No. 119

To Stone Olives

Pour Enucleer les Olives

If the olives are plump, large and contain small stones, these can be removed with a machine made for the purpose (Fig. 63) or with a tube from a column box, but generally the meat is cut off in spirals around the stone by means of a small knife. After the stone is removed, the olives resume their former shape, then plunge them into boiling water, and take them out again at once; they must be blanched without boiling.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A preparation method rather than a dish: Ranhofer is showing how to pit a large olive without destroying it, so it can be stuffed, garnished or arranged whole. Two details do the work — the spiral cut and the instant blanch.

The spiral cutHold the olive and turn it against a small, very sharp paring knife, letting the blade follow the stone in one continuous ribbon from end to end. Done properly the flesh coils off in a single spiral that springs back into an olive shape around the empty centre; a stop-start cut leaves flats and the olive will not close up.
"A tube from a column box"A boite a colonnes was a boxed set of nested round cutters (colonnes) used for cutting cylinders from vegetables and aspic. One of the smaller tubes, pushed through the olive from the stem end, punches out the stone. A cherry or olive pitter, or a plain metal piping tip, does the same job.
Which olivesThis only works on large, fleshy, small-stoned fruit — Sevillano, Spanish Queen, Cerignola, the sort sold as "colossal" or "super mammoth." Small Manzanillas and any oil-cured or wrinkled olive will tear.
Blanched without boilingThe hinge of the whole method. In and straight out of boiling water — a few seconds, no simmering. Ranhofer does not say why, but the likely effect is to relax and set the cut flesh so the spiral knits back together, and to take the edge off the raw brine; a longer stay in the water would be expected to slacken the olive and dull its colour.
Salt, then and nowOlives then came from the barrel and were often saltier than jarred olives today, though strength varied by curer. If yours are already mild, the blanch is purely a setting step; if they are aggressively salty, a short soak in cold water before the blanch does more than the blanch itself.
Drain and dryRefresh in cold water, then drain thoroughly and pat dry before stuffing. Any surface water thins a forcemeat or anchovy butter and stops it gripping the cavity.
Yield and keepingRanhofer gives no quantity; as a modern guide, two to four stoned olives per person works as a garnish. Prepared olives hold a day or two covered in a little of their own brine, refrigerated; stuffed ones are best used the same day.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer put this among the Elementary Methods of The Epicurean (1894), the compendium of his long service in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York — a book organised so that a cook could be sent to the numbered method rather than have it repeated in every recipe. Stoned and stuffed olives turn up constantly in that kind of cooking: as a garnish for braised birds and tongue, in the olive-and-anchovy garnishes of the period, and on the relish plates that opened a long menu. The machine in Fig. 63 reflects the era's appetite for small kitchen gadgets, but Ranhofer's own preference is clear — he treats the hand-cut spiral as the general method and the tools as the exception, which is a fair measure of how much skilled hand labour a restaurant brigade of the 1890s had at its disposal.