Stone some large Spanish olives with a tin tube sufficiently large to remove the stone; pare the olives very straight at both ends and fill up the hollow space with anchovy butter (No. 569); on top of the butter lay a green pistachio nut (Fig. 497).
A cold-buffet garnish from Ranhofer's Delmonico repertoire: a pitted olive, a piped anchovy butter filling, a pistachio cap. The whole thing succeeds or fails on temperature.
Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's for over thirty years, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a complete working system, and this entry sits in a long run of numbered garnishes intended to be assembled around cold pieces on a buffet. That such a small object gets its own number, its own French title and its own figure illustration suggests how the period thought about cold service: the pièce froide was judged as much on its border as on the meat or fish at the centre, and a large kitchen benefited from a fixed vocabulary of small standardised units. Spanish olives — large brine-cured green fruit, much of it from Andalusia — were a familiar American import by the later nineteenth century, and stuffing them fits a garnish tradition that also hollowed out cucumbers, eggs and mushrooms to hold seasoned butters and forcemeats. Anchovy worked into butter is an older preparation; the pistachio on top is there chiefly for colour, a green note that recurs in Ranhofer's cold work.