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Olive Sauce
Carefully stone twenty-four small olives, and place in a saucepan with two tablespoons sherry, one gill demi-glace, a half gill tomato sauce, half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley and a saltspoon cayenne pepper; mix well, let boil ten minutes, lightly mixing occasionally, and use as required.
A small brown sauce meant to be spooned over roast or braised meat, duck, or tongue. Everything depends on the demi-glace, which the book assumes you already have on the stove.
- GillOne gill is half a cup (4 fl oz), so half a gill is 1/4 cup. The finished sauce comes to roughly a cup, enough for four servings.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon. That is a forceful amount of cayenne for a cup of sauce; a scant 1/8 teaspoon suits most modern palates, and you can add more at the end.
- Demi-glaceIn a 1900s professional kitchen this was brown veal stock reduced with espagnole, thick enough to coat a spoon. Refrigerated or frozen demi-glace concentrate works; if you use plain beef or veal stock instead, reduce it hard first, or the sauce will stay thin no matter how long it boils.
- The olivesThe recipe says only "small olives"; small brine-cured green olives are the likely intent. Pit them with a cherry pitter or by pressing them flat with the side of a knife. Rinse them well and taste before adding salt anywhere in the dish, since brine plus reduced demi-glace can push the whole thing over.
- Ten minutes of boilingKeep it to a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil, and expect the olives to firm up and give off salt as they go. Five to seven minutes is enough to marry the sherry and tomato and take the raw edge off the wine; longer and the olives turn leathery.
- SherryDry or medium-dry (fino or amontillado), not cream sherry and not the salted "cooking sherry" sold in supermarkets.
- ParsleyAdded at the start here, it will lose its color over ten minutes of heat. Hold back half of it and stir it in off the heat if you want the sauce to look fresh.
- Tomato sauceThis means the classic reduced tomato sauce of the brigade kitchen, not jarred pasta sauce. A quarter cup of passata simmered down, or plain tomato pur°e loosened with stock, is closer than anything seasoned with garlic and herbs.
Olive sauce belongs to the family of small compound sauces built on demi-glace that French professional kitchens codified in the nineteenth century and that English and American cookbooks then drew on; the pattern is always the same, a base of reduced brown sauce plus a wine, an aromatic and one defining garnish. It is often said to have been served with duck, tongue or braised beef, where the salt and bitterness of the olives cut a rich, fatty roast. The presence of a recipe like this in a general household book is itself telling, and "use as required" assumes the reader knew which meats it belonged to without being told.