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Olive-sauce

A sauce made by stewing olives in rich brown gravy and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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.

Finish 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, and soften during blanching and stewing.
Rich brown gravy
Forms the body of the sauce and carries the olive flavour.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich gravy and olives.

The step that matters

Soaking the olives in cold water. Blanching and soaking draw out brine and bitterness from cured olives. Soaking for too short a time leaves the sauce overly salty, while the right soak length depends on how salty the olives are.

“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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