[Sca-cooks] Re: I hate olives...

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Also sprach Robin Carroll-Mann:
>Serving on tables, with dessert.
>
>>  You might see what your local Sam's Club or Price
>>  Club or Costco? offers in the large economy jars?
>
>Spanish olives.  Stuffed with pimentos.

Umm. Ya know, much as it tarnishes my already dubious reputation to
make such a claim, I have a tale to tell, which you may do with as
you will.

Nota: The reason why canned olives and (by extension, and often
unjustly) olives in jars have such a bad rep is that they are often
artificially ripened, so as to be sufficiently firm to be pitted
mechanically. (Like those fake supermarket tomatoes, which have the
questionable virtue of being able to be sliced with the bluntest
knife on earth.) In the case of green olives, you can actually get
decent ones that aren't pitted, and therefore have a relatively
minimal processing regimen.

The fact is, that a big chunk of the world gets their "bulk/fresh"
olives from large sealed containers very much like glass jars and
cans. "Fresh" bamboo shoots and water chestnuts bought in bulk from
your local Asian market undergo the same phenomenon, BTW. Often the
perceived difference in quality is a matter of storage, and
frequently just one of snobbery.

Okay, here's my story. Notwithstanding the fact that my absolute
favorite olives in the world are bright green Cerignolas from, I
think, Sicily ("like buttah! like Barbara Streisand's hands!"), I
recently bought some nice little green Spanish olives, with pits
intact, at a store alleged to be a "gourmet" shop. (I think it was
one of the Garden of Eden chain, which is more convenient, but of
lower quality, than Fairway; there's a bunch of them in NYC in the
areas I haunt.) Anyway, these little Spanish olives were
firm-textured, tasted like olive oil, and had been
marinated/macerated with a little garlic and a lot of herbs, and some
extra-virgin olive oil. They were pretty darned good, but I couldn't
shake the impression that what I had eaten were very inexpensive Goya
unpitted olives, drained of their indestructible brine, possibly
rinsed, and tossed with peeled, cracked garlic cloves, good olive
oil, and some herbs, not even fresh herbs.

And the thing was, they were really good.

Finally I went to the manager for that area of the store, and asked
him about them, and after a certain amount of grilling (pun intended)
he admitted that that was exactly what had been done. In the back of
the store, in fact.

Now, add to this the fact that every French restaurant I've ever
heard of (although it may be different in France) buys their Nicoise
olives in big ole cans, drains them, and feeds them to people who
know olives and who don't recoil in horror. I think this is part and
parcel of the whole food-transport weirdness that dictates that you
can't get an Idaho potato in Idaho (I haven't tried to, but for years
several authors and even friends have asserted this is so), most of
the shrimp eaten on the planet, even in areas where shrimp are
abundant, and in the fish market, is frozen, and the likelihood that
the bulk of the olives grown in the world are processed to keep a
longish time and travel a long distance from home, but that this is,
well, maybe concealed or at least downplayed in order to humor a
semi-luxury market clientele.

BTW, I live less than a mile from a Krinos processing plant (fanciers
of Greek olives, especially Kalamatas, bought in the supermarket will
probably know this name; it's pretty ubiquitous in the Northeast),
and the meshing of Cato the Elder with the modern world is kinda
cool. They do indeed pickle their olives in barrels in the sun,
before packing them in various more manageably-sized containers. The
thing is, the barrels are the infamous plastic pickle-barrels beloved
of Visby-coat armorers all over the SCA, and the sunny field they use
_really_ looks like a parking lot right off Northern Boulevard. I
assume the plastic barrels are carbon-monoxide-proof. ;-)

So, why am I telling you all this?

A) You don't necessarily need to heed the more dire warnings of the
gourmet-olive community

B) Nor should you necessarily just go and buy the cheapest thing you can find

C) You could do worse than to get inexpensive little Spanish olives
(with pits or without, but definitely not with pimiento), drain them,
and toss them with a little good olive oil, maybe some fresh oregano
or dried marjoram, and a few cloves of cracked garlic (you know,
whacked with a rolling pin or something, but not crushed into
oblivion), and let it sit in a cool place (the fridge is probably too
cold) for about 48 hours before using. For color, you could mix in
some similarly-sized black or purple olives, but I wouldn't mix them
until just before serving.

D) For a good time, without necessarily having access to the huge
gourmet Disneylands somewhat to the North of you, look in sleazy
little bodegas for Goya's line of Spanish olives stuffed with
almonds, garlic, or tuna. While I have no evidence for it, I would
think such practices are pretty old. These will be more expensive
than buying in bulk, and I'm not really recommending it for feast
service, but it might be something to add variety.

E) When is your feast? I may be able to bring some olives from around here...


Adamantius

--
"No one who cannot rejoice in the discovery of his own mistakes
deserves to be called a scholar."
	-DONALD FOSTER