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Beef Olives

Beef olives are rolled steak pieces stuffed with forcemeat, fried, simmered in stock, served over mashed potatoes with gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Beef Olives

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the olives

  1. Prepare the forcemeat by mixing all the ingredients together.

  2. Cut the steak into pieces 2 inches wide.

  3. Cut the pieces into even strips.

  4. Place 1 teaspoon of forcemeat on each piece.

  5. Roll up each piece.

  6. Tie each roll with string.

Brown and simmer

  1. Fry the rolls briskly in very hot dripping until brown.

  2. Place the browned rolls in the stock.

  3. Add carrot, turnip, and seasoning to the stock.

  4. Simmer gently for 1 hour or until tender.

  5. Remove the string from the olives.

  6. Thicken the gravy.

  7. Replace the olives in the gravy.

Serve

  1. Arrange the mashed potatoes neatly on a dish.

  2. Place the olives in lines on top of the mashed potatoes.

  3. Pour gravy over the olives and mashed potatoes.

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. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Potato + carrottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  3. Flour + turniptop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Potato + turniptop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together562 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Flour + carrottop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,029 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Steak
Forms the rolled outer wrapping that holds the forcemeat and cooks to tenderness in the gravy.
Forcemeat
Adds a moist, savoury stuffing that stays juicy inside the rolled steak during simmering.
Dripping
Fat that browns the outside of the rolls, adding colour and roasted flavour.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a gravy that coats the olives and potatoes.
Mashed potatoes
Provides a soft, starchy base that the olives and gravy rest on.

The step that matters

Fry the rolls briskly in very hot dripping until brown. Hot fat browns the surface quickly through the Maillard reaction, sealing in flavour. Fried slowly, the rolls steam, turn grey, and lose savour before the simmer begins.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, carrot, turnip):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, carrot, turnip. 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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