FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS the olive tree, its fruit, and its oil have been central to the ritual and the poetic vocabulary, as well as to the eating habits of the Mediterranean region, which is the heart of the civilization of the west. The same oil that is gracing our lettuce salad has been used to bestow irrevocable kingship, to consecrate priests, churches, temples, and holy objects, to light sanctuary lamps, and to signify sacramental grace and strength – even in countries very far away from olive groves and presses. The olive tree is not a spectacular plant, but it is one of the most deeply loved of trees. Contemplating one for the first time, it is not at all obvious why it should have exerted such power over the human imagination.
Furthermore, the olive itself in its pristine state, picked straight from the tree and eaten, tastes horrible. It contains an extremely bitter substance called oleuropein (after the plant’s botanical Latin name, Olea europaea), which must be separated by patient and sophisticated procedures from the rest of the fruit. When the oil in the flesh of the olive is pressed out, the oleuropein is siphoned off with the vegetable water, which is difficult to dispose of and may become a dangerous pollutant. The ancient Romans used to call this residue amurca: they used it as a weed-killer and insecticide, and for eradicating woodworm.
In order to be rendered fit for eating, olives have to be soaked in lye and carefully washed; they are then cured in brine. The timing of the various stages of the process is important, and the addition of herbs and flavourings is an ancient art. Dry-curing, oil-curing, and salt-curing are possible without the aid of lye, but these methods can take months to complete. Even before the fruit comes to be treated or the precious oil pressed out of it, the moment for harvesting has had to be judged with accuracy; the olives have to be picked and transported, in spite of their delicacy, with as little damage done to them as possible. The trees themselves, until they are old enough to survive on their own, have to be grafted, pruned, encouraged, and protected.
In other words, man and the olive are cohabitors, living in alliance with each other. It is related in the Book of Judges of the Old Testament that the trees once decided they needed a king. Being eastern Mediterranean trees, they immediately thought of the olive as the obvious candidate for sovereignty. But the olive drew himself up and said, “Should I leave my fatness, wherewith by me they honour God and man and go to be promoted over the trees?” The olive tree knew that he had been accepted into civilized society and given high status within it; he had left the wild behind him. (The unfortunate trees eventually had to lower their sights and ask a bramble bush to be king.)
The extreme utility which the olive has traditionally offered in the societies which have cultivated it is offset by the labour needed to take advantage of the fruit and its oil. The tree has continually caused men to wonder at their own ingenuity as they transformed a small and nasty berry into a rich gastronomic triumph and squeezed out of its bitter flesh the most delicious oil on earth. The olive tree became synonymous for its cultivators with civilization itself and expressive of the highest human ideals. It shares with bread a whole mythology which speaks of wisdom, patience, mysterious goodness, and technological expertise. Like rice and wheat, the olive must suffer in order to render up its riches; the fruit must be crushed or man will not profit from it. “Oil can be drawn only with the press,” says a Sicilian proverb: nothing is achieved without sweat. The olive is a tree dwelling outside paradise: its fruit belongs to a different category altogether from that of Adam’s facile apple.
The olive is the Mediterranean tree par excellence. As one approaches the Mediterranean sea, coming over the top of a hill or round a bend in the road, one suddenly knows that one has arrived, even before the sea itself comes into view. All at once, this is it: the white light, the rocks, the special strident blue of the sky. The first olive trees provide final proof that we have entered a region unlike any other.
Olive trees hug the Mediterranean coast so resolutely that it was believed in the ancient world that the trees depended in some way on sea water, and that they could not survive more than seventy-five kilometres (40 miles) from the coast. The second assumption is as fallacious as the first: it is of course not the sea itself which the plant craves, but the mild temperature to which the sea gives rise: In the Mediterranean region the sea is a cooling influence on the African shore, and a warming one on the north coast. Olive trees need long hot summers, but also a winter chill for setting the fruit (nothing, however, below 12° C. [54° F.]), and no spring frosts which would kill the blossoms. In addition, they will not tolerate the climate at heights greater than two thousand feet above sea level. These precise conditions can be met in places on earth other than the Mediterranean: Olea europaea has spread to California, South Africa, Australia, and is at present the object of special attention in China. But as long as the myth of the Mediterranean survives, the olive will remain representative of its place of origin.
The Olea family of trees includes the privet, the jasmine, and the lilac. There are over thirty species of Olea in the world, most of which are valued for their hard wood, which is used in making tools and furniture. Only Olea europaea is cultivated for its fruit. One relative, also common in the Mediterranean region, is known as the wild olive or oleaster. This is a hardy, spiny shrub with small meagre-fleshed fruit; it is often used as a stock upon which the cultivated olive is grafted. It used to be assumed that this wild olive was the original material from which man gradually bred the fruitful tree. It is now thought that Olea chrysophylla (“golden leaf”), a species found growing wild in Asia, Africa, and the Canary Islands, is the real progenitor. The oleasters would then be descendants of plants which have escaped from cultivation, and which have degenerated over long periods of time into their present state. (It is said that although there is very little oil to be squeezed from the fruit of the oleaster, what there is attains the highest quality.) Some scientists believe that Olea europaea is itself the original tree, having needed only careful nurturing to make it as fruitful as it is. The problems involved in deciding where the olive tree came from arise in part from the longevity of the plant. Little can be done experimentally to check hypotheses. By the same token, if human beings developed the olive tree, just how they did so, given the plant’s long life span, remains a mystery.
All fleshy fruits with a single woody stone enclosing a kernel are known among botanists as drupes, after the “original” drupe, the olive. (The word for a ripe olive in both Latin and Greek is druppa.) The olive nut is uncommonly hard and may take years to germinate. Farmers sometimes remove the kernels from their shells, soak them in fertilizer and plant them, but preferred methods of propagation include rooting cuttings, grafting, and planting out suckers. Where the olive’s root structure joins the trunk, the circulation of sap slows down and concentrates into bulbous growths called ovules. These can be cut from the trunk and planted out, and they will root and grow into separate trees.
Olive trees can live for centuries, sending deep tap roots down into the soil in search of water. If a tree is cut down or burned, the root survives and can spontaneously send out fresh suckers from the ovules at its base underground. For this reason the mythology of the olive includes ideas of regeneration and immortality: green shoots miraculously being born out of an old charred stump. The shoots of a plant are called “scions” – a word which came also to mean human offspring, sons of the parental “stock.” “Thy wife,” promises Psalm 128, “shall be as a fruitful vine by the sides of thine house; thy children like olive plants round about thy table.” (The image here is perhaps that of a cut stump “table” surrounded by green scions.) This ability to “begin again” is also the reason for extreme longevity in the tree: ages of two thousand years and more have been claimed in certain cases. The eight gnarled olive trees on the Mount of Olives at Jerusalem (“Gethsemane” means “olive press”) are said to have been there since the time of Christ, and this might be literally true, or true in the sense that they could share the root-system of trees living then.
A tree which proliferates from suckers can develop an enormous girth, made, in fact, of many trunks fused together. The trees on the Mount of Olives are six metres (20 ft.) in circumference. One hollow tree belonging to a nineteenth-century Provençal farmer is said to have been used as summer sleeping quarters for himself, his family, and his horse. Such ancient trees have often enjoyed a role in human society partly analogous to that of a pet animal: people have given them personal names (one famous tree near Nice was known as “Pignole”), loved them, honoured them, or treated them as sacred. A family might insist upon the quality of oil, unmatched by any other, which a specific tree could give. A tree could be thought of as gracious, or obstinate, or angry and therefore loath to give any fruit.
Olive flowers are tiny and greenish-white. The leaves are narrow, pointed, and leathery, green on the upper surface and silvery underneath. They grow in pairs along the stalk: it is one of the characteristics which make olive branches, even when extremely stylized, immediately recognizable in art. Because the tree is evergreen, one of its greatest benefits to man has always been the year-round shelter it provides from sun and rain. Olive trees can grow where there is very little water, thanks to their deep tap-root and because they lose almost no moisture by evaporation: the olive leaf is water-tight.
The fruit when young is an intense green; as it grows it becomes a brilliant yellowish light green, then violet with coloured spots; as the flesh within darkens, the skin gradually changes from violet to brilliant dark purple covered with a whitish bloom, and finally to black. Fully ripe black olives produce the most oil; but the best-tasting oil is from fruit only beginning to ripen. Olives which fall, as they naturally do when ripe, are often bruised and deteriorate very quickly lying on the ground; one or both of these conditions will destroy the quality of the olive oil. For these reasons fruit to be pressed for oil should wherever possible be picked from the trees before it is ready to drop off.
However, olives are highly resistant to separation from the tree before they are ripe. It follows that picking this fruit is extremely onerous work. For the finest olive oil, the fruit ought to be picked one by one, and by hand. The olives should be deposited in sacks or baskets carried by the pickers up into the trees. Any fruit which does fall should be collected at once – daily if possible. The work is intensely seasonal, lasting a few weeks in the year at the most. These facts alone are almost enough to cause any self-respecting modern food industrialist to throw up his hands in frustration and transfer his capital to more easily profitable fruit.
None of these factors was a serious problem in the past, although the olive was always acknowledged to be a plant which demanded a great deal of effort from its owners. Olive harvesting took place in the winter when other farm chores were relatively few. The pressing of the oil (often by human strength alone) was traditionally carried out by sailors, who could not go to sea in winter. There would be perhaps scores rather than hundreds of trees to be harvested, and all the families of a village might pitch in to help, afterwards sharing out the results of their work. Most oil was produced for personal consumption.
The olive harvest (known as the olivades in Provence, and given equivalent names in other regions) was considered to be one of the high points of the year, comparable with the grape harvest. It was a social event complete with picnics, and a climactic tasting of the famous frotte d’ail or bruschetta (toasted bread rubbed with garlic and doused in the new oil), when the quality of the new stores was finally appreciated. We hear, too, of elaborate song cycles, with themes ranging from the epic to the jocular which had evolved over the centuries to be sung while picking the olive harvest. Some of these have been preserved, thanks to the efforts of folklore collectors. The work of harvesting and pressing the oil was hard, and the monetary reward nothing like what it would be today. It was accepted as part of the yearly round, and celebrated as a triumph. The rewards were immediate – and satisfying when times were good.
Even in idyllic circumstances, however, and even when people were more patient about manual work than we are, olive-picking was so tiring and difficult that short-cuts were sought. Olives should ideally be picked by hand, and often cannot be picked any other way; but near-ripe fruit can be beaten and shaken from the trees onto mats set out on the ground below. With some luck the bruising will not be too severe (one ingenious Italian idea is to use open umbrellas placed upside down on the ground to catch the olives: the fruit bounces, and bruises less), and provided that the fallen fruit is quickly removed for pressing, only slight damage can be expected. From the earliest times, people have been beating their olive trees in order to save time and trouble. In the Book of Deuteronomy, for instance, it is laid down that “When thou beatest thine olive tree, thou shalt not go over the boughs again: it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow.”
In the course of beating for fruit, branches were constantly being broken off the trees. People reasoned, however, that olive trees liked this kind of damage: farmers considered it important, interestingly enough, to feel that their labour-saving devices were helpful and not injurious to their trees. The beaters were in many cases actually encouraged by being given any wood they brought down for fuel, as part of their reward. Olive trees were pruned in order to augment their fruitfulness: surely, therefore, beating the branches would have a similar effect, whipping the trees into productivity?
Pruning has always represented a fascinating paradox: the cultivator reduces a plant in order to elicit increase from it. The German botanist Camerarius used as his emblem a drastically pruned tree, with the words tanto uberius, “so much the more fruitfully,” written underneath. Camerarius himself doubtless understood the real science of pruning, but people have all too commonly assumed that cutting back is all there is to it. One Italian proverb pronounces that “An olive tree needs a sage at its feet and a fool at its head”: it wants careful tending of the soil but mad pruning of its branches. Another folk riddle represents the olive as asking, “Make me poor, and I’ll make you rich – who am I?” It has taken modern scientific hard-headedness finally to establish the fact that – in spite of aeons of folk wisdom – olive trees do best with only the minimum of pruning, and that indiscriminate beating can destroy a whole year’s fruit.
One of the commonest problems of olive-growing has always been that the trees seem often to produce only every second year – and the better the crop of fruit in one year, the less likely the tree is to produce anything the following season. Great fruitfulness was thought to “exhaust” the tree’s strength. This behaviour seemed annoying, but understandable. Today, biennial cropping has become economically intolerable: modern commercial practice cannot put up with abundance (low prices) one year, followed by a dearth and high prices the next. No longer does one olive tree serve the needs of one family: vast plantations are what we are after, to produce oil or fruit for thousands, and every tree must be regular, uniform, and constantly productive.
Modern agricultural scientists have discovered that the practice of beating the trees (vareo it is called, from the Spanish: the beating stick is called a vara) was largely responsible for biennial cropping. Vareo brought down, in addition to the slightly unripe fruit, a good deal of the new growth of twigs which would have borne the flowers and fruit of the following season; it was, in fact, systematic destruction of the tree’s fruiting power. And the actual purposeful pruning, if carried out without expertise, was even more damaging to the tree: both men and olive groves paid for the ancient saw that the trees benefited from savage treatment. Careful and knowledgeable pruning, on the other hand, can (and presumably often did, in the past as well as the present) usually prevent biennial cropping altogether. The practice of vareo continues, although it is generally discouraged, but a machine has recently been invented for shaking olive trees. Nylon netting is spread beneath to catch the fruit, and the branches are vibrated until olives stop falling. The practice saves manpower, while comparatively little of the tree’s new growth, which is vital for the next year’s crop, is damaged.
Olive trees, traditional wisdom said, should not produce fruit at full strength until they have been growing for as much as fifteen or twenty years: a man tended saplings which might really benefit only his children and their descendants. He would cut back his young olive trees, training their trunks, preventing branching too low down, even forcing the branches to form ladders, useful for the pickers to climb later. Every country and region had its own traditional ideas about the size and shape of olive trees, the height of the trunk, the length of branches, and the space between trees. But about one thing everyone agreed: an olive tree could, and should, live for centuries. Early pruning to create a tall trunk and the prevention of early fruiting ensured long life for the tree. The ancient, gnarled, familiar, idiosyncratic, almost human olive tree survived in the place where the family had its roots. It gathered to itself all the connotations of peaceful constancy, historic continuity, and unshakeable dependability which were accepted as human ideals.
Nowadays, we cannot wait. Olive trees simply must not take more years than absolutely necessary to begin fruiting. We want them around only so long as they are intensely productive. Once they settle back into a less vibrant old age, then away with them: uproot them and start again. As a matter of fact, the olive, as twentieth-century man has discovered, is by nature more like a shrub than a tree. It is man, with his pruning and patience, who has created those twisted and massive grey shapes, those angular branches gesturing against the backdrop of the blue Mediterranean sea. If you leave an olive tree alone, its crown of branches will sprout very low down – it will scarcely produce a trunk at all – and it will begin setting fruit in five years, not ten or twenty. Ideally, very light pruning will then be required – though none at all is likely to be the rule, since pruning is labour-intensive. True, the trees will not last anything like as long as those grown in the past – but we care very little now about anything lasting.
In the past, an olive tree was often a poor man’s mainstay. It would grow practically anywhere (which was where poor men tended to live): on steep stony slopes, in dry hot places; if nothing else would grow, the olive (provided the climate was Mediterranean) could be counted on. The peoples of northern Europe ate butter and the peasants there kept cows. In the south a family had its olives and olive oil; possessing a tree was far less risky than owning animals. Even if it stood far away from anyone’s home and received hardly any tending it produced something; once it was established, it cost almost nothing to keep up.
We now know, however, that olives – like any other trees – do best in correctly irrigated, rock-free, and fertile soil. In order to create a profitable modern enterprise, we begin, therefore, by bulldozing the land, removing the stones, and creating flat plantations for olives, to ensure optimum drainage of the soil. The rooting of cuttings is speeded up by a new mist-spray process. We plant the trees – shrubs really – in serried ranks, so close together that their branches touch and they become almost like hedges, with only enough space between rows for the tractors to pass with herbicides and mechanical ploughs. Close-planting facilitates the spraying of pesticides from the air, since no chemicals are wasted on the gaps between trees (even though olives are among the least amenable of fruits to many modern pesticides, because their oil disconcertingly retains the flavour and smell of chemicals.)
Scientists urge the creation of large groves, bearing more than one thousand trees per hectare, in order to justify the use of machinery and the cost of remodelling the terrain. The terraces created on steep slopes by the labour of generations of farmers should now be abandoned, some say, unless piped irrigation is available and access can be created for tractors. Not least among the momentous changes being advocated is that of ownership: big companies alone have the capital, the access to scientific research, and, above all, the unified leadership which mass agriculture requires. In spite of these new ideas, it is still not uncommon in the Mediterranean countryside for each olive tree in an ancient grove to belong to a different family – even for many families to have inherited shares in one tree.
The amount of work which olive cultivation still requires is a serious count against it in the modern scheme of things; the ease with which other oils are produced from tropical seeds, (as we saw when we read about margarine in chapter 3), causes fierce competition from these cheaper oils for profitable markets. Olive oil, unlike margarine, can come from olives and nothing else; and chemists, so far, do not seem to have made any claims to be able to reproduce its flavour. Meanwhile, people living in the rich countries of the world clamour more and more insistently for olive oil. This development is very recent, and, as we shall see, it is in several respects surprising. But the figures are unmistakable: demand for olive oil has gone up at least 2,000 per cent in North America alone during the past five years. The industry is suddenly being called upon to supply an increasing quantity of oil, just when olive cultivation was being comfortably thought anachronistic and, in many places, doomed to extinction.
Several things are being done to change the situation in the olive oil industry. “Rationalization,” along the lines already described, is continuing apace. Old trees, abandoned by the farmers who used to tend them and who have now gone to live modern lives in cities, are increasingly threatened with destruction. This is especially true in countries like Italy and France, where people command high wages, and where it is often lamented that “nobody wants to tend the olives any more.” The spread of the Common Market and of agri-business in Europe has already meant the ruin of many old olive groves, and the dismantling of many more is being predicted for Spain and Portugal. Prestigious centres of production like Liguria, Tuscany, Sardinia, and Provence are holding their own, while Spain and Greece continue to supply the world with large quantities of olives and olive oil. But olive production is increasingly being shifted to poorer Mediterranean countries, such as Turkey and Tunisia, where harvesters are content for the time being both to do the work and to accept lower wages.
The word oil comes from oliva, the Latin for olive. The earliest Greeks had called the olive tree elaiwa; they later dropped the w sound, but Latin kept it, and handed on the term oliva, together with oleum for the oil, to the countries of the north which the Romans conquered, and to which the olive was exotic. The other main root for the name of the olive in the languages of the Mediterranean region is the Semitic zayt, which becomes zayith in Hebrew, zait in Arabic, and aceituna (aceite for the oil) in Spanish. (The holy oils used in church ritual in Spain are called oleos santos: the Latin name replaces the Semitic because of the association of the Church with Rome.)
The ancient Egyptians (who called the olive tat) grew and harvested olives mainly for eating, but preferred to leave the heavy labour of growing, harvesting, and pressing for oil to Palestine and her Levantine neighbours. The Egyptians imported enormous amounts of olive oil from this region, for lighting and for ritual requirements in their temples; olive crowns and branches are commonly found in mummy cases. It is thought by some that Port Said means “Port Olive,” because it was the point of entry for Egypt’s olive oil supplies.
It is easy to see how people learned to squeeze oil out of the olive; but the strange idea of seeking ways to make the bitter olive edible is, as far as we can judge, equally ancient. Pickling the olive preserves it in addition to adjusting its taste. The result turned out to be of great nutritional importance in the Mediterranean area, where olives have, from time immemorial, constituted an essential food resource, depended upon by the poor but also appreciated by the rich.
Olives were a favourite snack (another fast food) in the streets of ancient Rome, as they are in that city today. One would select olives from an array of different types, sizes, ripenesses, flavourings, and pickling brines, and carry them away from the vendor in cornets made of papyrus. For the Romans, olives were something quintessentially Italian and therefore civilized. They were also simplicity itself, and so satisfied a craving for rustic frugality: the Romans needed to see themselves as an austere people, content with little. Any foodstuff which can cover two poles of yearning at once (in this case both sophistication and simplicity), is bound to acquire great symbolic complexity for the society which so honours it.
Most people who have never encountered an olive before find the idea of eating one quite unpleasant, even repulsive. The blend of powerful and quite perversely difficult tastes – salty, sour, bitter – needs some getting used to. Ralph Waldo Emerson said that olives were like life at sea: exotic and distasteful. With perseverance, however, a liking for olives can be “acquired,” and after that it is never lost. Taste is an extraordinarily complex phenomenon, not to be thought of as purely physical; human beings, indeed, are unique among omnivorous mammals in continuing to try eating foods they find repellent in the beginning.
Liking for certain foods creates a bond among people, and effectively excludes from the group those who have not acquired the taste. Learning to like something is in the nature of an initiation, of progress into a desirable position “beyond” the one formerly occupied. We prevent our children from drinking coffee because it is bad for them. A secondary but by no means negligible reason is that a coffee break becomes one occasion which beleaguered adults cannot share with their children; while we drink our unhealthy coffee, we can tell our children to “run along” with a clear conscience. As people grow up, they teach themselves to do what distinguishes adults from children: they will choke and cough until they have mastered the cigarette, or force themselves to down bitter beer until they are ready to join the group that actually likes it. Our television advertisements understand the lure of this “in” group, and with infinite cunning portray beer-drinkers as fit, extremely convivial, grown-up yet usually young; cigarette-smokers are made to seem sexy, sophisticated, and extremely healthy, even tough.
Eating olives, in our society (as opposed to that of the Mediterranean, where children are taught to like olives at an early age) is “sophisticated” behaviour. Liking them is proof of an adventurous readiness to try foreign foods, as well as of familiarity with an exotic yet universally acclaimed cuisine. Eating olives, one is grown up, broad-minded, and a person, as we say, “of taste.” One really does like olives after a while: a new possibility for enjoyment has entered one’s life, like an ambition achieved or an object possessed. Clearly, acquiring such a taste has many rewards, and once it has been acquired, we wonder how we could ever have forgone the treat. The taste of olives, once loathed because it was utterly unlike that of the pale, bland, sweet foods so obviously and effortlessly pleasant to us, now seems to be not only powerful and sophisticated, but also to possess a primary or fundamental character. Lawrence Durrell writes in Prospero’s Cell that olives have “A taste older than meat, older than wine. A taste as old as cold water.”
The ways in which olives are eaten in the Mediterranean region create a broad geographical division, separating the cuisines of the area into two parts. In the countries of the eastern half (Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, the Levant, Egypt, and Libya) olives are used as a garnish and for hors-d’oeuvres; they are eaten like a fruit, that is to say uncooked (except insofar as pickling them is “cooking” them) and often as small meals in themselves, accompanied perhaps by bread, cheese, and herbs. In the west (Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Spain, Portugal, France, and Italy) they are very often cooked along with other foods. The reasons for these two attitudes towards the olive are to be sought in traditional mealtime structures, and perhaps in the likelihood, in the past, of there being little but olives to eat at certain meals. The countries where olives are often cooked are also those where green olives tend to be especially popular.
Olives may be eaten at the beginning of a meal or at the end; either way, they always make an excellent accompaniment for drinks. The modern martini pays homage to the olive’s ancient role as enhancer of drinks by including one “swimming,” as the ancient Greeks would have said, in the glass. In Spain, meals traditionally end with olives, so that a person who arrives on the scene when everything is over is said to “get there with the olives.”
Spain produces more table olives than anywhere else on earth: two and a half million metric tons a year for export, about two-thirds of those being stuffed green olives. Factory-processed green olives get a short cure in lye, and are then fermented in salt brine. This means that the olives are treated with both of the methods used to discourage bacteria in food: lye gives the olives a pH level too high for most microorganisms to live in, and the subsequent pickling brings the pH level down too low. Lactic acid, produced naturally by fermentation and sometimes added in the factory, together with salt, replaces most of the taste which was removed in the lye.
Firm-textured green olives are easily pitted (modern machinery removes seventeen hundred stones per minute) and keep their shape. The red “pimiento,” or sweet pepper stuffing is a ground-and-reconstituted gelatinous pimiento paste which is extruded in ribbon form and squeezed into the olives with machine-tooled precision. It is even possible these days to replace the lid on a pitted olive so that no one would guess that the olive had ever been broached – as though it had grown seedless and ready-stuffed on the tree. Anchovy stuffing is funnelled like toothpaste from tubes into the olives in the same fashion. Almond- and onion-stuffed olives have still to be processed by hand. Cracked green olives continue to be pickled at home or as a cottage industry. They are soaked for about two weeks in water with the stones left in them, and subsequently marinated in a salt brine with various combinations of flavourings, which include fennel, fenugreek, cumin, oregano, bay leaves, rosemary, chili peppers, and orange or lemon peel. Either vinegar or lemon juice may be added to the brine.
Black olives vary greatly in size, shape, texture, and taste. They grow especially large in the warm climates of southern Spain and Greece, reaching sizes over two centimetres (1 in.) long in some varieties. Greek olives are often not treated with lye, but cured only in plain salt or brine where, in time, they undergo lactic fermentation; the result in many cases has a strong and bitter taste. French olives from the cooler north shore of the Mediterranean are small, often with comparatively little flesh and a strong flavour; they are generally considered to be the best-tasting olives of all. Pickled Mediterranean olives are exported in large containers, in their brine, to America and to northern Europe. They continue to ferment in transit, so that valves have to be fitted to let gases out and prevent explosions. The alternative method, pasteurization to stop fermentation, is also practised, but it results in pickled olives lacking in finesse.
Ripe black olives cannot be factory pitted because their flesh is too soft; an olive pitter is, therefore, an inexpensive and useful kitchen gadget to own. In California, however, unripe olives are processed to make them turn black: the flesh then remains firm enough to allow destoning in the factory. They are picked green and then chemically blackened; the resulting dark colour is fixed with ferrous gluconate. A lye treatment is followed by washing, pitting, inspection, and immediate canning in a mild salt brine. There is no time taken for fermentation, which means that these olives develop no strong pickled flavour. They also need, as pickled olives do not, to be sterilized at high heat in the cans in order to become resistant to spoilage.
The oldest Californian olives are called Mission, because they were planted from Mexican stock at San Diego de Alcalà by Franciscan missionaries in about 1785. These are small olives, which may either be eaten black or pressed for oil. California produces hardly any olive oil these days, and small olives have not been greatly appreciated there for the last sixty years. The old Mission trees are often used for stock on which to graft large table varieties. Because many Americans like their olives large, salesmen of canned Californian black-ripe olives stress the size of their product with zeal; they have given the various dimensions of olives names which include Giant, Jumbo, Mammoth, Colossal, Super Colossal, and Special Super Colossal.
“Let the salad-maker be a spendthrift for oil,” advises a Spanish proverb, “and a miser for vinegar, a statesman for salt, a madman for mixing.” The best and freshest lettuce deserves the finest of oils, and plenty of it. The finest is unquestionably Cold Pressed Extra Virgin Olive Oil. (A less wide-spread tradition advocated walnut oil; but this has become these days, even in southwestern France, a luxury still rarer than top-quality olive oil.) Olive oil is called “Virgin” when it is the first oil to come out of the olive, that which is released from the fruit with the least pressure being applied. It is “Extra” to distinguish it from the merely “Superfine” Virgin oil: “Extra” has less than 1 per cent oleic acidity (0.5 per cent in the very best product), while “Superfine” has up to 1.5 per cent. “Fine” or “Regular” has between 1.5 per cent and 3 per cent acidity, plain “Virgin” or “Pure” has up to 4 per cent, and anything more acid than that is inedible lamp oil.
This classification, which is used on most olive oil labels, is a relic from the past. It can be completely misleading, because it has meaning only if the oil has not been refined by modern chemical and mechanical methods. An abominable olive oil can now be refined until its acidity easily ends up less than 1 per cent. The resulting oil will have no taste at all, let alone the matchless flavour of true “Extra Virgin.” It can be made palatable by the addition of 5 per cent to 10 per cent of frutada, the strongest-tasting “Extra Virgin” oil; this produces what is called in the trade a “Riviera mixture,” and it makes up most of what is sold world-wide as olive oil.
The real “Extra Virgin” oil is to be known by its taste, by the name of its supplier, or by the additional phrase “Cold Pressed,” which indicates that it has not been refined. Top quality also commands a high price. In 1985, the finest Tuscan cold-pressed oils cost $20 Canadian per litre, which is between three and five times the price of olive oil as it is usually bought in the shops. Refining the oil and then replacing some of its taste is a compromise which most people must accept on account of the saving in money. A litre of cold-pressed oil is to be treasured, and used only for salads or as an added condiment, since heating it above 60°C. (140°F.) alters its flavour.
Olive oil “tastings,” on an analogy with wine tastings, are one of the ways in which the olive oil companies are acquainting the public in non-Mediterranean countries with the range of their oils and persuading them to recognize the prestige of olive oil generally. About six small glasses containing oils ranging in colour from pale yellow to green-gold are savoured one by one, with unsalted bread and slices of apple between oils to cleanse the palate. One rubs oil on the back of the wrist – like perfume – to test the aroma. A fatty sensation in the mouth is a bad sign, acid in the throat another. Olive oil is intensely liable to pick up other odours and tastes, so the taster watches for the least degree of contamination, and also for any hint that the fruit was bruised in the harvesting, or was not precisely the right age for pressing. Then there are varieties of olives in the blend to be noted, the climate during growth being an important factor which improves or lowers quality.
Olive oil has good years and bad years, but it does not improve with age like wine. Five months aging is needed for fruity oils like the Tuscan, which begins with a distinct peppery after-kick. (Some gourmets consider this pepperiness part of the oil’s excellence, and do not wait for it to mellow.) Olive oil keeps well for up to two years, provided it is not exposed to sunlight; it can, on occasion and in the proper conditions, last for many years without deteriorating. The greenish colour of certain oils is sometimes taken for a sign of their “extra virginity.” It is quite common now for manufacturers to add a few ground olive leaves in order to produce what they call a “green note,” just because the colour is attractive to customers.
Cold pressing olive oil is a risky and labour-intensive process. The difficulties begin with the harvest, with fruit hand-picked at precisely the right moment (olives do not ripen simultaneously, even on the same tree), and with no bruises or damage in either transport or storage. Ideally, olives should not be held in storage at all before pressing because piles of fruit spontaneously heat up and begin to ferment, with increase in acidity and damage to the oil’s aroma. But modern working conditions and the need for expensive modern machinery to be kept in operation makes storage, with its concomitant risk, almost inevitable. Stored olives are spread out as thinly as possible and must be kept cool. The olive is one of the rare fruits with high fat content. Its precious burden of oil – 17 per cent of the olive’s substance – is contained in pockets within the fruit’s cells. The oil is removed by crushing the fruit until its vegetal structure is broken down. Metal crushers are economical, but they conduct heat; it is preferable to use millstones, each eight tons in weight. The softer the stone the better the oil – but, as usual, the best stone requires the most work, as it wears out quickly and needs to be recut and replaced. In the past, great care was taken to crush as few olive pits as possible; today we are less purist, but make up for this in part by providing more efficient filtering techniques.
The fruit is reduced to a paste so that the torn cells release most of their oil. In the cold-pressing method, the milled paste goes straight to the press, where it is spread, in loads of nine kilograms (20 lb.) of paste each, on round nylon mats. These are then mounted onto disks eighty to ninety centimetres (31 to 36 in.) in diameter, each with a hole in the middle. The disks are threaded one on top of the other onto a vertical spindle, and the whole column is then squeezed downward; oil and water pour down the perforated central shaft into the catchment basin. The method is essentially unchanged (except for the materials out of which the press is made) from that used three thousand years ago.
The first pressing, performed without the use of too much force and always in this method without heat, releases the finest olive oil of all. Second and third pressings, requiring increased power, produce successively inferior oils. Filtering, settling, and decanting to remove vegetable water follows. This process relies on the fact that oil is less dense than water, and therefore separates itself out and rises to the surface. Simple decanting pots, with a funnel at the bottom to drain off the unwanted liquid, have been found in Crete, dating back forty-five hundred years.
Next, the oil is stored for a few weeks in cool, dark, underground vaults, so that minute particles of remaining fruit can settle to the bottom. The oil is then filtered again. Many oil enthusiasts insist on very little settling and filtering: the taste is fruitier without it, but the oil looks cloudly instead of a brilliant clear green-gold. The best oils are filtered through cotton; filtration through alkaline earth helps to lower the acidity of poorer oils. Sunlight spoils olive oil, so bottles should be opaque.
In modern mills which do not cold press, the crushed olive paste is heated slightly and then beaten with mechanical paddles. The purpose of this is to break down the membranes of lipoprotein which develop on the drops of oil freed in the crushing of the fruit, so that the oil drops run together as much as possible. Next, the mass is pressed with the help of heat and water. More and more commonly a centrifuge or spinning press is used; this saves time but damages the oil. Most of it, however, will be refined to remove acidity and used as the base for frutado-flavoured cheaper olive oil.
Modern producers of olive oil would dearly love to find an extraction method which would do away with the breakable disks and the labour-intensive cold press. Even where all the latest machinery is in use, they sadly compare their conditions of work with the cheerfully automated continuous screw-presses which the seed-oil industry can use to pour out vast quantities of cottonseed, rapeseed, peanut, soya, and other oils at a far smaller cost. Seed-oil can even be extracted by chemical solvents. But olive paste will not submit to the same treatment: the cold disk press, hot-pressing, or centrifuging the paste remain the only practical processes available for olive oil. Difficulties of harvesting and timing added to the non-continuous, multi-operational pressing methods account for most of the high cost and explain why olive oil, once a poor peasants’ staple, is now a luxury.
People have always adulterated olive oil, or tried to, whenever other oils have been easier and cheaper to get. Today regulations are such that real, though refined, olive oil must be used as a base, with the addition of frutado, if the product is to be allowed the appellation “olive oil.” Before a way of testing for saponification levels and other modern scientific methods of verification were available, tasteless vegetable oils were used to eke out the expensive “real thing.” For example, an olive oil racket involving adulteration with tea-seed oil imported from the Orient was broken in the United States in 1936; the affair greatly encouraged the systematic inspection of oils in North America.
In May 1981, thousands of Spaniards became sick and hundreds died because rapeseed oil from France had been used illegally to adulterate olive oil which was then sold off at apparently “bargain” prices. The rapeseed oil, which was meant to be used only in steel mills, had been treated with aniline dye. It was bought up, bleached, recoloured, and reprocessed, and passed off as something like the refined olive oil base to which we are all accustomed. But in the process a deadly poison was created that killed or paralyzed human beings who ate it. Thousands of people demonstrated in Madrid, many of them on crutches and in wheelchairs; the tragedy was one of the most horrible food-poisoning disasters in modern western history. More than twenty people were jailed. The Spanish government introduced new laws making date-stamping obligatory, guaranteeing compensation for victims of food poisoning, and introducing fines for offences against public health. The twentieth century has unprecedentedly high standards of hygiene in one sense, but the dangers of chemical poisoning have escalated beyond anything imagined by our simpler and “dirtier” forefathers.
The ancient Greeks and Romans seem to have spent much of their lives pouring olive oil over themselves. They oiled after the bath, before and sometimes during meals, before and after doing physical exercise, before long journeys on foot and again upon arrival, and in general whenever they wished to relieve tension and fatigue. The prescription for health of the ancient Greek philosopher Democritus was “honey on the inside, olive on the outside.” Later Greek and Roman versions of this adage prefer wine to be taken internally, but olive oil remains the external lubricant.
There were many professional anointers who offered massage for a fee to anyone feeling in need of relaxation, especially in the gymnasia and public baths. Every athlete who took his sport seriously (and every young man with pretensions to style was expected to frequent the gymnasium) had two trainers: a gymnastic master for physical training and an “anointer” who advised him about diet, gave him medical checkups, and either prescribed massages and oil-rubs or performed them himself. The official in charge of the gymnasia of an ancient city considered one of his main tasks to be the provision of enough olive oil to make sport, as the ancients conceived it, possible.
Before wrestling naked, as was customary in the ancient world, one first did a few warm-up exercises to open the pores, then poured on oil and rubbed it in to make the muscles supple. Next one sprinkled oneself from head to foot with sand or dust, which stuck to the oil and provided a kind of protective second skin. This prevented the body from being too slippery for one’s opponent to grasp; in addition, the oil and sand were thought to keep the body temperature constant and so to ward off colds and stiffness in the muscles.
After exercise, one was rinsed and scraped with an iron tool called a strigil, with more oil to soften the instrument’s abrasiveness. After a bath in water and lye made from wood ash or lime, or a rubbing with Fuller’s Earth to remove any remaining sweat, sand, and grease, one was ready for yet another generous application of olive oil to soothe the skin. An athlete’s essential equipment (the equivalent of our soap and towel, sweat suit and sneakers) included a sponge, a strigil, and an oil flask with a flat disk round the opening with which to spread the oil as it poured out. The poet Martial, complaining about the young men of his day who refused to do any work, said they spent “most of their lives in oil,” meaning that sport and luxurious massages were all they cared for.
The ancient Gauls, who may have learned the secret from the Phoenicians, made a kind of soap from goat fat and beech ash (potash). They used it mainly to redden their hair and make it fashionably stiff and waxy; but they also used it occasionally to clean themselves a good deal less painfully than the Greeks and Romans did with their scrapers and their lye and Fuller’s Earth. Soap, which began to be imported into Italy in growing quantities in the early years AD, would eventually cut drastically the amount of olive oil which the people of the southern Mediterranean region used on their skins.
Olive oil became, however, the basis for making the highest quality soap, which came to be called “Castile” because this industry was centred in Spain. Other kinds of oil were used to make soap, but in Spain only olive oil was permitted. Castile soap is opaque, white, and glossy, with a faint natural fragrance. It became a world-famous luxury article from the eighth century AD onward. Marseilles, once the point of departure for exports of Gaulish soap to the Classical world, took over a good deal of the market in the thirteenth century. Marseilles often adulterated its soap by using other oils, until a law was passed in 1668 (it is still in force) refusing the name Marseilles to any soap containing oil not made from olives.
Olive oil is an excellent base for perfumes, and scented oils were used liberally on all social occasions in the ancient world. France, then as now, specialized in soaps, perfumes, and cosmetics generally; the industry depended upon French olive groves. Hair gleaming with perfumed ointment was greatly admired, as we saw to be the case among northern peoples who used butter rather than oil for this purpose. The ancient Egyptians used to set large cones of perfumed ointment, which must often have been made with olive oil, upon their heads at dinner parties; as the atmosphere warmed up the cones would gradually melt and deliciously drizzle scented oil down their hair and faces and over their bodies. (In butter cultures, as we saw earlier, butter was used in much the same way, for cosmetic basting of the human body.) Women in Greece and Rome perfumed themselves with scented oils, imitating Aphrodite (Venus) the goddess of sex, who was regularly anointed by the Graces on her sacred island, Cyprus; Hera herself, in the Iliad, enhanced her sexual attraction for Zeus by the application of perfumed oil to her person. Olive oil covered the bodies of dinner guests, and crowns of olive or bay leaves were worn at banquets as well. Excavators at Roman Pompeii found a shop which had specialized in perfumes and olive garlands: people invited to dinner could stop by on the way to the party and pick up the headgear and the oils which they needed for the evening.
Many people who live in the Mediterranean area today drink olive oil regularly in small amounts, one or two spoonfuls at a time, once a day, once a week, or once a month, for their health. The oil is a gentle laxative. There is some evidence that it has astringent properties as well, when applied externally. But it is health in general which many believe to result from taking small but constant doses internally of soothing, nourishing, softening oil. An Egyptian medical text of 1550 BC mentions olive oil seven hundred times as appropriate either to be taken orally or to be rubbed on the body. The use of oil as a shield against infection was a well-known precaution. The Good Samaritan, who is described as pouring wine and oil into the wounds of the man beaten up by robbers, first used antiseptic alcohol, then olive oil as protection from external contamination. Ground olive leaves can be used to cause fever abatement, and were an ingredient in ancient medicines given to combat malaria. It is now known that the olive tree contains salicylic acid, the active element in Aspirin. The hardened sap of the olive tree used to be chewed as relief for toothache, and “Lucca gum,” as it was called, went into many medicaments, especially ointments for healing wounds and infections.
Light at night was most commonly provided in the ancient Mediterranean world by lamps filled with olive oil; an oil-soaked wick takes a good long time to burn. For sanctuary lamps, votive lamps, and any light which burned continually, olive oil was the preferred vehicle, since it smokes and smells so little. Until the early twentieth century it was customary in southern Europe to leave money in one’s will for candles and lamp-oil for the funeral lights.
Olive oil has been used from time immemorial for dressing wool: it minimizes the breakage of fibres, prevents static electricity, and makes the fleece easier to handle as it is drawn and twisted in the spinning. It never causes discolouration, and is easy to wash out. Olive oil is now much too expensive to be used for this purpose, and is replaced with specially treated mineral oils. Olive oil is employed, or has been used in the past, for rust prevention, softening and lubricating leather, making ink, and diamond polishing. Fish has been canned in olive oil ever since Nicolas Appert perfected the canning process in 1804, although now soya oil is being increasingly used for cheaper products. In the ancient world, statues in danger of cracking because of the climate were kept constantly coated in olive oil. The huge image of olive-crowned Zeus at Olympia sat with a black marble pavement rimmed in white at his feet. Its purpose was to hold the oil which ran from the god’s majestic gold and ivory form.
The ancient Athenians were confident enough in their worth to believe that two gods fought for the privilege of being their patron. In front of the king of Athens and a panel of gods to judge the contest, Poseidon struck the rock on top of the Acropolis with his trident and produced a salt-water well or “sea”; then Athene miraculously presented her gift – an olive tree. The prize went to Athene, and Athens received her name. Poseidon, in a fit of pique, flooded one of Attica’s plains, and sent his son to cut the winning tree down. The boy died by missing the tree and chopping himself down with his axe. From the day of the contest to the present time, pilgrims to the Acropolis have been shown the marks of Poseidon’s trident in the rock (the salt “sea” was near by) and the “City Olive” growing on the hill among the temples which crown it.
The City Olive was believed somehow to embody the destiny of Attica. When the Persians besieged and then burned the Acropolis, the tree was left a charred stump. But almost immediately (the very next day, people said) it sent out a green branch: Athens was to rise again from the ruins. The tree stood at the psychological centre of Attica. From it, twelve suckers were taken and planted at the mythic “boundary” of Attica, in the Academy gardens (later to become the place where Plato founded his philosophy school), outside the city walls. These twelve trees were called the Moriae. They were constant and immoveable: expressive, with the City Olive, of the centre, the extent, and the boundary of the Attic state. They were also protected by a curse: anyone doing them damage would immediately find himself the object of supernatural rage. When the Spartans surrounded the city of Athens they laid waste the countryside, paying especial attention, as enemies did in the ancient Mediterranean world, to the destruction of olive groves. But they were sufficiently impressed by the curse to spare the Moriae. A single olive tree, planted to commemorate the Moriae and the site of Plato’s Academy, now stands stranded in the middle of thundering traffic in the city of Athens.
There were many other sacred olive trees in the Attic countryside, all of them thought to be offshoots from the City Olive and its scions, the first twelve Moriae. They were fenced round, regularly inspected, and protected directly by the Council of State whose other main duty was deciding cases of murder. Anyone who damaged one of these trees, even if it appeared to be dead, was in the early days liable to be executed; in later times he was merely exiled for life and had all his property confiscated. From the fruit of the sacred olive trees was pressed the oil which was given to winners in the games held in honour of Athene, goddess of the olive tree and of Athens.
On the occasion of these games, once every four years, the citizens of Athens staged an especially elaborate procession up the Acropolis in honour of their goddess. Their goal was an ancient olive-wood statue of Athene which was dressed in a newly woven robe as a climax to the festival. A depiction of the procession, expressing as it did the totality of the people of Attica, was carved as a frieze round the great new temple which rose, a kind of man-made version of the green branch which grew from the charred olive stump, on the ruins left behind by the retreating Persians. The two great pediments of this temple, the Parthenon or Virgin’s Temple, showed Athene’s birth at the east end, and Athene winning the contest with her olive tree at the west.
Olive trees, as these myths and rituals exemplify, mean revitalization and continuity, as well as constancy. When Odysseus built his marriage bed, one post of it was the trunk of an olive tree, still rooted in the ground: it meant that his bed was immoveable, just as the Moriae were immoveable, and as is the marriage bond. His wife Penelope alone shared the secret of this bed, and in the Odyssey she cunningly tests the disguised Odysseus’s identity by seeing whether he knows this crucial fact. When a male child was born in ancient Athens (a branch or scionissuing from his parents’ wedlock and from the state), the family displayed an olive wreath at the front door of their house.
Olives are the most civilized of trees. The iconographical scheme of the Parthenon includes, in addition to the great procession frieze and the myths of Athene’s birth and creation of the olive tree, a series of symbolic representations of Civilization conquering Barbarism. Tending olive trees requires experience and a technical mastery which makes them belong very clearly to the domain of Athene, the goddess of craftsmanship. Olive trees, like agriculture in general, suffer badly in wartime. In Attica, where olive oil was the country’s chief export, burned olive groves spelled disaster. So olive branches, evergreen and civilized, came to mean “peace.”
The olive tree represented wisdom not only in the sense of technical skill but also because peace is wise and can be preserved only through intelligence and civilized restraint. Olive branches were carried and worn as crowns by suppliants and heralds in the ancient world, much as a white flag signifies surrender and a non-belligerent attitude today. Suppliants, like sacred olive trees, should be safe from violence, no matter what the politics or what vengeful feelings may be rampant. They constitute a demand for self-control on the part of the powerful. Heralds used the olive to indicate their inviolability as they presented themselves in the camp of the enemy; in time the olive branch became a herald’s badge of office. When artists of the Italian Renaissance depicted the angel Gabriel announcing the birth of the Saviour to Mary, he was usually shown holding a lily, symbol of purity and virginity. The lily was also the emblem of the city of Florence, however, and some of the Sienese painters decided that a flower representing a city which was their deadly rival was quite inappropriate for Gabriel to carry. They found a brilliant substitute: for Simone Martini and others, Gabriel holds an olive branch or wears an olive crown as a mark of Mary’s purity, and also because he is a herald and peace-bringer.
Winners at the ancient Olympic Games received a crown of olive leaves for their prize. This honour implied that the victor possessed all of the civilized virtues associated with the olive branch. According to the Olympic ideal, any monetary reward would fall far short of the prize of recognition for true worth. The wreath was in some sense also the Fate of the wearer (as the City Olive embodied the destiny of Athens): Fate had ordained that this man should win, and Victory, represented as a winged goddess, bound his head with the triumph, in the form of an olive branch, in the sight of his countrymen. In medieval Europe, following a tradition going back directly to Jewish and Classical times, the anointing of a king or queen with olive oil would be completed by placing the crown of destiny upon the sovereign’s head.
The olive wreath, and the bay wreath in honour of Apollo, were customarily worn by all the guests at banquets in the ancient world. Eating together is a sign of peace, trust, and civilized conviviality. For the Greeks, wearing olive and bay crowns at dinner also signified their acceptance of human limitation and abhorrence of hybris. Hybris meant insulting contempt for other people’s honour arising from an arrogant misunderstanding of one’s own worth and duties. Prometheus, the divine benefactor of mankind, had ordained the wearing of the wreath in memory of the day when he had been set free from bondage.
The olive tree, together with its oil, is a symbol of virginity, because its role is to preserve and to be constant, inviolable, and unchanging. Athene herself was a virgin. Olive-pickers, right into the Middle Ages in some places, had to keep chaste while the harvest was on. Olive oil, once pressed, is pure; it is golden and healing and gives light by preserving the flame of the lamp. In one of the parables of Jesus, the wise virgins were able to keep their lamps full of olive oil as they waited for the bridegroom, because they prudently took a supply of oil with them to top up their lamps if need be. They were humble (for in Christianity humility and wisdom are aspects of each other), and therefore not misled into forgetting what they were living for: they were able, as a result, to preserve and be constant. The foolish virgins got everything wrong, even their roles as virgins.
The modern phrase, “extra virgin olive oil,” is a barbarism arising from the hectoring excess of advertising. “Virgin” here means merely “first”; the oil squeezed out in the first pressing of the fruit. But virginity, even when it is supposed to mean only the state of being first, is an absolute and superlative condition: it cannot become “extra” or more than itself. The misuse of the word comes about because the industry wishes to extend the use of it to oils inferior to the best: the best has therefore to be distinguished by means of an enthusiastic absurdity. Even though virgin is now used of olive oil in a technical rather than a mythic sense, the continued association of the word with the oil seems to be a remarkable – if unconscious – survival of an ancient linkage of ideas.
When Noah decided that it was time to see whether the flood had subsided, he sent a dove out from the ark. She returned because there was nowhere for her to rest. He sent her away again a week later, and she came back bearing an olive branch; at the third try she flew away never to return. The olive branch in the dove’s beak was a potent symbolic message: it meant that the most constant of trees, sure indicator of hope for the future and of the rebirth of civilization, had survived the flood. The dove was a herald from God, who was ready now to make peace with the world.
Christians from the earliest times understood the story of Noah, his ark, the flood, and the olive-bearing dove as a prefiguration of the Resurrection and of the sacrament of Baptism; they painted the scene with its new meaning over and over again in the catacombs. The dove and the olive branch are to be found especially often; they constituted a kind of shorthand for the whole story and its Christian meaning. The flood is the death of the old so that the new can begin afresh; it is a symbol of initiation. Noah and his ark “die” and are purified in the flood, as the Christian’s old self is drowned in the waters of Baptism, so that he may be saved and rise again from them a new man. The dove, with its message of hope, wisdom, health, and peace as embodied by the olive, is the Holy Spirit, who appeared as a dove at the Baptism of Jesus. The olive twig stands for olive oil, which after the Baptismal washing anoints the Christian’s head, completing his initiation and signifying the support of the Holy Spirit in his life. The oil also reminds the Christian that “Christ” means “Anointed” (Christos in Greek, Messiah in Hebrew.)
Anointing with olive oil was a sign of respect in the ancient world: one poured oil over the head of an honoured guest, and one anointed the dead. It was customary in ancient Greece to leave a jug of olive oil in a dead person’s tomb as a friendly and respectful offering; if anything could be useful to the dead in the hereafter, oil was thought likely to be what they needed. The oil was apparently more costly than the beautiful container: the jug often held a tiny vessel inside the neck so that no more than a very little oil need be left in the tomb. Presumably the dead were thought to be weak, and were therefore to be cheated with impunity, even as the forms of ritual were being adhered to.
A host would offer oil for the feet of anyone who arrived at his house after having walked a long way. No one intending to travel a great distance on foot would dream of setting off without oil for tending his feet at the beginning and end of each day. When Jacob had his vision of angels, he rose the next morning, set up the stone he had used for a pillow, poured oil over it and called it Beth-el, “the House of the Lord.” Jacob was travelling as lightly as possible at the time – but he had still thought it necessary to carry a flask of olive oil on his person. Later, Jacob returned to Beth-el, set up a second stone there, and poured wine and oil over it.
For thousands of years people have felt that it is right and necessary to pour oil over special or significant stones. Just why they have done this is mysterious. Perhaps these are some of the factors involved: The oil sinks into the stone, darkens it and makes it shiny; the oil seems somehow to have penetrated the stone, honoured it, perhaps even imparted some sort of life to it, adding dynamic power to the strength and duration of rock. “Fatness” always tended in the past to mean “life force.” “Fat” land is fertile, whereas dry land and “dry bones” mean death. Oil made a man’s skin “glow” (as we say) with life and happiness. The omphalos stone at Delphi, which claimed to be the centre or “navel” of the earth, was constantly anointed by the ancient Greeks; the sacred black rock of Islam, the Ka’bah at Mecca, is ceremonially drenched in oil. When Moses had the Tabernacle built at Sinai, God told him to anoint with olive oil, specially spiced according to a precise recipe, the Ark of the Covenant, the altars, and all the vessels and candlesticks. “You shall consecrate them, that they may be most holy; whatever touches them will become holy. And you shall anoint Aaron and his sons, and consecrate them, that they may serve me as priests.” In memory of Jacob’s action at Beth-el and of Moses at Mt. Sinai, all Catholic churches are consecrated as “Houses of God” and “Gates of Heaven” in a ceremony of anointing by a bishop: the twelve places of anointing are marked on the pillars and walls of the church by Greek (equal-armed) crosses. Altars are anointed with particular emphasis, and there are special traditional ceremonies for naming and anointing church bells.
Whatever is anointed – man, building, ritual utensil, or rock – is set apart; anointing initiates it into a new and singular state. Anointing the head of one’s guest admitted him into one’s house and into the number of one’s friends. Dead people were anointed out of respect, and because they had entered a new state; when Jesus was anointed before the Passover by a woman as he reclined at dinner in the house of Simon the Leper, he interpreted the action as a preparation for his burial. A ceremonial application of olive oil could also be used as a way of distinguishing one group or society from another. The anointings at Mt. Sinai by Moses were designed in part to differentiate the Jewish Temple and Jewish ritual practice from those of the Egyptians and of the other peoples in Canaan.
Priests in the Catholic Church are ordained, as priests were in the Old Testament, by the pouring or rubbing on of oil. The image of oil as representing strength, constancy, and wisdom is present in all initiatory anointings, as it is in Christian Baptism, as well as Holy Orders, Confirmation, and the Anointing of the Sick. This last ceremony (which is not recognized as a sacrament by most of the Protestant churches) has recently been the subject of controversy in the Roman Catholic church. A decision was taken by the Vatican to emphasize the symbolism of strength over that of initiation: the oil is administered primarily as aid and comfort to the sick, and only secondarily as Extreme Unction, as it was formerly called, the “final anointing” or initiation into the “last journey” of death.
Consecrated olive oil, in both Jewish and Christian practice, represents the action of the Holy Spirit, whose other chief symbols are wind or breath (“life force”), the dove, and fire (we recall that olive oil was used for lighting). Oil flows, spreads, and penetrates, and then softens, nourishes, warms, strengthens, and provides illumination: it easily comes to signify what Christians call “grace,” the “extra something” which God confers. When Samuel saw David, “the Lord said, ‘Arise, anoint him, for this is he.’ Then Samuel took the horn of oil and anointed him in the midst of his brethren; and the Spirit of the Lord came upon David from that day forward.”
David instantly took on, with the Spirit, legitimacy, and also that personal inviolability which, in the ancient world, was the privilege of olive-bearing heralds and suppliants as well as oil-anointed kings. The change induced by anointing was permanent: even though Saul had been deposed as unworthy of the Lord, David rebuked the man who claimed to have killed him, for Saul had received the oil of consecration, no matter what his subsequent actions had been. “How wast thou not afraid,” said David, “to stretch forth thine hand to destroy the Lord’s anointed?” As Shakespeare put it many centuries later,
Not all the water in the rough, rude sea
Can wash the balm from an anointed king.
When a Jewish king was anointed by a priest or a prophet, he became a person permanently set apart, as the stone Beth-el was; he was granted the divine right of access to the throne because the oil expressed continuity and legitimacy. As king, he was permanently sacred and inviolable, and he had it in his power to radiate peace, civilization, and wisdom, and bring victory to Israel. In other words, the manifold meanings of the olive tree and its oil are all aspects of the Jewish idea of kingship.
Beginning with the Visigothic monarchs of Spain in the seventh century AD, and continuing with Charlemagne, who was anointed emperor by the Pope on Christmas Day, 800 AD, the medieval kings of Europe took over intact all of the symbolism of the Old Testament for their rites of coronation. King Solomon’s anointing by Zadok has been especially singled out for commemoration: the anthem “Zadok the Priest and Nathan the Prophet” has been sung at every English coronation since 973 AD. Olive oil became, together with the crown, the embodiment of kingly authority. The consecrated oil also ensured that authority was not wrested from the original holders and guardians of it: once again, the olive tree and its fruits expressed continuity, in this case the preservation of the status quo.
For not just any olive oil would do. It was related in medieval France (the legend is believed to have been born in the ninth century) that when King Clovis, or Louis the First, was baptised in 496, the press of the crowd was such that the man with the oil had trouble reaching Bishop Remi, who was waiting to complete the King’s baptism by anointing him. Suddenly the crowd saw a dove appear above the king; it descended with a small pear-shaped flask of olive oil in its beak. This was used to anoint Clovis and so initiate him into Christianity. When Remi died, a church was built in his honour at Rheims. In the church was preserved the original flask of oil, the Sainte Ampoule, as it was called. The kings of France were forever to be anointed from that store of oil (topped up at intervals: sacred oils do not dilute), and that alone.
The legend of the Sainte Ampoule was a political device, and a brilliant one. No upstart claimants to the throne could tear apart the fabric of the state: the royal line would be continuous and exclusive. Legitimacy depended upon the agreement of the powers (the Church and those who could persuade the Church) who controlled and guarded the sacred symbol of sovereignty, the irreplaceable Sainte Ampoule. At the coronation of a French king, the procession of the Knights of the Sainte Ampoule at dawn to get the flask was followed, in the great Cathedral of Rheims, by the solemn showing of the flask to the people, and its veneration. Then came the ritual anointing of the king on his head and stomach, between his shoulders, on his right shoulder and his left, under both his arms, at the elbow and the inner joint of each arm, and on the palms of his hands. The king wore a special cloak with openings at all these places. After the anointing the slits were closed up and gloves drawn on over the king’s oiled palms. (It was the anointing of the royal hands with the sacred oil, a symbol of healing, which was believed to give kings the power to heal scrofula by touch.)
The flask was smashed during the French Revolution at the sacking of Rheims Cathedral, but a piece of it was salvaged. This was used at the last French coronation, that of Charles x in 1825. The fragment of the Sainte Ampoule was then retired from its long service, to the tomb of St. Remi behind the high altar in the saint’s Cathedral, where it remains today.
Thomas à Becket had been driven into exile in France by King Henry II of England when he received from the Virgin Mary a flask in the shape of a golden eagle which contained sacred olive oil. This oil was henceforth to anoint all the true kings and queens of Britain. Henry II, anointed with oil which had no celestial origin, was by the same token unacceptable to heaven. This “vision” was kept secret and the golden eagle was hidden away for two hundred years. It came to light only when the dream of a hermit led to its discovery – just in time to anoint Henry IV as the rightful king of England. His predecessor, Richard II, had been anointed, but with oil which had not come directly from heaven.
Some sceptical people at the time thought that the legend and the oil had been invented in order to support Henry’s dubious claims to the throne, and to compare Richard with Thomas à Becket’s enemy, Henry 11. Some malicious chroniclers even reported that the miraculous unction gave Henry IV head-lice. But the golden eagle, known as the Ampulla, has been employed in England for every royal anointing since 1399. The Ampulla and the ancient ritual Oil Spoon were among the few objects of the regalia to survive the Civil War in England in the seventeenth century. They are both now to be seen in the Tower of London.
A bitter conflict arose during the twelfth century over the increasing insistence of kings that they were in some sense priests as well as temporal rulers: that anointing and coronation constituted a sacrament. In the early thirteenth century Pope Innocent III decreed that there was a difference between bishops and kings, and he tried to insist that bishops could be anointed on the head with chrism (consecrated olive oil mixed with scented balsam), while kings received simple unscented olive oil on their arms and shoulders only. (The English and the French blatantly ignored the Pope and continued to anoint kings on their heads.) The coronation ceremony was further said, by Pope John XXII, to lack the permanent mark on the soul which priestly ordination conferred. This was potentially very damaging, because it suggested that kings could be unmade, whereas one of the chief meanings of anointing had always been that they could not. The details may appear to be merely picturesque, but they represent a deadly serious battle for the right of the Church to confer or withhold authority, over whether temporal authority should be thought absolute at all, and over the power of kings to interfere in what the Church saw as its own domain.
Anointing today is almost entirely restricted to religious symbolism, and even there its role is often largely traditional and either misunderstood or greatly reduced in meaning for many people. The modern secular state has no truck with absolutes such as inviolability and indelibility: our political ideals have rather to do with reducing the claim of anything or anybody to be unique or irreplaceable, while value is expressed as far as possible by means of money. We are committed to mobility and change, and these must always militate against both continuity and irrevocable status. The idea of things or persons being sacrosanct or “set apart” is not a feature of our mythology – not consciously or officially, that is. The imagery associated with the olive tree has, therefore, tended in modern times to limit itself to intimations of virtue (peace, strength, wisdom), and to be downplayed as a mark of permanent initiation and of exclusive and unquestionable status.
The peoples of northern Europe belong to the butter cultures: sauces are traditionally made with cream, salads are dressed with salad-cream or even cold sugared water, and vegetables are often boiled because butter burns at a lower temperature than oil does, and is therefore unsuitable for long pan-frying. The olive-oil cultures to the south have traditionally distrusted and despised butter. As we saw in Chapter 3 the ancient Greeks thought the barbarians who ate butter were primitive and weird; the Japanese complained that butter-eaters stank. Plutarch tells us that when a Spartan lady paid a visit to Berenice, the wife of Deiotaros, one of them smelled so much of scented olive oil and the other of butter that neither of them could endure the other. For the opposite is equally true: the English have long shuddered at southern European food, calling it greasy, “reeking” with garlic, and “swimming in olive oil.” Olive oil and garlic in combination was, of course, almost hilariously dreadful.
One typical story among many of how the image of olive oil has recently changed for people whose cuisine was traditionally based on butter, is associated with the history of the Greeks who came relatively late to North America, arriving in large numbers only after 1905. These people imported olives, olive oil, sharp cheeses and feta, spices, and dried figs for their own use: they had heard from the earlier Greek-Americans that these things would be hard to find in their new country. (The Creoles of New Orleans were an exception: they had always brought in plenty of olive oil, together with other French foods, for themselves.) According to R. J. Theodorakis, who has studied the evolution of Greek cookbooks in the United States, the new Greek-Americans’ eating habits, together with their religious rites and language, kept them very isolated as a group for several decades.
Nevertheless, many Greek-Americans became café-owners, quickly learning what their clientèle would find acceptable. They carefully censored their menus, keeping such intensely national and strong-tasting dishes as skordalia (olive oil and garlic) a secret, to be shared only in their own houses, among themselves. Before 1960, cookbooks written for Greek-Americans regularly warned their readers not to eat skordalia before going out into the Anglo-Saxon world. The immigrants did, however, introduce a few dishes which pleased and educated American palates: the hand-held shish-kebab, or meat on a stick, for instance, was cheap, fast, and acceptably “interesting,” with its flavourings of oregano, rosemary, lemon, marjoram, and bay leaves.
After the invasion of northern Greece in 1940, Greeks went to the United States in steadily increasing numbers. It was difficult to get olive oil during the war, so they used American cottonseed, peanut, and corn oils in their cooking. The result was that many more Americans began to eat and like Greek food. Greeks, on the other hand, began to adopt American ways, shifting away from eating organ meats and the goat (taboo and rare in America), learning to like more “northern” dishes, and cutting down on oil for the purposes of slimming.
American acceptance of southern cuisine accelerated in the 1960s. Garlic arrived. “Ethnic” cooking was increasingly perceived by middle-class North Americans in general as alluring rather than revolting; adventurousness became good taste. Experimentation with “Mediterranean” foods (beyond the already acceptable shish-kebab), began in the Greek case with stifado, a stew with herbs and spices, from which all traces of oil could be meticulously removed before eating. Moussaka (almost unknown before the 1950s, when North America first took an interest in the eggplant and eventually began growing it) was suddenly on every open-minded, sensuous and hearty, intelligently money-saving table. Greek and other Mediterranean dishes required oil, not butter, and Americans quickly learned to like oil; a taste for olive oil in particular grew simultaneousiy, quietly, and naturally. Skordalia was brought out of hiding; it was soon being referred to in cookbooks as nothing more sinister than “a zesty sauce.”
Disapproval of oil entirely on grounds of taste (finding oil “disgusting”) still lingers among people of northern European descent, but in North America, the middle classes have on the whole become unprece-dentedly eclectic about food: oil, like garlic, is now perfectly acceptable. Oil actually has an advantage over butter: it is largely “unsaturated” and therefore believed to be healthier.
It was first suggested by scientists in the 1950s that daily consumption of polyunsaturated fatty acids (known in the journals as PUFA might actually lower blood cholesterol; and high blood cholesterol was known to be one important factor contributing to the risk of coronary heart disease. People began to turn from butter to margarine (the restrictions on the appearance of which had been lifted in 1950). Margarine was partly made of seed-oils whose fat is polyunsaturated, unlike saturated and cholesterol-carrying butter. Soya, corn, and sunflower-seed oils in particular could boast 55 per cent PUFA, and no cholesterol at all.
The most recent research (Mattson and Grundy, 1985) begins from a new realization that habitual large intakes of polyunsaturated fats may not, in fact, be healthy. Experiments in which animals were fed on it resulted in cancer. The composition of cell membranes has been shown to be altered by polyunsaturated fats, and the risk of gallstones may be increased. There are two types of lipoproteins: high density (HDL) and low density (LDL. While it may be beneficial to lower the incidence of LDL, it is not desirable to cut down on HDL. Polyunsaturated fats reduce both.
Saturated fat molecules are chains of carbon atoms which connect with hydrogen atoms until no more hydrogen or any other gas can be accommodated. (One reason for artificially saturating fat, as in margarine, is to prevent oxygen getting in and turning the fat rancid.) Polyunsaturated fat (with linoleic acid) has room for four or more additional hydrogen atoms per molecule. In between polyunsaturated and saturated fats is an intermediate type: that containing oleic acid. The fat is called mono-unsaturated, because it has only one double bond (polyunsaturated fat has several: saturated fat has none) and can absorb two additional hydrogen atoms per molecule. Olive oil is a mono-unsaturated fat.
Until now, mono-unsaturated fat has been largely ignored in the great cholesterol debate. It has been called neutral or intermediate in effect and lumped with saturated fats: people have been advised quite often to avoid it wherever it is possible to choose a polyunsaturated substitute. Experiments have now suggested, however, that mono-unsaturated oil may well be the “healthiest” choice of all.
Oleic acid, according to these experiments, reduces total LDL cholesterol (the “bad” kind) as the polyunsaturates do, but it reduces the “good” HDL appreciably less. It has long been known that mammals form mono-unsaturated fat in their bodies by directly removing two hydrogen atoms from saturated chains. It is also known that people from the Mediterranean region have a curiously low rate of cardiovascular disease. One reason for this may be their preference for mono-unsaturated olive oil.
This kind of research can produce great problems for the food industry: just when margarine was getting its powerful polyunsaturated message across, along comes olive oil to snatch away the prize. To make matters worse, olive oil has come a long way in public esteem lately: if health can be related to a product already considered to be a luxury, there is no telling how far the product could run. But the polyunsaturated oil men need not despair, for chemistry can still save them: if the public should become determined to buy mono-unsaturated oil, they can quite easily add some hydrogen to their oil, lose a double bond or two, and soya oil or corn oil too could end up mono-unsaturated – and still be much cheaper than olive oil. The only problem remaining would be the hopelessly complex flavour of olive oil, and the public’s growing predilection for it.