Beef Olives
Ingredients.
One Egg. One pound and a half of Fillet of Beef or Rump Steak. Three ounces of Bread-crumbs.
Two ounces of Beef Suet.
One teaspoonful of chopped Parsley.
Quarter of a teaspoonful of chopped Thyme and Marjoram. Nutmeg and Lemon-rind grated.
The book gives quantities only, in the shorthand of a professional kitchen where the method for a beef olive was assumed. What follows fills in the working detail a modern cook needs.
- What the dish actually isBeef olives are thin slices of beef spread with a breadcrumb forcemeat, rolled, tied or skewered, browned, and braised in stock until tender. The finished rolls are meant to be small, neat and uniform.
- Cutting the meatFrom 1 1/2 lb of fillet or rump you want six to eight slices cut across the grain, then beaten between plastic wrap to about 1/8 inch. Slices roughly 4 by 5 inches roll neatly and hold their stuffing.
- The forcemeat needs a binderThree ounces of breadcrumbs (about 1 1/2 cups fresh) with 2 oz shredded suet, herbs, nutmeg and lemon rind will not hold together dry. A beaten egg, or a spoonful or two of stock, is a common binder in forcemeats of this type, though the recipe as printed specifies neither.
- Beef suetRaw suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, sold shredded in Britain and available from butchers elsewhere. Cold butter, frozen and grated, is one common substitute; it melts sooner, so it bastes the stuffing rather than holding its structure.
- Seasoning amounts"Nutmeg and Lemon-rind grated" is genuinely unmeasured. A modern reading is a good grating of nutmeg and the zest of half a lemon for this quantity of crumbs; salt and pepper are unstated but assumed.
- CookingBrown the tied rolls in hot fat, then braise barely covered in good brown stock, tightly lidded, at 325F or on the lowest simmer. Rump wants 1 1/2 to 2 hours to become tender; fillet is done in 30 to 40 minutes and dries out if pushed further.
- FinishingRemove the strings before serving and reduce the braising liquid to a sauce, thickened lightly if you like. On the quantity given, expect about four small servings, or three as a main course with potatoes.
The "olive" in beef olives may have nothing to do with the fruit: one proposed derivation is from alou/alouette, the lark, and the dish has close relations in veal birds and the French alouettes sans tête, "headless larks" — small stuffed rolls of meat that looked like trussed songbirds on the dish. Others take the "olive" simply for the fruit-name applied to the oval shape, or trace it to Old French aloyau. Stuffed and rolled meat slices appear in English cookery books from the seventeenth century onward, and by the late nineteenth they seem to have settled into something like the position they occupy here: an entrée, the made dish served between fish and roast, where a cook could turn a modest amount of beef into a number of identical, elegant portions. The forcemeat of breadcrumbs, suet, parsley, thyme, marjoram, nutmeg and lemon rind is the standard British stuffing mixture of the period, used with equal readiness in veal, poultry and baked puddings.