Home › The World's Kitchen › Stuffed Olives
Stuffed Olives
Stone twelve large Spanish olives. Stuff the interior of each with very finely hashed-up sweet peppers and serve on a dish with a folded napkin.
Two lines of instruction that assume a cook who has pitted an olive by hand and knows what a napkin is for. The only real work is the stoning.
- Spanish olivesLarge green brine-cured olives; the biggest of them, the Sevillano, is what is now usually sold as a "queen olive" (Manzanilla is a smaller grade). Buy them whole and unpitted; the pre-pitted ones have a hole too ragged and a cavity too loose to hold a filling.
- Stoning themCut a shallow spiral around each olive from stem to tip with a small knife, following the shape of the pit, then unwind the flesh off the stone and wrap it back into place. A cherry pitter works but tears the ends and the filling falls out.
- Sweet peppersIn a book of this period this means pimientos — the soft, red, skinned peppers sold in jars, not a raw bell pepper. Raw bell pepper is crunchy and watery and will weep into the olive; if that is all you have, roast and peel it first.
- Hashed-upChop the pimiento to a near-paste, then drain or blot it well on paper. Excess liquid is the whole failure mode here — a wet filling slides out and pools on the dish.
- SaltNo seasoning is called for; the brine will already have salted the olives. If the olives taste harsh, soak them in cold water for twenty minutes and dry them before stuffing.
- The folded napkinA period serving convention: dishes of this kind were commonly sent to table on a folded linen napkin, which would also take up any brine that drained off.
- Yield and timingTwelve olives is a garnish for two to four people alongside other relishes, not a course. They can be stuffed several hours ahead and kept covered in the refrigerator; bring them back to cool room temperature before serving, as cold flattens the fruit's flavour.
Stuffing an olive with a strip of red pepper is a Spanish table habit that industry later mechanised: the pimiento-stuffed olive is generally said to have become the default cocktail olive in the United States in the early twentieth century, and until stuffing machines were widespread the work was done by hand, olive by olive, in the canneries of Andalusia. That is exactly the labour this recipe assumes of a household cook.