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Olives, Stuffed
With a small sharp knife make a cut lengthwise and crosswise in the olive, and take out the stone. Put in the place of the stone a fillet of anchovy dipped in mayonnaise sauce and rolled up, or a small ball of anchovy paste. Pile on a small dish, and serve as a hors d'oeuvre.
A two-ingredient hors d'oeuvre that stands or falls on the olives. Everything else is assembly.
- Choose the right oliveLarge green olives in brine — Queen, Gordal or Cerignola — have flesh thick enough to hold a filling without splitting. Small black olives are harder to fill neatly, and loose pitted olives may already be too soft to hold their shape.
- PittingThe cross cut described here works, but a cherry pitter or the flat of a knife pressed against the olive until it cracks is faster and leaves the flesh in one piece. Keep the olives in their brine until the moment you fill them so they do not dry at the cut edges.
- Anchovy filletsSalt-packed anchovies need rinsing and filleting; oil-packed tins are ready to use but should be blotted, since oil will slacken the mayonnaise. A single fillet cut lengthwise usually gives two rolls.
- Anchovy pasteThe Victorian jarred paste was anchovy pounded with butter and spice, closer to a potted fish than to the sharp tube paste sold now. Modern tube paste tends to be saltier and more concentrated; use it sparingly, or pound your own anchovy with an equal weight of soft butter.
- Salt on saltBrined olives and anchovies are both heavily salted. Soaking the olives in cold water for an hour, changed once, keeps the finished bite from being punishing.
- MayonnaiseOnly enough to bind the fillet as it rolls — a teaspoon for a dozen olives. Homemade mayonnaise here contains raw egg and should be kept cold and eaten the same day; commercial mayonnaise is made with pasteurised egg and holds better.
- Yield and servingAllow three or four per person alongside other hors d'oeuvres. They can be filled two or three hours ahead, covered and refrigerated, but bring them back to cool room temperature before serving or the anchovy tastes of nothing.
Stuffed olives belong to the late nineteenth-century hors d'oeuvre table, the little cold dishes set out before soup that English households borrowed from French service and Cassell's records in some quantity. Anchovy was the standard savoury note of the period — anchovy paste, anchovy essence and anchovy butter were pantry staples, valued for the same reason cooks now reach for fish sauce — so pairing it with a brined olive was an obvious move rather than an invention. Commercially pimento-stuffed olives, now the default, came later; in a kitchen of this date every olive was cut and filled by hand, which explains why the recipe specifies a small sharp knife before it specifies anything else.