pound the steak and season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  3. Place small pieces of bacon and onions inside each piece of steak and roll them up.

Cook

  1. Brown the rolled steak in a pan.

  2. Transfer the browned steak to a kettle and add 1 cup of water.

  3. Boil for 2.5 hours.

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. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Round steak
Forms the main meaty wrapper that holds the filling and becomes tender during long simmering.
Bacon
Adds fat and savory flavor that melts into the filling and moistens the lean beef.
Onions
Add sweetness and aroma as they soften inside the rolled beef.

The step that matters

Browning the rolled steak in a pan. Browning creates deep, savory flavors through the Maillard reaction on the meat surface. Pale meat added to the water will taste flat, so the surfaces need real colour before the liquid goes in.

“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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