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Sauce

Olive Sauce

A sauce made from olives, lemon, stock, and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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. Remove the stones from the olives using a small cutter.

  2. Blanch the olives in boiling water for 1 minute, then transfer to cold water.

Make the sauce

  1. Stew the olives in the stock for about 30 minutes.

  2. Just before serving, add the strained juice of the lemon and a dash of cayenne.

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 + 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

French olives
Provide the main flavour and texture of the sauce.
Stock
Cooks the olives gently and forms the liquid base of the sauce.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, salty flavour of the olives.

The step that matters

Blanching the olives in boiling water, then cooling them. Brief blanching softens the skins and draws out some of the harsh bitterness and brine, so the olives taste milder and cook more evenly in the stock.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Limefits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Avocadofits less well
  4. Cherryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against olive, 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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