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Olive- Sauce

Olive sauce made by blanching olives, stewing them in brown gravy, and adding 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 close to them in a corkscrew shape.

  2. Weigh the prepared olives and blanch them in boiling water for 5 minutes.

  3. Transfer the olives to cold water and soak for 30 to 60 minutes, depending on their saltiness.

Make the sauce

  1. Drain the olives well and stew them gently in the 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

French or italian olives
Provide the main flavour and a soft, meaty texture once blanched and stewed.
Rich brown gravy
Forms the savoury body of the sauce and flavours the olives as they stew.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, savoury gravy.

The step that matters

Soaking the olives in cold water. Olives are cured in brine, so soaking draws out salt. The right time depends on how salty they are. Too little soaking leaves the sauce overly salty, and stewing in gravy concentrates any salt that remains.

“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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