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Olive Sauce

A thick olive sauce made with flour, vegetable stock, boiled olives, pepper, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Olive and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 30,263 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Olive Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a saucepan, heat the flour until it turns a very dark brown, being careful not to burn it.

  2. Gradually add the vegetable stock to create a thick, cream-like sauce.

  3. Add the prepared olives to the sauce.

  4. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt to taste.

  5. Bring the sauce to a boil and serve.

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

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

  2. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + olivetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,871 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

Flour
Browned in the pan, it gives the sauce a deeper, toasty color and flavor and thickens it.
Vegetable stock
Liquid that hydrates the browned flour, forming a thick, cream-like sauce.
Olives
Add their distinctive briny, savory flavor to the sauce.

The step that matters

Browning the flour. Flour can go from deep brown to burnt within moments. Burnt starch tastes bitter and cannot be fixed, so the flour must be stirred constantly and watched closely over heat.

“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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