Of
Bread and Olives
Olives.
If there is a single flavour whose presence gives shape to the eating of
the Mediterranean, it is the olive. Their acescent aroma prevails in
market squares where brine-soaked tubs proclaim their gaudy varieties:
bruise purple, glaucous, pure emerald green; some plump to bursting,
others withered as any prune. In Provence alone, there are dozens of
varieties and hundreds of ways of curing them, touching every flavour
note in a bitter and pungent registry. How
can we in North America understand this appetite? Olives are so hard for
us to like, except one by one – a piquant touch on hors d’oeuvre, or
some tiny slivers scattered over a salad, pizza, or pasta. Even then, we
prefer them at their most suave – nicoise, Kalamata, Ponentine –
sleek miniatures of what is in truth a coarse and gargantuan hunger. Our
cookbooks reflect our tastes, not theirs. It is rare to find any olive
flecked offering beyond the usual roast chicken or beef stew. And rarer
still is any mention of a simple eating of what is perhaps the most
ordinary of any Mediterranean meal or snack – a glass of wine, a bit
of bread, some sea salt and oil, and a whole plate of them, with an
empty saucer for the pits. All
those olives out there and so few words. How can we hope to take the
full measure of a regions cooking when its most basic hunger eludes our
palate, when we stand away from roadside vendors offering them in paper
cones, sold and eaten with the same happy abandon that you and I invest
in an ice-cream cone? Our tongue resists the shape: the natural grain of
our appetite runs the other way. Canadian cuisine, like American is
after all, a cuisine designed to master abundance, not make the most of
scarcity. Salt and sugar – the seasonings of satiety –are our
favorite seasonings because they urge flagging appetite on well past
hunger. In
much of the Mediterranean, appetite marches to a different drummer
formed by the habits of hard work and thrift. The essential flavours of
its cooking – sour, pungent, bitter –cause the mouth the pause.
Garlic, anchovy, lemon, and all their familiars give the eater a pungent
spurt of pleasure that balances against a bland and starchy bulk of
pasta, rice and bread. The
complex taste of a brine-cured olive halts appetite in its tracks, the
tastebuds tracing the pattern of a sensory brocade. Our
mouths, unused to this sensation, meet it with difficulty, even
distaste. Our favorite foods, based on meat and dairy, are bland and
rich, meant to pass quickly over the tongue. We find our pleasure in the
long and blissful slide into a familiar fullness. Or
so, at least, I explain all this to myself. From the moment I first
tasted it, olive oil won over my appetite. I can drink it from the
bottle, and as for olives, I’ve persevered toward liking them because
my tongue knew that somewhere buried in that bitter flesh were a few
happy drops of liquid gold – if I could only learn to discern and
savour them. Happily, the rest of the Meditteranean equation had an
instant, magnetic appeal. The glass of wine, the bread, the olive oil
– all these drew my appetite. I had only to learn how to this pleasure
the olive itself was the central pivot. And so I began without the
olives, just the rich and unctuous slice. Green
Tapenade The
classic tapenade is made with black olives. This sauce, made with green
ones is delicious on cold vegetables, especially celery root, and can
also be tossed with hot or cold pasta or simply spread on
toasted croutons. Makes
2/3 cup 2
large cloves garlic, pureed 1
½ cups pitted green olives 6
anchovy fillets 2
tbsp capers 2
tbsp olive oil ¼
cup parsley leaves pinch
of thyme freshly
ground black pepper to taste splash
of brandy (optional) 1)
Puree the listed ingredients in a blender and taste carefully for
seasoning. Add more of any or all of the ingredients, as you see fit. |
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