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Beef Olives
Cut 2 pounds of steak into pieces 4 1/2 inches long and 2 inches wide. Mix together in a basin 3 tablespoons breadcrumbs, 1 chopped onion, 4 tablespoons Crisco, 1 tablespoon chopped parsley, salt, pepper, and paprika to taste and 1 well beaten egg. Spread a little of this mixture on each piece of meat, roll up and tie with fine string. Melt 2 tablespoons Crisco in a pan, brown pieces of meat in it; stir in 1 tablespoon flour, gradually add 2 cups water, bring to boiling point and cook slowly 1 1/2 hours. Remove string and dish in a circle, season the gravy and strain over the meat.
A straightforward braise of stuffed beef rolls, written for the Crisco kitchen of the 1910s. Two details decide the outcome: how thin the meat is and how gently it simmers.
- The cutSteak here is probably round or topside, sliced thin. Pound each piece to about 1/4 inch before filling, or the rolls will be tight and the collagen will not break down in the time given.
- CriscoThis book was issued to promote Crisco, so the shortening appears in nearly every recipe. Butter, lard or a neutral oil substitutes one for one; the 4 tablespoons in the stuffing are there for richness and can be cut to 2 without harm.
- TyingFine string is still the tidiest method, but wooden cocktail picks work and are quicker to remove. Roll from the short end so the seam sits underneath when you brown them.
- BrowningGet the fat properly hot and work in batches. Crowding the pan steams the rolls, and the browned residue is the only real flavour base in a gravy made with water rather than stock.
- The simmer"Cook slowly" means a bare tremble, not a boil, on a low burner with the lid on. At a rolling boil the meat tightens and the rolls will still be tough at 90 minutes.
- The gravyOne tablespoon of flour to two cups of water gives a very thin sauce by modern taste. Use stock in place of water, and if you want body, reduce the strained liquid hard for a few minutes at the end rather than adding more flour.
- StrainingStraining is what makes this dish look finished; it removes any loose stuffing so the gravy pours clear over the ring of rolls.
- YieldTwo pounds of steak makes enough rolls to serve four generously. Mashed or boiled potatoes are the period accompaniment and soak up the thin gravy well.
Beef olives contain no olives. The name is generally traced to the medieval English alows or aloes, itself borrowed from French, for a thin slice of meat rolled around a stuffing; the modern spelling seems to be a case of an unfamiliar word being reshaped into a familiar one. Versions appear in English cookery books from the seventeenth century onward, and the same idea travels under other names across Europe, as German Rouladen and French paupiettes. Its usefulness is obvious: a cheap, lean cut is tenderised by pounding, stretched by a breadcrumb forcemeat and made succulent by long moist cooking. That thrift is why it earned a place in a book like this one, a Procter & Gamble promotional calendar of everyday dinners built around the then-new vegetable shortening, where the aim was respectable family cooking rather than display.