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Beef Olives

Beef Olives are beef steak slices rolled with forcemeat, simmered in stock, and served with a thickened gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,677 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Beef Olives

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the olives

  1. Cut the beef into slices about 1 inch thick and 4 inches long.

  2. Flatten the slices with a rolling pin dipped in water.

  3. Chop the trimmings finely and mix them with the forcemeat.

  4. Place a small amount of forcemeat at one end of each slice.

  5. Roll the slices up and tie the rolls with cotton.

Simmer

  1. Stand the rolls upright in a stewpan.

  2. Pour boiling stock over the rolls.

  3. Cover the stewpan and simmer gently for 1 hour or until tender.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Remove the rolls and take off the cotton.

  2. Arrange the rolls on a hot dish.

  3. Thicken the gravy with flour and stir until it boils.

  4. Let the gravy boil for 3-4 minutes.

  5. Season the gravy to taste and color it with browning.

  6. Strain the gravy over the beef olives.

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 + flourtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Beef and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,677 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Beef steak
Forms the wrapper that holds the filling together and becomes tender during simmering.
Forcemeat
Provides a moist, savoury filling that keeps the rolls juicy as they cook.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth gravy as it boils.

The step that matters

Simmer gently. A gentle simmer keeps the beef tender and the rolls intact; a hard boil toughens meat fibres and can break the rolls apart.

“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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