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Olive Sauce
Remove stones from ten olives, leaving meat in one piece. Cover with boiling water and cook five minutes. Drain olives, and add to two cups Brown Sauce I or II.
A two-line finishing sauce that assumes you already have a pot of brown sauce on the stove. Everything hinges on the blanching step, which is there to pull salt out of the olives rather than to cook them.
- Which olivesAn unqualified "olive" in American cookbooks of this period generally meant a brine-cured green olive, sold loose from a barrel and likely saltier than a modern jarred olive. Ten large green olives comes to something like a quarter-cup once pitted.
- Leaving the meat in one pieceThe instruction means pitting the olive without cutting it in half. A cherry pitter or the flat of a knife pressed until the flesh splits along one side both work; the point is that the whole olives stay intact in the finished sauce rather than shredding into it.
- Why boil them at allFive minutes in boiling water leaches out brine and softens the flesh. Barrel-cured olives of the period were probably saltier than much of what you will buy today, so taste one first. Olives from a modern jar may need only a rinse and a shorter blanch, or the sauce will be under-seasoned rather than over.
- Brown Sauce I or IIBoth are given elsewhere in Farmer: butter and browned flour let down with brown stock. Any well-made brown sauce or a good demi-glace stands in. Two cups is the finished volume, not the stock you start with.
- Adding at the endStir the drained olives in off the heat or over the barest simmer. Long cooking in the sauce makes them leathery and pushes their salt into the whole batch.
- Seasoning orderBetter to check the seasoning of the sauce after the olives go in than before. Even blanched olives can carry enough salt to shift the balance of two cups of sauce.
- Yield and servingAbout two cups. Brown sauces of this kind were used with roast and braised meats, though this recipe itself names no dish.
Olives with braised meat is an old European pairing, and the combination of brown sauce and olives is generally traced to French practice, where canard aux olives and beef braised with olives were standing dishes long before Fannie Farmer's book. What is notable here is how casually the recipe assumes the olives, treating them as a garnish rather than a luxury. The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book is often said to be built on exactly this kind of modularity, with a handful of mother sauces and short variations built on them, so that a student who could make Brown Sauce could produce a dozen finished sauces without learning a dozen recipes.