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Sauce

Olive Sauce

Olive sauce made by simmering French olives in stock with lemon juice and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Olive Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Quarter the olives and carefully remove the pits by paring them in ribbons to maintain their shape.

  2. Blanch the olives in boiling water, then transfer them to cold water for 5 minutes.

Cook and serve

  1. Stew the olives slowly in the stock for 30 minutes.

  2. Add the lemon juice and serve hot.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Olive + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,922 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Olive + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,263 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

French olives
Provide the main ingredient, with a firm flesh that holds its shape during stewing.
Stock
Liquid that gently cooks the olives and carries their flavour into the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, savoury flavour of the olives.

The step that matters

Stew the olives slowly in the stock. Gentle, slow heat softens the olives and lets their flavour move into the stock without the fruit breaking apart or turning tough. Rapid boiling would cause the olives to fall apart and the sauce to become cloudy.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (olive, pepper):

  1. Limefits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Avocadofits less well
  4. Cherryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against olive, 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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