No. 801

Olives Stuffed with Anchovy Butter and with Anchovies

Olives Farcies au Beurre d'Anchois et aux Anchois

Remove the stones from some large verdal olives, using for this purpose a column punch five-sixteenths of an inch diameter, or the machine (Fig. 63); throw them at once into cold water, drain, and garnish them through a cornet with anchovy butter (No. 569). Close up the openings with hard boiled egg-white, or else a piece of truffle, either one cut with the same cutter, or capers may be used instead.

Olives Stuffed with Anchovies.—Remove the stones the same as for olives with anchovy butter, garnish the insides with fillets of anchovies, arrange them on a side dish, and pour over a little fine oil and lemon juice, then serve.

← No. 800 Olives Crescent or Lucques, Spanish Queen, B Cold Side Dishes No. 802 Pickled Oysters →

For the Modern Kitchen

Two variations on a stuffed-olive hors d'oeuvre from Delmonico's kitchen. Nothing here is difficult; the whole job is neatness, and a few of Ranhofer's tools and terms need translating.

Verdal olivesVerdale (Verdal) is a large green French table olive, still grown in Provence and Languedoc. Any large firm green olive sold whole and unpitted works — Cerignola, Castelvetrano, or Spanish Queen, which Ranhofer names in the adjoining entry (No. 800).
The column punchA 5/16-inch column punch is a small round cutter; a plain 8 mm piping tip or an apple corer of that bore does the same work. Push it through the olive from the stem end and the stone comes out in the plug. The "machine" in Fig. 63 is a hand olive-stoner, still made.
CornetA cornet is a paper cone or piping bag. Fit it with a plain tip narrow enough to enter the cavity and pipe the butter in from the bottom up so no air pocket is left.
Anchovy butterNo. 569 is anchovy pounded to a paste with softened butter and pushed through a sieve; proportions are butter-heavy, but check the cross-reference rather than working from a fixed ratio. Sieving matters, since any fibre will block the piping tip.
Chill before pipingThe butter must be soft enough to pipe but not oily. Work it cold, and refrigerate the finished olives for at least half an hour so the filling sets firm before serving — otherwise the first bite pushes the butter out.
The plugsCut the hard-boiled egg white or truffle with the same 5/16-inch cutter so the plug fits flush. A caper of matching size is the quickest substitute and needs no cutting.
The anchovy versionRoll a single oil-packed fillet lengthwise and thread it into the cavity. Dress on the dish, not in advance — olive brine and lemon juice will slacken the anchovy if it sits.
YieldFigure three or four olives per person as part of an hors d'oeuvre assortment; the count per pound varies widely with the size of olive chosen, and stoning and filling by hand is slow work.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of what he cooked during three decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its "Cold Side Dishes" chapter is essentially the hors d'oeuvre trolley: radishes, anchovies, sardines, pickled oysters, and dozens of small salted things meant to be eaten standing or at the start of a long meal. Stuffed olives belong to that repertoire rather than to any single national tradition — cured anchovy is old around the whole western Mediterranean, and the technique here is simply the French kitchen's habit of hollowing, piping and plugging applied to it. What dates the page is the assumption of labour: a house that would set a cook to punching stones out of several hundred olives by hand, and finish each one with a disc of truffle cut to the same gauge, is a house with a brigade. Commercially stuffed olives are often said to have emerged from late nineteenth-century Spanish hand-stuffing, though the dating is loose and mechanised stuffing came considerably later; in time they made this kind of handwork a matter of choice rather than necessity.