Skip to main content
Main

Beef Olives

Beef olives are rolled beef slices stuffed with forcemeat, simmered in stock, and served with a thickened gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Beef and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,677 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Beef Olives

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the olives

  1. Cut the beef into slices about ½ inch thick and 4 inches long.

  2. Beat the slices flat with a rolling pin dipped in water.

  3. Chop any trimmings finely and mix with the forcemeat.

  4. Place a small piece of forcemeat on the end of each slice of beef, roll them up, and tie each with cotton.

Cook and serve

  1. Stand the rolls upright in a stewpan, pour the boiling stock over them, cover, and simmer gently for 1 hour until tender.

  2. Remove the olives, take off the cotton, and arrange them on a hot dish.

  3. Thicken the gravy with flour, stir until it boils, let it boil for 3-4 minutes, season to taste, color with browning, and strain over the 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. Beef + flourtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Beef and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,677 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Beef steak
Forms the wrapper that holds the forcemeat and becomes tender during simmering.
Forcemeat
Provides a moist, flavorful filling that keeps the rolls juicy as they cook.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a gravy by swelling with heat and binding the liquid.

The step that matters

Simmering the rolls gently for 1 hour. Boiling vigorously can toughen the meat and break the rolls apart, while gentle simmering lets collagen in the beef slowly soften into tender meat.

“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.

You might also like

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipesBeef BrothBeef Broth67 recipes