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Beef Olives

Beef Olives are small steak squares rolled with fat, parsley, breadcrumbs, and seasonings, fried and simmered in stock with Harvey's sauce and mushroom ketchup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Beef Olives

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rolls

  1. Place a small piece of fat and a mixture of parsley, bread crumbs, pepper, salt, and egg in each square of steak.

  2. Roll up the meat and tie it securely with string.

  3. Fry the rolls in hot butter or dripping until nicely browned.

Braise and finish

  1. Remove the rolls from the pan and stir in the flour with the remaining butter.

  2. Add enough stock or water to cover the rolls and cook very slowly for 1.5 hours.

  3. Stir in Harvey's sauce and mushroom ketchup before serving.

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 + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  4. Bread + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Pepper + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Steak
Forms the outer wrapper and becomes tender during slow cooking.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture from the egg and parsley, giving the filling body.
Egg
Binds the bread crumb and parsley filling so it holds together when rolled.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a light gravy.
Mushroom ketchup
Adds savoury, umami depth to the sauce.

The step that matters

Cook very slowly for 1.5 hours. Gentle, low heat in liquid breaks down the connective tissue in the steak, making it tender. Fast boiling toughens the meat and can dry out the rolls and loosen the filling.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, pepper, egg, butter, flour, sauce, mushroom):

  1. Parsleythe original
  2. Capersfits about as well
  3. Nutmegfits about as well
  4. Thymefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, pepper, egg, butter, flour, sauce, mushroom. 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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