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Olive Sauce
To Brown Sauce add one teaspoon chopped onion and one half cup stoned, chopped, and boiled olives.
A one-line derivative sauce of the kind that fills the sauce chapters of turn-of-the-century American cookbooks: the base is assumed, and only the additions are printed. Nearly everything you need to decide is left unwritten.
- The brown sauce is the whole jobThe book expects you to have already made its Brown Sauce. A brown sauce of this period is generally a roux of butter and flour cooked to a nut colour, moistened with brown stock and seasoned; something on the order of 2 tablespoons each butter and flour to 1 cup of good beef or veal stock will give about a cup of finished sauce. A commercial demi-glace base works, but cut back on salt for the reason below.
- Boiling the olives is not optionalCured olives of the period were generally packed in strong brine, and boiling them in fresh water for a few minutes would have drawn out salt and softened the sharp cured edge. Modern jarred olives are milder, but a one-minute blanch and a good drain still keeps the sauce from turning salty as it reduces.
- "Stoned" means pittedThe recipe does not say which sort of olive; pit them yourself if you are buying them unpitted.
- Cook the onion firstA teaspoon of raw chopped onion stirred into finished sauce stays raw and harsh. Sweat it in the butter before the flour goes in, or soften it separately, so it disappears into the sauce.
- Do not boil after the olives go inAdd the drained olives at the end and bring the sauce back to a bare simmer, no more than a minute or two. Prolonged cooking dulls the olives and clouds the sauce with their liquor.
- Season lastBetween the stock and the olives, the sauce may need no added salt at all. Taste after the olives have been in a minute, then correct. A spoonful of sherry or Madeira is a period-appropriate lift if the sauce tastes flat.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantity of brown sauce, so the yield depends on the base; a cup of sauce plus half a cup of olives makes roughly a cup and a half. A sauce of this kind would suit roast or braised beef, duck, tongue, or veal, and works with a pot roast or braised short ribs now.
Olive sauce belongs to a family of nineteenth-century brown-sauce variations, sauce piquante, sauce Robert, olive sauce, in which a single sharp ingredient is dropped into a standing base of roux and brown stock. The convention of printing only the addition suggests how these books were used: a cook learned the mother sauces once and then worked through the list. Olives with rich dark meat is an old pairing generally traced to French cookery, where canard aux olives was long established. Lowney's Cook Book, published by the Massachusetts chocolate firm in the first decade of the twentieth century, is best remembered for its confectionery, but it also aimed to be a complete household manual, which is why a full chapter of meat sauces sits alongside the chocolate work. Olives at the time arrived in heavy brine by the barrel or in glass, and the instruction to boil them is a reminder of how much saltier the cured product then was.