By Joel Denker
The olive tree is not a majestic one. But the striking evergreen, with its twisted trunk and gnarled roots, has inspired loyalty and affection through the ages. Its silvery green leaves have their own special beauty.
The Mediterranean was its birthplace. To many, the sea and the fruit were synonymous. “The Mediterranean ends where the olive ceases to grow,” the French writer Georges Duchamel puts it.
Early societies happened upon the wild olive, a spiny shrub with small, extremely acrid, inedible fruit, lacking the heavy, rich oil that permeates the domesticated one. Farmers in the Near East, in Syria and Palestine, botanists generally agree, had cultivated the olive by 6000 B.C.
At about the same time, farmers on the island of Crete were farming the crop. Since the cultivated olive could also not be eaten raw, ingenious people in these cultures had to figure out techniques of treating them (curing with salt, for example) so that the glycosides, the substances responsible for the bitter flavor, were leached out. Experimenters developed tangy marinades in which olives were soaked to make them more appetizing.
Archaeological remains on Crete provide a glimpse of an early and energetic olive oil industry. The Palace of Knossos housed a plant in which pipes carried oil into large storage vats. Jars of olive oil, called amphorae, stored the olive oil before it was shipped out to Greece, North Africa, and other locations. Records of supplies and their costs were kept rigorously.
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To learn more about olives, see The Carrot Purple and Other Curious Stories of the Food We Eat, coming in October from Rowman & Littlefield: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442248861/The-Carrot-Purple-and-Other-Curious-Stories-of-the-Food-We-Eat.
