No. 510

Olive Sauce

Sauce aux Olives

Verdal or Spanish Olives, Stuffed or Not Stuffed.—Remove the stones from two ounces of olives without injuring their shape, then throw them into boiling, salted water, drain them after they have boiled up once or twice, and put them into a pint of reduced and clear espagnole (No. 414). The empty spaces in the olives may be filled with a chicken quenelle forcemeat (No. 89), mixed with anchovy butter (No. 569); poach and drain, and stir them into the sauce.

← No. 509 Sauce a la Normande Hot Sauces No. 511 Orange Sauce →

For the Modern Kitchen

A pint of finished sauce built on espagnole, with the olives doing double duty as garnish and seasoning. The whole thing stands or falls on the blanching step.

Blanch the olives, alwaysBrine-cured olives dropped straight into a reduced brown sauce will make it aggressively salty, and espagnole that has already been reduced has no room left for salt. Ranhofer wants them in the boiling salted water only until it boils up once or twice, then a good drain; that is enough to pull out the harshest of the brine while keeping the flesh firm.
Verdal olivesA large green table olive from the south of France, still grown but rarely labelled as such outside specialist shops. Any firm, meaty green olive works — Castelvetrano, Lucques, Picholine. Avoid the soft canned California black olive, which collapses in hot sauce.
Two ouncesAbout 1/3 cup of pitted olives, or roughly 10 to 14 large ones. Ranhofer wants them pitted with the cavity intact, which means a proper olive pitter or a small paring knife spiralled around the stone, not a press that splits the fruit.
EspagnoleRanhofer's No. 414 is a long-simmered brown sauce of veal stock, mirepoix and brown roux, strained and reduced over hours. A good commercial or homemade demi-glace, loosened with brown stock to a pint of nappant sauce, gets you to the same place. It should coat a spoon, not pour like broth.
The stuffing is optional and fiddlyChicken quenelle forcemeat is pureed raw chicken bound with panade and cream, piped into the pitted cavity. If you make it, poach the stuffed olives gently in barely trembling water -- a rolling boil bursts the forcemeat out of the olive and clouds the poaching liquid.
Anchovy butterHis No. 569 is anchovy fillets pounded to a paste with soft butter and sieved. Two or three fillets to 4 tablespoons of butter is about right; it is there for salt and depth, not for a fishy note, so keep the hand light given the olives are salty too.
Do not boil the finished sauceThe olives go in at the end and only need to heat through. Sustained simmering turns them leathery and bleeds bitterness into the sauce.
Yield and servingA pint, enough for six to eight portions. Olive sauce of this type was traditionally served with braised tongue, boiled or roast poultry, duck and dark meats generally -- anything that wants a salty, sharp counterweight to a rich brown sauce.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially the house manual: a thousand-odd pages of cross-referenced numbered recipes in which almost nothing stands alone. This sauce is a good example -- three separate numbers must be made before you can begin. The dish itself is straightforwardly French, a variation on the family of brown sauces garnished with a single sharp element, and olive sauce in some form appears in French professional cookery well before Ranhofer. The optional stuffing is the most laborious touch: hollowing the olive and refilling it with chicken forcemeat and anchovy butter is restaurant labour of a kind that only made sense in a brigade kitchen with a fleet of commis, and it says a good deal about how a nineteenth-century grand hotel measured its own seriousness.