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Olive Sauce
2 dozen olives
2 tablespoons flour
2 tablespoons salad oil
1 pint stock
1 slice onion
Salt and pepper
I lemon
Place the olives in an earthenware bowl, cover with hot water and let them remain for half an hour to draw out the brine. Place the oil in a frying-pan, and add the onion; when this commences to color, add the flour. Stir until smooth. After it has cooked for two minutes, add the stock, and place where it will simmer gently. Pare the olives round and round as though paring an apple, leaving the pulp in a single strip. If this is done carefully, the olives will retain their shape. Place the olives in the sauce, add the seasoning, the juice of the lemon and simmer for twenty minutes. Skim carefully and serve.
A brown-sauce variation built on a small oil roux rather than butter, finished with olives cut off their stones in one long spiral. Nothing here is difficult, but two details govern the result: the desalting of the olives and the length of the final simmer.
- The hinge: soak the olivesBarrel-cured olives of 1900 were far saltier than most jarred olives sold now. Taste one first; if it is only mildly salty, ten minutes in hot water is enough, and add no salt to the sauce until the olives have been in it a while.
- Paring, not pittingCut around the stone with a small sharp knife the way you would peel an apple, so the flesh comes away as one continuous ribbon that can be wound back into an olive shape. Firm green olives (Manzanilla, Picholine) hold this; soft black California olives collapse. A pitter and whole olives are an honest substitute if the display does not matter.
- MeasuresA pint of stock is 2 cups. Two dozen olives is roughly 5 to 6 oz drained. "Salad oil" was a general term for a bland refined oil, often cottonseed or olive; any neutral oil works, and olive oil suits the dish.
- The rouxTwo tablespoons flour to two tablespoons oil and two cups stock gives a light, pourable sauce, not a gravy. Cook the flour the full two minutes so it loses its raw taste, and add the stock gradually while stirring to keep it smooth.
- StockUse a real brown veal or beef stock if the sauce is going to red meat or game, chicken stock for poultry. Commercial broth is usually salted, which again argues for holding back the salt.
- Lemon and the simmerA whole lemon's juice in 2 cups of sauce is assertive; start with half and adjust. Twenty minutes of gentle simmering both thickens the sauce and lets the olives give up their flavour, but keep it below a boil or the surface oil emulsifies in instead of rising to be skimmed.
- SkimmingAn oil roux throws a film as it reduces. Draw the pan half off the heat so the fat collects on the cool side and lift it off with a spoon before serving.
- Yield and servingAbout 1 1/2 cups after reduction, enough for six. It suits duck, tongue, braised beef or roast game.
Sauce aux olives belongs to the classical French repertoire of small brown sauces, most familiar in canard aux olives, and versions of it reached American cookbooks alongside espagnole and its derivatives. Paring the olive from its stone in a single spiral is a professional technique: the flesh, wound back on itself, looks like a whole olive on the plate but eats without a pit. That the fat is "salad oil" rather than butter may be a period detail, since bottled refined oils were becoming cheap and widely available in American kitchens around 1900. Butterick, better known for dress patterns, also published household books aimed at women running a household without a professional cook.