Here's Why Medieval Beef Olives Didn't Actually Include Any Olives

The names of certain dishes forever tease us with riddles from their culinary history — like she-crab soup, which may have traveled from Scotland to South Carolina, or the iconic Boston cream pie which is technically a cake. Then there are beef olives — a comforting dish that reminds many people of homecooked dinners and a favorite of celebrity chef and restaurateur, Jamie Oliver. Beef olives are full of flavor, can be stuffed with various fillings, and are delicious when cooked low and slow — a great way to tenderize tough cuts of meat. Though today, some people might toss olives into the recipe, historically the dish, which was popular in 16th-century Britain, never contained any olives. And, as it turns out, even beef wasn't a regular feature until the 18th century, with veal and mutton used just as frequently.

So, why the name? The dish itself is straightforward enough: Thin slices of beef are stuffed, tied, and rolled before being cooked until tender. One theory about the dish's origins theorizes that these stuffed rolls, with their compact, oval shape, resemble olives, leading to the name. However, the explanation most food historians seem to agree on is that beef olives look like larks (more specifically ones whose heads have been cut off ready to eat), known as "aloes" in French. Historians believe that olives, in this context, are a linguistic evolution, or a mispronunciation, of the word "aloes."

While a version of beef olives originated in Britain, variations of the dish are also found and known by different names around the world. In Malta, they are known as bragioli, while the French call them roulades, derived from the word rouler, meaning "to roll." Interestingly, other names for the dish also seem to evoke bird imagery. In Belgium, it is known as oiseaux sans tête, which means headless bird. Then there is the Czech Španělský ptáčky, meaning Spanish bird. The Dutch, too, evoke our feathered friends with the name blinde vink, or blind finches.

Tracing the lineage further back, a 15th-century English cookbook from around 1440 describes an intriguing dish titled "alows de beef," similar in method and presentation to modern beef olives.  Due to historical ambiguities, however, there isn't a definite origin point for the first recipe – was it British, French, or invented by another country entirely? Whatever the case, beef olives seem unlikely to have anything historically to do with olives.