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Beef Olives

Beef olives are strips of rump steak rolled with breadcrumbs, spices, and onions, stewed in water and bay leaves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and thyme are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,585 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Beef Olives

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the olives

  1. Cut rump steaks into strips 3-4 inches long and ¼ inch thick.

  2. Sprinkle with bread-crumbs, pepper, salt, and thyme.

  3. Roll up the strips and tie with thread.

Stew and finish

  1. Fry onions in butter or fat.

  2. Add 1 pint of water and bay leaves to the onions.

  3. Stew the beef gently for 1 hour.

  4. Before serving, remove the thread and thicken the gravy with brown flour.

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 + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Thyme + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Rump steaks
Forms the meat wrapped around the filling, becoming tender through gentle stewing.
Fine bread-crumbs
Absorb juices from the beef and add body to the filling.
Onions
Soften and sweeten as they fry, flavouring the gravy.
Brown flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a gravy.

The step that matters

Stew the beef gently for 1 hour. Gentle, low heat lets the tough connective tissue in rump break down slowly into tender meat. A hard boil toughens the muscle fibres and can leave the gravy cloudy and the meat stringy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, pepper, thyme, butter, flour):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, pepper, thyme, butter, flour. 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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