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Beef Olives

Beef olives are rolled beef strips filled with seasoned trimmings, fried, and served in a gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and pork match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,690 recipes. Both carry 12-methyltridecanal, which smells tallowy, beefy. The science ↓

Beef Olives

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the olives

  1. Trim edges and fat from beef, then cut into strips 3 inches wide and 4 inches long.

  2. Season beef strips with coarse sea salt and black pepper.

  3. Mix chopped trimmings, fat, powdered cracker, sage, savory, pepper, and salt thoroughly.

  4. Spread the mixture on beef strips, roll them up, and tie with twine.

  5. Roll the beef olives in flour.

Brown and make the gravy

  1. Fry the pork until brown, then remove from the pan.

  2. Add the beef olives to the pan and fry until brown.

  3. Transfer the olives to a small covered saucepan.

  4. In the remaining fat, stir 1 tablespoon of flour until smooth and brown.

  5. Gradually pour in 1½ pints of boiling water, stirring for 2-3 minutes.

  6. Season the gravy with salt and pepper, then pour over the olives.

Simmer and serve

  1. Cover the saucepan and simmer for 2 hours.

  2. Remove the strings from the olives with a sharp knife and serve on a dish with gravy.

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 + porktop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

  2. Pepper + sagetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Sage + porktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,527 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Sage + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,115 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Forms the rolled wrapper and becomes tender during long, slow simmering.
Flour
Coats the olives for browning and thickens the gravy as it cooks in the fat.
Powdered cracker
Absorbs moisture and binds the chopped filling so it holds together when rolled.
Pork
Adds fat and savory flavor when fried brown in the pan.
Sage and savory
Add aromatic herbal flavor to the filling.

The step that matters

Browning the olives and flour in the fat. Browning builds deep flavor through the Maillard reaction, so the olives and the roux-style flour should be well colored before liquid goes in. Pale flour or underbrowned meat leaves the gravy tasting flat.

Swap the sage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, pepper, pork, flour):

  1. Marjoramfits about as well
  2. Thymefits about as well
  3. Jalapenofits about as well
  4. Sagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pepper, pork, flour. 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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