Olive Sauce
One cup brown sauce, twenty-four stoned olives, one tablespoon sherry.
Simmer olives in hot water ten minutes.
Drain, add sauce, simmer five minutes; take from fire and add sherry.
A short finishing sauce built on a base the book assumes you already have. Most of the work is in the brown sauce; the olive steps take fifteen minutes.
- Brown sauceThis means espagnole or a plain brown gravy — stock thickened with a browned roux, often with mirepoix and tomato. A cup of good demi-glace or a reduced beef stock thickened lightly will stand in; a jarred gravy will read as salty against the olives.
- Stoned olivesPitted, not crushed. The recipe does not say which olive; green brine-cured Spanish olives were the usual grocery item and are the likeliest intent. Twenty-four small olives comes to roughly half a cup.
- Why the ten-minute blanchThe hot water pulls out brine and some bitterness so the olives season the sauce rather than overwhelm it. Skipping it risks a markedly saltier sauce. Drain well before the olives go into the sauce.
- Sherry off the heatThe instruction to take it from the fire first is deliberate. The sherry is there for aroma, and boiling it off leaves only a faint sweetness. Use a dry amontillado or fino rather than cooking sherry, which is salted.
- SeasoningTaste only at the very end. Between the brown sauce and the olives there is usually enough salt; the recipe itself calls for no further seasoning.
- Yield and servingA cup of sauce plus the olives, so nearer a cup and a half. The recipe names no dish; a sauce of this kind was generally served with roast or braised meats.
Olive sauce belongs to the family of small brown sauces codified in nineteenth-century French cookery and carried into American household books — a base of espagnole plus one dominant garnish, finished with a fortified wine off the heat. Its usual partner was duck, whose fat takes well to something salty and sharp, and the pairing of duck with olives is still standard in French restaurant cooking. The presence of the recipe in a bride's cook book is telling: it assumes the new housekeeper already keeps brown sauce on hand, which in a period kitchen is often said to have meant a stockpot in more or less permanent use. Bottled Spanish olives were by then a common grocery item in American cities.