I fell in love with olive oil almost by accident, but I fell hard. Forty years ago, I bought an abandoned farm, 25 acres high up in the hills of eastern Tuscany, hard by the border with Umbria. A dozen or so olive trees came with the property, all of them overgrown and neglected, scarcely discernible amid the tangle of blackberries and wild gorse that infested the terraces below the tumbledown stone farmhouse. Over the years, those olive trees began to fascinate me, even as they led me to wonder: Who planted them? When? And why? Twelve olive trees would not provide enough oil for an individual, let alone the fairly sizable family that had last inhabited and farmed Pian d’Arcello some eight or ten years earlier. And those decrepit trees scarcely bore any fruit at all.
Virgin Territory is in part the story of that fascination and of how it led me on an unending and predictably futile search to find the world’s greatest olive oil, a search that led to agronomists and nutritionists, to great research institutions, to small family farms in out-of-the-way corners of the Mediterranean and to vast estates where olives marched in regimented rows to the horizon, and finally back to our own farm, where I eventually added 150 young trees to the collection and where we now make our own superb (if I say so myself) green-gold, Tuscan extra-virgin. It has been a continuing process of education as I have studied and questioned, and as I began to grasp how and why things were done the way they were—and just as important, how and why things began to change.
But something else also happened as I pursued my olive oil education. That was the discovery, beginning in the 1960s, of the “Mediterranean diet,” or rather the Mediterranean way of eating. Diet implies a regimen, a strict adherence to an eating plan with the goal of losing or, more rarely, gaining weight. But the Mediterranean way of eating—with its emphasis on healthful habits based on the consumption of fresh vegetables and fruits, legumes and complex carbohydrates, not much meat, quite a lot of seafood, and above all else the use of extra-virgin olive oil as the principal fat—is less a regime than it is a totally joyful approach to the kitchen and to the table.
As a founder of Oldways Preservation and Exchange Trust, the Boston food-issues think tank that was primarily responsible for educating Americans about the Mediterranean diet, I played a small but gratifying role in the propagation of this great development. Over several decades at Oldways, with my colleagues Greg Drescher and Dun Gifford, we brought together time and again journalists, scientists, nutritionists, educators, and the general public, organized in forums and conferences in the United States and abroad, where we jointly explored what exactly a healthful diet might be and how it might be made more widely available to Americans.
With Oldways and also on my own, I traveled to many parts of the Mediterranean, revisiting places like Spain, France, Cyprus, and Lebanon where I had once lived, and discovering places, like the North African Maghreb, that were entirely new to me. I visited bakers and cheese makers, wineries and markets, all around the Inner Sea. I talked with farmers and chefs and home cooks, with fishermen and market gardeners and commodity grain growers. I stuck my nose into kitchens of all shapes and sizes, and sampled from the cooking pots and the bake ovens. And of course, always and everywhere, I stopped in olive groves, some as ancient as the millenarian trees of Puglia, some as young as the vast new high-density plantations in Andalusia (and in California and Chile, two places that often look Mediterranean even though they are far distant). I visited olive mills, in season and out, to see and taste firsthand what the best producers were doing and how they managed to achieve their quality. And I tasted plenty of rancid, fusty, musty oil at the same time—all to further a deeper understanding. I learned about the different types of olive oil (extra-virgin, virgin, pure, light, flavored), though it took me—and the rest of the world, too, frankly—a long time to understand that high-quality extra-virgin is unique among all types of olive oil for its remarkable health benefits.
Eventually, as the word has spread about olive oil, so too has the cultivation of the olive. In parts of the world with a Mediterranean type of climate, immigrants and colonists planted olive groves, most of them originally no doubt intended for religious uses of the oil. In California, the first olive trees were set out by Spanish mission priests, who needed oil for baptism, unction, and other rituals. Later, Italian immigrants, especially those who came from Liguria, contributed their own varieties and their own techniques. But olives were not a very important crop in California, and table olives were always more important than olives for oil, a situation that has only recently begun to change. In an old issue of National Geographic from the early 1940s, I came across a couple of black-and-white photographs of a California olive mill and of ranks of barrels filled, according to the caption, with olive oil and ready for shipment. Another caption praised local olive producers for gearing up to overcome the oil shortfall from the Mediterranean, cut off by war.
Nowadays, olive cultivation has expanded dramatically in Chile, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and also California; it is spreading even to what would have seemed, just a dozen or more years ago, extremely unlikely parts of the world—China, India, Pakistan—even the U.S. state of Georgia! Why? Because of the health message, because of olive oil’s emergence as a must-have item in sophisticated kitchens, because of the market demand that is a result. If most of the world is not yet suffering—and may never suffer—from a glut of high-quality olive oil (we can’t seem to get enough of it, in fact), Spanish producers of less-than-top-quality oils are currently suffering the anguish brought on by overproduction. But the rest of the world continues avidly growing, producing, and consuming what many, myself included, believe to be one of nature’s most perfect foods.
Olive oil, especially extra-virgin olive oil, is not without its critics, however. Much of the criticism is justified. Prices for extra-virgin are high, especially if consumers can be persuaded that the oil on the shelf, whether in the local supermarket, low-cost chain, or gourmet products store, is genuinely extra-virgin and worth the asking price. And that’s where the problem lies. Because, as has been pointed out over and over again, much of what is labeled as extra-virgin in fact is not; sometimes it is not olive oil—or not entirely olive oil—at all. Olive oil is not the only food product, by any means, that is tainted with fraud, but it is the product that at the moment is most questionable in the public mind. Entirely laudable attempts to explain how the fraud occurs have had the unfortunate effect of stigmatizing all olive oil, especially all Italian olive oil.[1] Gresham’s Law—bad money drives out good—operates here, as with other products: Cheap, badly made, badly handled, or out-and-out duplicitous olive oils, labeled extra-virgin, are driving the truly excellent oils—and there are many of them, from many different parts of the olive oil world—off the market shelves and out of business.
Now more than ever, with all of this oil from likely and unlikely sources circulating in our markets, it seemed to me important for cooks and consumers to understand what exactly extra-virgin olive oil is, to get a good handle on what determines its quality, and to grasp how to tell good oil from bad. So Virgin Territory is also a cookbook and a guide, for beginners and experts alike. Each of the 100 or so recipes included herein uses extra-virgin olive oil, sometimes as a cooking medium, sometimes as a key ingredient, sometimes as a condiment or garnish for the plate—and often as all three of these. Above all, whether you’re a chef, a cook, or a garden-variety consumer, I hope you’ll find in this book a compendium of invaluable information about olive oil in general and extra-virgin olive oil in particular—how to select it, how to use it at the table, and how and why to make it a part of your cooking, your diet, and your life.
Crusty old Tuscan peasant farmers have come a long way in recent decades, but so too have Americans in their appreciation of olive oil. As recently as 1988, a correspondent in The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” section could write about the “extremely low cholesterol level” of an extra-virgin olive oil sold at Macy’s. The oil was made, surprisingly, by then–Chrysler head Lee Iacocca on his Tuscan farm, but if it had any kind of cholesterol level at all, it wasn’t olive oil, which, because it’s entirely plant-based, could never be a source of cholesterol in any case. Such was the state of knowledge a mere quarter of a century ago, even at a magazine famed for the rigor of its fact-checking department.
That was the same year in which I first published a story about olive oil, an article in The New York Times that asked the perennial olive oil questions, still being asked today: “Is it worth the price?” and “What are consumers getting when they buy extra-virgin olive oil?”[2] In the previous year, Americans had imported 51,000 metric tons of olive oil, only about 5 percent of which was extra-virgin. In 2013, we imported more than 290,000 tons, and 65 percent of that was “virgin”—an astonishing increase in that period of time.
Part of the increase was the result of an aggressive marketing campaign by the International Olive Oil Council (now called the International Olive Council or IOC) in the 1980s and 1990s, but part also was certainly traceable to the growing awareness, among scientists, researchers, public health authorities, and consumers at all levels, of the benefits that olive oil provides as part of a healthful diet. At the same time, in the United States our own homegrown olive industry has burgeoned, mostly in California but with a few outreaches in places as likely as southern Oregon, Texas, and New Mexico and as unlikely as Georgia and Washington State. And uncomfortable, even disquieting questions have been raised constantly about the quality of what is labeled extra-virgin olive oil, especially extra-virgin olive oil imported from the traditional Mediterranean producing regions, Spain and Italy. Mediterranean extra-virgin ought to be the finest kind, but, as almost anyone who has had the misfortune to sample a bottle of standard supermarket extra-virgin knows, too often it is not. Even when it costs a lot.
The demand is greater, much greater, than it was just 10 or 15 years ago, but the knowledge about quality continues to be abysmal, and the knowledge of what quality actually tastes like, what the flavor characteristics are of the best extra-virgin olive oils, remains, for most consumers in the United States and elsewhere, shockingly low. How did we get to a state of affairs where we understand so little about and treat so badly an ingredient that is not only precious but also honored, lauded as the very symbol of Mediterranean food, a substance that is not only beyond any doubts healthful but also delicious, adding immeasurably to the overall pleasure of the food on our plates? How can we begin to understand what makes a premium extra-virgin olive oil, and how can we choose it in the marketplace and use it with confidence in our kitchens and on our tables?
I offer this book to try to help answer these questions. Of course it’s important to be aware of fraudulent practices in the olive oil industry—just as it is important to be aware of fraud and deception in milk and honey, two other products that are frequent victims of malpractice—and I deal with that misfortune in many places in this book. But it’s also important to understand that there is plenty of excellent extra-virgin olive oil available for mindful and attentive chefs, cooks, diners, and food lovers alike. Once you have trained your palate to recognize excellence, you will easily be able to avoid the false, the counterfeit, and the outdated. And by buying only the best, all of us together, we may even come to put the least out of business entirely. Fortunately, training your palate to recognize great, honestly made oil is an easy task—and very agreeable, too. And if you are a chef or a cook, you will quickly come to understand how the myriad flavors of olive oils can be put to use in the kitchen to enhance every dish in which they are used.
1. Reviewers of a book by journalist Tom Mueller, Extra-Virginity, published in 2011, often make claims like the following: “Most of what we eat today on the cheap is actually lampante.” That was in The Observer in January 2012. Actually, although he is deeply critical of fraudulent practices, nowhere in the book does Mueller make that claim.
2. As far as I can tell, this was the first-ever major New York Times story about olive oil in the food section’s entire history.