Olive Sauce
2 cups Brown Stock. 1/2 teaspoon salt. 1/4 teaspoon pepper. 1 dozen olives.
PROCESS: Melt butter in sauce-pan, add onion and cook until delicately browned; remove onion and stir butter until well browned; add flour sifted with seasonings, stir to a smooth paste and continue browning. Add stock gradually, beating constantly. Pare the meat from olive pits, leaving it in one continuous curl. Cover with boiling water and cook six or seven minutes. Drain and add to Sauce.
A brown-roux sauce finished with blanched olives, of the kind served with roast beef, braised tongue or duck. The printed ingredient list is incomplete — butter, flour and onion appear in the method but not in the column above — so the proportions have to be supplied.
- The missing quantitiesFor 2 cups of stock, use 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour, plus a thick slice or half a small onion used only for flavouring and then discarded. That gives a sauce of light coating consistency; a third tablespoon of each makes it heavier.
- Browning is the whole pointThe butter is browned, then the flour is browned in it, over medium-low heat until the roux is the colour of a hazelnut shell — five to ten minutes of steady stirring. Rush it over high heat and you get scorched bitterness rather than the nutty depth the sauce depends on.
- Add stock off the boil, graduallyAdd stock gradually -- "Beating constantly" means whisking in the first half cup until smooth before adding the rest. The recipe does not specify the stock's temperature; cooks differ on whether warm or cool liquid goes more smoothly into a hot roux.
- Brown stockA stock made from roasted beef or veal bones and browned vegetables. Unsalted homemade stock is best here; if using commercial beef broth, hold back the 1/2 teaspoon salt until you have tasted the finished sauce, since the olives contribute plenty.
- Paring the olivesThe instruction assumes unpitted green olives in brine. Cut around the pit in a spiral with a small sharp knife so the flesh comes away as one curl — decorative, and it also keeps the pieces from disintegrating in the sauce. Pitted olives sliced into rings work perfectly well if less elegantly.
- Blanching, and whySix or seven minutes in boiling water pulls out the harsh brine and softens the flesh. Brine strengths vary a great deal, then and now, so two or three minutes may be enough; taste one before deciding.
- YieldAbout 2 cups, enough for six to eight servings alongside a roast. Simmer the finished sauce gently for a few minutes to lose any raw-flour taste, and strain if you want it glossy.
Olive sauce belongs to the long line of brown sauces that anchored American company cooking around 1900, all built on the same base of browned butter, browned flour and brown stock, then differentiated by a single finishing ingredient — olives here, capers, mushrooms or Madeira elsewhere. Green olives are often said to have entered American households in the late nineteenth century as an imported, faintly luxurious grocery item, sold whole and unpitted in brine, which is why the recipe pauses to explain paring the flesh from the pit. That continuous curl of olive is the giveaway that this was a Sunday dinner dish: a cook with time, aiming for something that looked deliberate on the platter. 52 Sunday Dinners was organised as a year of full menus, so the sauce would have arrived as one component of a planned meal rather than as a standalone recipe. The abbreviated ingredient list, which omits the butter, flour and onion the method calls for, may be nothing more than a typesetting slip.