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Olives for Garnish
Remove the stones from some olives by cutting them round and round in a spiral form so that the olives may keep their shape. Put them in a saucepan, pour in stock and Chablis wine in equal proportions to cover, and stew slowly until they are done. Salmis of duck is generally garnished with this.
A French garnish reduced to three lines: pit the olives without destroying them, then poach them in stock and white wine until the brine is gone and the wine is in. Everything depends on the pitting.
- The spiral cutHold the olive against the blade of a small sharp knife and turn it, cutting a continuous ribbon of flesh from the stone the way you would peel an apple. The olive then springs back into shape, hollow but whole. A cherry pitter is faster and gives you a punched hole instead, which is not the same effect.
- Which olivesFirm green olives in brine, not the soft black canned kind and not oil-cured. Picholine, Lucques or plain unstuffed Manzanilla all hold up. Pit them yourself; pre-pitted olives collapse in the pan.
- Purge the brine firstBrined olives can carry a lot of salt, and the recipe adds none. Blanch the pitted olives in unsalted boiling water for two or three minutes and drain, or the finished garnish will overwhelm the sauce it is sitting in.
- "Stew slowly until done"The recipe gives no time. A bare simmer, uncovered, with the liquid barely covering them, will usually get there in something like ten to fifteen minutes. They are done when they have plumped slightly and taste of wine rather than brine; longer and they turn mushy and grey.
- ChablisAny dry, unoaked white does the work: Chablis, Aligoté, a lean Sauvignon Blanc. Avoid anything oaked or sweet. Use a light veal or chicken stock, or duck stock if you have it from the bird.
- Season at the end, if at allNo salt goes in at the start and often none is needed at all. Taste an olive before you decide, and remember the sauce it garnishes is seasoned too.
- QuantityThe recipe says only "some olives"; something like 20 to 24, roughly a cup, will garnish a duck for four. They can be poached ahead and rewarmed in their liquid, and the cooking liquid itself is worth reducing into the sauce.
- Salmis of duckA salmis is a dish in which the bird is part-roasted, carved, and the carcass pounded and simmered to make the sauce the pieces are finished in. If you are not making one, these olives are equally at home with braised duck legs, rabbit, or any dark wine-based sauce.
Oscar Tschirky's book records the working vocabulary of a large American hotel kitchen run on French lines, and this is a fragment of that vocabulary rather than a dish: a *garniture* to be kept ready and dropped onto a plate at service. Pitting olives in a spiral so they keep their shape was fine-kitchen handwork, and it survives in classical garnishes labelled *aux olives*. Olives with salmis is a familiar nineteenth-century French pairing, the salt and bitterness set against the richness of the bird's own pressed juices. That a New York hotel man in the 1890s could assume his readers knew what a salmis was, and would have Chablis in the kitchen to poach olives in, says most of what needs saying about the audience for this book.