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Beef Olives, Sherry Sauce

Beef olives are thin slices of beef rolled with sausage, egg, herbs, and seasoning, simmered in sherry sauce and served over mashed potatoes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Beef Olives, Sherry Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the olives

  1. Cut the steak into 12 thin slices and beat them thin with a cutlet bat dipped in water.

  2. Spread each slice with a mixture of sausages, egg, finely chopped parsley, thyme, and seasoning.

  3. Roll up the slices and tie with string.

  4. Fry in a little butter until light brown on all sides.

Make the sauce

  1. Place in a stewpan with sweet herbs, onion, carrot, celery, bay leaf, allspice, and stock.

  2. Simmer for 1 hour, then strain the gravy and thicken with roux.

  3. Add soy sauce and strain through a fine metal strainer.

  4. Add preserved mushrooms to the sauce and bring to a boil, skimming off any scum.

Serve

  1. Remove the string from the olives and arrange them in a circle on a bed of mashed potatoes.

  2. Pour the boiling sauce over the olives and serve immediately.

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. Parsley + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Parsley + allspicetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,289 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 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

Rump steak
Forms the wrapped outer layer that becomes tender during the long simmer.
Sausages
Provides fat and savoury flavour to the filling inside each roll.
Egg
Binds the filling so it holds together inside the rolled slices.
Roux
Thickens the strained stock into a smooth, glossy gravy.
Preserved mushrooms
Adds earthy flavour and extra body to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Skimming the sauce before serving. Scum rising as the sauce boils can cloud its appearance and taste bitter, so it should be skimmed off as it forms. Bringing the sauce to a boil after adding the mushrooms keeps it hot for serving.

Swap the allspice

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsley, onion, carrot, celery, egg, mushroom, potato):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Dillfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Allspicethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, onion, carrot, celery, egg, mushroom, potato. 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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