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Olives
½ teaspoon vinegar Parsley finely chopped To white sauce add remaining ingredients. Stir constantly until mixture is thoroughly heated, but do not let it come to the boiling-point. Served with boiled, steamed, or fried fish.
Yolks 2 eggs
This entry has come down to us garbled — the ingredient list has been broken up and scattered, with the egg yolks stranded at the end and the olives named only in the title. The method is still legible: it is a white sauce enriched with yolks, sharpened with vinegar, and finished with chopped olives and parsley.
- What is missingThe original list would have specified a quantity of white sauce and a measure of olives, presumably stoned and chopped or sliced. Neither figure survives in this text, so treat the proportions as a matter of judgement rather than a rule.
- The white sauce baseA cup of white sauce of this period generally means about 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk, cooked until smooth, though thinner and thicker versions were equally standard. Anything headed as a sauce assumes that base is already made and hot.
- The hinge: never let it boilEgg yolks stirred into a hot sauce will curdle if the mixture gets too hot; in a milk-and-flour base that point is somewhere in the region of 180F. The instruction to heat thoroughly but stop short of boiling is the whole technique. Temper the yolks with a few spoonfuls of the hot sauce first, then stir over low heat only until the sauce thickens and coats a spoon.
- OlivesTurn-of-the-century American recipes mean brined green olives, then usually sold whole with the stone in. Modern pitted green olives work directly; rinse them if they are packed in a very salty brine, since no salt survives in this fragment.
- The vinegarHalf a teaspoon is a seasoning, not an acidulator: enough to lift the richness of the yolks. White wine or cider vinegar suits it. Note that the recipe itself has the vinegar going in with the other additions before heating; adding it late and off the heat is a modern precaution against the yolks seizing.
- Yield and serviceNo yield is given; a cup of finished sauce would serve about four with fish. It is best spooned over the fish at the table rather than held warm, since it will thicken and skin as it stands and cannot be reboiled to loosen it.
White sauce is the workhorse of period cookery teaching: it was taught as a set of graded thin, medium and thick formulas, and cooks were expected to ring changes on the base, so a long run of sauces are simply that base plus one defining addition — egg, capers, olives, mustard, lobster coral. The approach reflects a larger project of teaching cookery as a system of proportions rather than a set of memorised dishes. Olives themselves were a fashionable import in American kitchens of the 1890s, arriving in barrels of brine from Spain and increasingly sold in glass jars for the household trade; they turn up in this period as a sauce ingredient, a salad garnish and a stuffing for veal birds, which are themselves sometimes called olives. Paired with boiled or steamed fish, the salt and acid of the olives do the work that a squeeze of lemon does in a modern kitchen.