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Sauce

Olive Sauce

A sauce of olives stewed in brown gravy with 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 rolling them in a corkscrew motion.

  2. Place the olives in boiling water for 5 minutes, then drain.

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

Make the sauce

  1. Drain the olives well and gently stew them 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

Olives
Provide the main flavour and texture of the sauce, softened by stewing in the gravy.
Brown gravy or espagnole
Forms the rich, savoury sauce base that the olives simmer in.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich gravy and balances the olives' saltiness.

The step that matters

Soaking the olives. Soaking draws out brine and excess salt from the olives. Soaking too briefly leaves the sauce overly salty, while the right soak lets the olive flavour come through in the gravy.

“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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