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Bacon Olives
Cut some very thin slices of bacon, lay the pieces flat, and place a little minced meat of any kind, well seasoned, on each piece; roll up the bacon tightly, dip in batter, fry a golden brown, and garnish with fried parsley. Probable cost, 3d. each.
A Victorian savoury of rolled, stuffed bacon — quick to assemble, but the filling is what decides whether it works.
- "Olives" means rollsNothing to do with the fruit: an olive in nineteenth-century cookery is any thin slice of meat rolled round a stuffing; the name is variously explained, and the derivation is not settled. Compare beef olives, which are the same idea in a larger format.
- Use cooked mince if you canThe recipe says only "minced meat of any kind", which leaves cooked leftovers or raw mince equally open. If you start with raw minced beef, pork or lamb, the rolls must reach 71C/160F in the centre, which is longer than a batter coating will happily stand — so a small test roll first is worth the trouble.
- Bacon thicknessStreaky bacon sliced as thin as the butcher will go, or pancetta, rolls without cracking. Modern thick-cut supermarket bacon splits and will not stay shut.
- Keep them closedThere is no mention of fastening, so the rolls need to be tight and small. A cocktail stick through each one, removed after frying, saves the batter from unravelling in the fat.
- BatterA plain coating batter of the period is roughly 4 oz flour, 1 egg and enough milk or beer to make thick cream. Chill the assembled rolls before dipping so the batter clings.
- Frying temperature175C/350F. Hotter and the batter colours before the filling heats; cooler and it drinks fat. Three to four minutes gives the golden brown asked for.
- Fried parsleyDry curly parsley sprigs, dropped into the same fat for about 15 seconds, until they stop hissing and go bright and brittle. Wet parsley spits violently — dry it properly first.
- Yield and servingReckon two or three per person as a savoury or a hot hors d'oeuvre; the quantity is left entirely to the cook, since it depends on how much cold meat is in the larder.
- "Probable cost, 3d. each"Three pence apiece in old currency, the kind of costing Cassell's printed throughout so a housekeeper could price a menu. It is a comparative figure only, useless as a modern conversion.
Cassell's belongs to the great age of the British "savoury" and of the make-shift dish: a household that had served a roast on Sunday was expected to turn the remains into something presentable by Tuesday, and rolled, stuffed, crumbed or battered scraps were the standard answer. Bacon olives are that logic at its most economical — the expensive element is a paper-thin wrapper, the filling is whatever the mincer produced, and the batter and fried parsley do the work of making it look deliberate. The word olive for a stuffed roll of meat is generally traced to the older alouette or lark, via dishes such as veal olives and the French alouettes sans tête, "headless larks" — small bundles said to resemble little trussed birds. The per-item costing is characteristic of the dictionary's audience: mistresses and cooks pricing a supper table down to the penny.