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Olive Sauce

A sauce made with olives, stock, lemon juice, oil, flour, onion, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 the olives

  1. Soak the olives in hot water for 30 minutes to extract the salt.

  2. Carefully peel the olives, removing the pulp in a single piece around the stones.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, heat the oil.

  2. Add the onion and cook until the onion begins to color.

  3. Stir in the flour until smooth.

  4. Add the stock and let it simmer.

  5. Add the olives to the sauce.

  6. Season with salt and pepper.

  7. Simmer for 20 minutes.

  8. Skim the sauce carefully.

Serve

  1. 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. 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 + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,779 recipes

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

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

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

  5. 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

Queen olives
Provide the main flavour and the pulp that thickens and colours the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce by absorbing liquid when cooked with the hot oil.
Rich stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, carrying flavour through the simmer.
Salad oil
Carries the onion's flavour and cooks the flour into a smooth base.

The step that matters

Stir in the flour until smooth. Flour added to hot fat must be stirred constantly so it cooks evenly; otherwise lumps form that do not dissolve into the stock, leaving the sauce grainy.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Kalefits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Eggplantfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against olive, lemon, flour, 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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