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Stuffed Olives with Caviare
Stone twelve large Queen olives and fill with Russian caviare. Dress on a hors d'oeuvres dish with a few leaves of lettuce and serve.
An assembly rather than a cooked dish, so the whole thing rests on the quality and the temperature of two ingredients. A few notes on what the original assumes you already have.
- "Stone"Simply means to pit. Queen olives are large enough that a cherry pitter works, though a small paring knife twisted from the stem end gives a cleaner cavity for filling.
- Queen olivesLarge green olives, usually the Spanish Gordal or the Sevillano type sold as "queen"; today often sold already pitted or stuffed. Buy them whole and unstuffed if you can, as pre-pitted ones may not hold a filling neatly.
- "Russian caviare"In cookery of this period the term generally meant lightly salted Caspian sturgeon roe, the low-salt style later sold as malossol. Wild Caspian sturgeon roe is now restricted; farmed osetra or sevruga, or American paddlefish or hackleback roe, all suit the purpose. Lumpfish and salmon roe work but read differently in salt and texture.
- Salt on saltThe hinge of the dish. Brined olives and cured roe are both salty, so rinse the olives and drain them well, and use a restrained amount of roe. If the olives are aggressively brined, soak them in cold water for an hour and dry them before filling.
- Handling the roeUse a bone, horn or plastic spoon rather than metal, which can give the eggs a tinny taste, and fill the olives without pressing so the grains stay whole.
- TemperatureServe cold. Keep the roe on ice until the last moment and fill the olives shortly before they go to the table; the eggs slacken and weep if they sit at room temperature.
- YieldTwelve olives is a single hors d'oeuvres plate for four to six people as part of a spread, not a course on its own. Allow about 1 oz (30 g) of roe for the dozen.
This belongs to the hors d'oeuvres variety, the kind often associated with the hotel dining room, where a waiter brought a tray of a dozen small cold things and the diner took two or three: radishes, anchovies, sardines, beetroot, and stuffed olives in several guises. Cookbooks of the period print such items in strings of three or four lines each, since there is nothing to cook and everything to buy well. Caviar reached Western European and American tables in quantity in the late nineteenth century, a boom that rested on hard-worked Caspian fisheries and heavily on North American sturgeon as well, and to which refrigerated shipping was one contributing factor; for a time it was expensive but not yet rare, and appeared in small garnishing amounts on canapés or, as here, tucked into an olive. The pairing survived the century because it works: the brine and slight bitterness of a green olive cut the fat of the roe. Wild Caspian stocks have since collapsed and the trade is controlled under CITES, so the same dish today is built on farmed roe.