Skip to main content
Drink

Olive Sauce

A sauce made from olives simmered in brown gravy and finished with lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Olive and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,922 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Olive Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the olives

  1. Remove the stones from the olives by paring the fruit in a corkscrew shape.

  2. Weigh 6 ounces of prepared olives and blanch them in boiling water for 5 minutes.

  3. Drain the olives and place them in cold water for 30 minutes to 1 hour, depending on their saltiness.

Make the sauce

  1. Drain the olives again and stew them gently in 1 pint of rich brown gravy for 15 to 25 minutes.

  2. Add the juice of ½ lemon and serve the sauce hot.

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 + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,922 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Olives
Provide the main flavour and texture of the sauce, with a distinct savoury bite.
Rich brown gravy
Forms the body of the sauce and carries the flavour of the olives.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, savoury gravy.

The step that matters

Soaking the olives in cold water. Olives cured in brine are very salty, and soaking draws out salt so the sauce does not taste harsh. Soaking time should match how salty the olives are, since under-soaking leaves the sauce too salty and over-soaking dulls the olive flavour.

“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.

More olive sauce recipes

for Roast Duck 3 See all 33 →

You might also like

Lemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesLemon SquashLemon Squash10 recipesLemon EssenceLemon Essence8 recipes