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Beef Olives
Cut two pounds of rump steak into thin slices, or if preferred leave it in one large piece. Lay over it a seasoning of chopped herbs, pepper, and salt; roll up the pieces separately, and tie round with a narrow tape. Get a clean stewpan, in which place one ounce of butter, half a pound of bacon cut in thin slices, and some chopped parsley. Put the rolls of steak into a stewpan, pressing them closely together; turn them over till they are brown, then pour a little stock over them, and stew gently from two to three hours. When sufficiently tender, thicken the gravy with a tea-spoonful of brown thickening, or half an ounce of butter rolled in flour, and serve. Just a little mushroom ketchup, or Worcester sauce, is considered by some cooks to improve this dish. Probable cost for steak, 1s. 3d. to 1s. 6d. per pound. Sufficient for six persons.
A plain braise of rolled beef slices, written before oven-braising became standard practice. Two things need attention: the cut, and the length of the stew.
- The hinge: brown the rolls dry, then barely coverThe hinge: brown the rolls first, then barely cover -- The recipe has you turn the rolls in the butter and bacon fat until coloured before any liquid goes in — that browning is where the gravy's flavour comes from. Then "a little stock" suggests enough to come partway up the rolls, not enough to submerge them; a gentle simmer does the rest.
- Rump steakBritish rump corresponds roughly to what American butchers sell as top sirloin. Ask for it in slices about 1/4 inch thick, or buy a piece and pound the slices thin between plastic. Bottom round works and is cheaper, but wants the full stewing time.
- Cooking timeTwo to three hours suits a single large piece. Thin rolled slices are usually tender in 1 1/2 to 2 hours over a very low flame; check at 90 minutes and stop when a skewer meets no resistance. Pushed too far, thin beef shreds and the rolls fall apart in the pan.
- Oven instead of hobA stewpan on a modern burner is hard to hold at a true simmer. A covered casserole at 300-325F is steadier and needs no watching.
- Narrow tapeCotton kitchen twine, tied in two places per roll, or a wooden cocktail pick pushed through. Remove before serving.
- Brown thickeningA Victorian pantry staple: flour cooked in fat until nut-brown, kept in a jar. The alternative the recipe already offers — half an ounce of butter kneaded with flour, whisked into the simmering gravy — is what most cooks will use, and needs two or three minutes' cooking to lose its raw taste.
- BaconThe recipe specifies only thin slices; streaky is the likeliest reading, and unsmoked suits the dish best, since heavily smoked supermarket bacon will dominate it. Green (unsmoked) bacon or pancetta is a good substitute.
- Seasoning"Chopped herbs" is left unspecified; parsley, thyme and a little sage or marjoram would be a plausible mix. Season the meat generously — the salt has to carry through two hours of stewing.
- YieldSix, as stated, with potatoes or a purée to take the gravy. Note that no forcemeat stuffing appears here; many versions of beef olives roll the seasoning up with breadcrumbs and suet, and that variation is easily added.
The name has nothing to do with the fruit: one explanation traces it to the shape of the little tied bundles, which resemble stuffed olives, though the derivation is folk etymology rather than settled fact, and a route through the French alouettes sans têtes — headless larks — is at least as often proposed, the same trick of rolling a thin slice of meat around seasoning to imitate a small bird. Dishes of this kind run right through English cookery from the seventeenth century onward, and by the time Cassell's compiled its dictionary in the 1870s they were firmly middle-class household food: a way of making two pounds of rump and half a pound of bacon feed six people at a price the book thinks worth quoting to the penny. The inclusion of mushroom ketchup or Worcester sauce as an optional improvement is very much of its moment, when bottled sauces had become the ordinary cook's shortcut to depth of flavour.