SC - olives in period spanish recipes?

[Alistair Ramsden]

Spanish food without olives? That is like Italian food without olive oil: 
read on, what was written in 1470 about the olive.

An excerpt from Mary Ella Milham's translation of Platina's "De Honesta 
Voluptate et Valetudine" reads, Bk 2 Ch 13 "On Oil... one must speak first 
about certain simple ingredients about the olive and olive oil. There are 
several kinds of olives: the preserving kind, the pausia(?) olive, the long 
olive, the oblong olive, which is the best preserved
of all olives, as Varro says, the Salentine or the Spanish. The preserving 
kind are the largest and the best to eat, as are the Bolognese and the 
Picene... etc"

Olives! Oh! On their stone, a most excellent little morsel!

Pliny mentions them; as does a C14th manuscript of the Arabian Knights, in a 
tale of feasting and (sic) erotic bathing.

Some simpe recipes - Olives simmered in pounded garlic and honey, Olive 
bread - Olives with pasta. In baking or cooking, they can be cut off the 
stone, but you can buy pitted olives they are easier again (if, presumably, 
awfully inauthenic , what?)

Alistair aka Stefano

>From: Stefan li Rous <stefan at texas.net>
>Reply-To: sca-cooks at ansteorra.org
>To: SCA-Cooks maillist <SCA-Cooks at ansteorra.org>
>Subject: Re: SC - olives in period spanish recipes?
>Date: Wed, 06 Dec 2000 00:34:18 -0600
>
>Kiri commented:
> > I don't have the recipe in front of me, but there's an olive recipe that 
>is
> > suspiciously like our modern tapenade in, I think, some of Cato's 
>writings from
> > Roman times.  I got the recipe out of Ilaria Giacosa's A Taste of 
>Ancient Rome.
>
>What is "tapenade"? If anyone has a copy of this book, could you please
>post the recipe/redaction? I started a file on olives (olives-msg in
>the FOOD-VEGETABLES section), but it is still quite small. For a food
>that I thought was common to the Mediterranean area, olives have not
>gotten much discussion on the SCA news/mail groups. Perhaps in
>period olives were used mostly for their oil or generally only
>eaten in an uncooked state? I'm saying "uncooked" rather than "raw"
>since from earlier comments on this list, the raw olives taste
>horrible.
>
>I have decided that some olives might be edible after some of the
>discussion on this list and trying a few. Several weeks ago when I
>was buying foods for the New World/Old World demo food game I bought
>a jar of mixed Greek olives just so I could try a variety of them.
>--
>THLord  Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
>Mark S. Harris             Austin, Texas         stefan at texas.net
>**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****
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