When I was a child, my mum used to keep a very small bottle of olive oil in the kitchen cupboard for medicinal purposes. It stayed there on the shelf for years and I’m sure she would no more have thought of cooking with it as she would of smearing lard into my ear to cure earache. However, now that the Mediterranean diet has become popular, the bottle has come out of the closet and stands proudly on the worktop, next to the garlic flakes and the Herbs of Provence.The olive tree was probably first cultivated about six thousand years ago in what is now known as Syria, Israel and The Lebanon. It was used in oil lamps and blended with flower essences to make scented balms and even served as currency. Biblical references reveal its sacred qualities – it was used to anoint priests - as well as its symbolic qualities of peace, life and honour. Later, the Greeks brought the ‘King of Trees’ to Marseille where it thrived in the stony soil and hot, dry climate and today, ninety percent of olive tree cultivation is concentrated around the Mediterranean basin.
In Provence, it is common to find trees that are several hundred years old and there exists in Italy a tree that is three and a half thousand years old - although the claim is probably the Italian equivalent of the Fisherman’s Tale. The olivier is robust and take time to grow: unscrupulous would-be olive farmers have been known to steal young trees from existing olive groves as they haven’t got the time to grow them from seed. Indeed, it used to be said that it takes three generations to reap the benefits of an olivier: the grandfather plants it, the son prunes it and the grandson harvests the fruit. It is true that for the first seven years, the olive tree basks in the sun and takes life easy. Between seven and thirty-five years is when it begins to grow and produce olives, the crop increasing with each year. From thirty-five years onwards – and up to one hundred and fifty – the olive tree produces a regular and abundant crop until exhausted, it subsides gracefully into a gnarled and fruitless old age.
The olive tree is cultivated mainly for its oil and the olives have to be picked at the right moment as the taste depends upon it. Although the olive is ready for l’olivaison (harvest) at the end of September, when it is a tender green colour, only those destined to be pickled and eaten (or dropped into dry martinis) are gathered. As autumn progresses, the olive turns from pale green to yellowish green and then to brownish pink when it is known as l’olive tournante or ‘turning olive’. The colour deepens to wine red, then to purple and at the beginning of December, when it is almost black, it is finally harvested. This is a delicate operation and it is still done by hand, where possible, by migrant workers. Armed with wicker baskets slung around their waist, they climb stepladders that are pointed at the top like an easel and which allow them to reach the tops of the trees without damaging the branches. This is an expensive and impractical method and in some regions a special pole called a gaule is used to shake the olives from the branches into a net beneath. Elsewhere, they use an olive comb to rake the fruit from the branches.
The fragile olives are taken to the mill where they are sorted, washed and crushed into a paste which is then pressed in a pressoir or in a more high-tech centrifuge. The extracted, filtered oil is known as ‘cold-pressed virgin’ and is used for cooking and seasoning and, of course, pouring into sore ears. Regular consumption helps to combat high blood pressure, indigestion, diabetes and a host of other ills we lardy butter-guzzling northerners have brought upon ourselves. In the past, it was used as an anti-wrinkle cream (the recipe for which has been found on ancient papyrus), as a cure for cholera and as a massage oil for insomniac elephants (according to Aristotle). But surely you already knew that…?
The famous Marseille soap was once made from seventy-two percent olive oil. Today, it is made from several oils and various colorants and preservatives and has become a fashionable additive to floor cleaner, washing powder and the like. You can even be fooled into buying soap-scented shampoo or shower gel… Sadly, genuine savon de Marseille can only be found today at craft fairs, sold by organic middle-aged hippies at extortionate prices, like most other genuine produce.
As for the olives themselves, they can be eaten at various stages of maturity. Green olives are unripe and inedible straight from the tree – they must first be soaked in water or a lye solution for several weeks, then washed and pickled in brine. Black olives are fully mature and need only be brined. Each region has its speciality: Nyons is famed for its black olives which benefit from an AOC, like wine, as do the olives cassées or ‘broken olives’ from Les Baux de Provence, which are flavoured with fennel.
In the meantime, my mum happily pours olive oil onto just about every dish she makes. In fact, she uses so much of the stuff these days that my dad swears it’s coming out of his ears…
