Skip to main content
Main

Beef-Olives

Beef Olives are beef slices rolled with spices, breadcrumbs, and optional suet, then roasted or stewed in broth with catsup and walnut pickle sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Beef and walnut work together. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 460 recipes. Both carry 2,4-nonadienal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Beef-Olives

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Flatten the beef slices.

  2. Dip the slices in beaten egg, then coat them with a mixture of herbs, breadcrumbs, spices, and salt.

  3. If using lean meat, add a little shredded suet to each slice.

  4. Roll the slices tightly and secure them with kitchen twine.

  5. Optionally, add a little forcemeat inside each roll.

Cook and serve

  1. Roast the rolls on a spit or brown and stew them in broth.

  2. Thicken the sauce with catsup and walnut pickle, then pour it over the beef olives before serving.

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. Beef + walnuttop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together460 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  2. Egg + walnuttop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Beef + eggtop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef rump
Forms the main body of each roll and becomes tender with slow stewing.
Egg
Binds the breadcrumb coating so it adheres to the beef slices.
Breadcrumbs
Absorb moisture and form a coating that helps hold the filling together.
Catsup
Adds sweetness and acidity to the sauce, giving it body and tang.

The step that matters

Roll the slices tightly and secure them with kitchen twine. If the roll is loose, the filling can escape and the olive may fall apart during roasting or stewing. Tight rolling with twine holds the layers together while the meat shrinks and cooks.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, egg):

  1. Sesamefits better
  2. Peanutfits better
  3. Peasfits about as well
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, egg. 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.

You might also like

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipesBeef BrothBeef Broth67 recipes