Beef olives – classic comfort food, without an olive in sight |
We all did mad things during the first Covid lockdown. For some it was getting a dog or starting up a microbakery. For me, it was signing up for a NVQ Level 2 in butchery. I’m still not quite sure how it happened, but, once the schools reopened, I spent my Tuesdays in a cold butchery store in east London, socially distanced from my septuagenarian master butchery tutor, who would teach me how to break down whole carcasses, the art of seam butchery and the trick to linking sausages.
For much of those lessons, while trying to feel for a muscle group I couldn’t see, or conjure up the answer to a question about a sheep’s physiology, I would look straight ahead, gazing at a poster almost as old as me which showed different ‘value-added’ dishes that the traditional butcher could offer to the time-poor customer, a way of making the most of cheap cuts that would take the faff out of cooking. Most were familiar: kebabs on skewers, chicken kievs, marinated chicken breast. But among them, one intrigued me: the beef olive. It was hard to tell from the poster what it actually was. I prided myself on having reasonable culinary knowledge, but the beef olive was a mystery to me. I’d certainly never seen one, let alone eaten one.
My butchery teacher was appalled: how did I not know what a beef olive was? They were a staple of the butchery counter. And it’s certainly true they have a long history.
Thin, gently cooked steak and a highly seasoned........