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Beef Olives

A stuffed beef roll filled with a forcemeat of veal, ham, truffles, and spices, fried and served with sauce or stewed olives.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and shallot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,737 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Beef Olives

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the forcemeat

  1. Mix veal, ham, soaked bread, truffles, mace, parsley, shallots, marrow or suet, long pepper, salt, lemon peel, and mountain wine to make a forcemeat.

Assemble the rolls

  1. Cut beef slices about 10 inches long and 5 inches wide from the underside of a rump or sirloin.

  2. Brush each beef slice with beaten egg and spread the forcemeat over it.

  3. Roll up each beef slice and secure with a skewer.

Coat and fry

  1. Dip the rolled beef in egg yolk and coat with seasoned bread crumbs.

  2. Fry the coated rolls in boiling oil or lard until golden brown.

Serve

  1. Serve the fried rolls with a rich sauce or surrounded by stewed 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. Parsley + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

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

  2. Ham + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  3. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Veal + truffletop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together815 recipes

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

  5. Ham + truffletop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together516 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Veal
Forms the soft, binding body of the forcemeat filling.
Ham
Adds savoury, salty flavour to the forcemeat filling.
Bread soaked in milk
Adds moisture and tenderness to the forcemeat so it stays soft.
Eggs
Bind the coating so the bread crumbs stick and set golden when fried.
Marrow or suet
Adds richness and fat that keeps the forcemeat moist during cooking.
Seasoned bread crumbs
Form a crisp, browned outer crust when fried.

The step that matters

Frying the coated rolls in boiling oil or lard until golden brown. The oil must be hot enough to crisp and brown the crumb coating quickly. If it is too cool, the coating absorbs oil and turns greasy before the thick beef and forcemeat are cooked through.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, ham, bread, milk, truffle, parsley, shallot):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, ham, bread, milk, truffle, parsley, shallot. 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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