Olives

_Olives_ by Mort Rosenblum is a well-written, witty, and engaging book on all things olive, thorough in its coverage. Rosenblum became an olive aficionado after acquiring five acres of land in the Provence region of France, site of an abandoned farmhouse and two hundred half-dead and heavily overgrown century-plus olive trees, long neglected. From that point on he became not only committed to bringing his trees back to life but on becoming an expert on olives in general, traveling throughout France, Israel, Palestine, Spain, Italy, Tunisia, Morocco, Greece, the former Yugoslavia, California, and Mexico to speak to olive growers, those who press olives for their oil, government regulators, those involved in marketing table olives and olive oil, chefs, and nutritional experts. Though not a cookbook, _Olives_ even includes cooking, buying, and storage tips as well as recipes for such fare as eliopitta (a Cypriot olive bread) and imam bayaldi (the name meaning "the imam fainted," supposedly reference to a long-ago reaction to this eggplant and olive oil dish). The origins of the domestication of _Olea europaea_ are lost in the mists of prehistory. The olive, a close relation to the lilac and jasmine, was maintained in groves in Asia Minor as early as 6000 B.C. Greeks, Phoenicians, and Romans spread olives to Sicily, the Italian mainland, France, Spain, and North Africa. Spanish missionaries in the 1500s brought the olive to California and Mexico. Today there are 800 million olive trees in the world. Though found on six continents, 90% of them are found in the Mediterranean (Spain has the most). Olives have long been an important fixture in Mediterranean history and religion. Golden carvings of olives decorated ancient Egyptian tombs. Greeks used so much olive oil to lubricate their athletes that they invented a curved blade, the strigil, to scrape it off. Saul, the first king of Israel, was crowned by rubbing oil into his forehead. In Hebrew, the root word for "messiah" comes from "unguent," meaning that the messiah when he arrives will be slathered in oil. The fuel referred to in the miracle of Hanukkah was olive oil. The Old and New Testaments refer to olive oil 140 times and the olive tree 100 times. The Romans had a separate stock market and merchant marine dedicated just to oil. Rosenblum vividly showed that olive oil is a nuanced as wine. There are seven hundred cultivated varieties, or cultivars, with some grown for pressing, others for eating, ranging from cailletiers (favored in salade nicoise) to malissi (the standard tree of the West Bank) to the hardy, wilder Moroccan picholine to the famous Greek Kalamata. Oils vary a lot in taste, from syrupy yellow oils of southern Italy to thin green Tuscan oils with a peppery after bite to the spicy and light oil of the Siurana region of Spain. Acidity and taste vary due to local cultivators, the weather that year, the presence or absence of pests, when the olives are harvested, and how l

I'm gorging myself with olives: the fruit, the oil, this book. There are books you re-read years gone, but I found myself devouring clumps of this book just days after reading it in the conventional way. Mort Rosenblum could have given us an encyclopedic guide to the "noble fruit," but instead he follows his passions--and does first class journalistic digging--to press out the finest extra virgin essence of his subject. I also like the way Rosenblum writes, as much a friend as an authority. France, and its olive oils, comes first on the author's list, but he also does justice to subjects as disparate as the place of olives in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the promising growth of the high-end California olive oil industry, and even the seemingly bottomless corruption on the olive oil front in the European Community. Few effective journalists write with such literary flair, without seeming to try too hard. A winner.Food writer Elliot Essman's other reviews and food articles are available at www.stylegourmet.com

This book presents a very comprehensive overview of olives, olive oil, and olive producers in a style that is part travelogue, part anthropology, and part history (without footnotes). Rosenblum takes us on a tour of the Mediterranean, from France, to Palestine, Greece to Tunisia, and Spain to Bosnia. In each locale, he interviews local olive growers on the way they tend their trees, pick their fruit, and press their oil, and of course, he never refuses a sample. I found the first chapter, which started with some literary-historical introductions a little shaky, but after that I couldn't put the book down. Rosenblum's explanations as to why different olive oils have varying qualities were very clear. They will come in handy next time I'm faced with selecting a brand of olive oil at the market. Although Rosenblum mentions the curing of olives in each country, most of the text focuses on the production of oil. I would have been interested in reading more about table olives, but perhaps that's because I'm living in Dubai, where every supermarket deli counter has a minimum of 20 different kinds of olives to choose from. Even though this book is not a cookbook, it does contain a handful of recipes.

This book will provide a good read for anyone even vaguely interested in olives, olive growing or Mediterranean cuisine. As an olive grower, I also found that it provided very valuable information on growing, pruning and processing methods - including the fact that there is no "right" way to do things.

This story transports you to another place and time by following the path of one of humanity's oldest and most prized commodities, the olive and its oil. I was drawn to the book and was unable to put it down (and I'm not one who generally reads for pleasure).