Customer Reviews

Olives: The Life and Lore of a Noble Fruit

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_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 long they sit around before pressing (as fermentation drives up acidity).

There are regional differences in harvesting olives. In Israel, Palestine, and France, they "milk" trees, the pickers using their fingers and dropping olives into a basket or a net under the tree. "Whackers" - prevalent in Spain, Italy, and Greece - use sticks to hit the branches to dislodge olives, faster and not requiring ladders, but tougher on the trees.

The actual process of pressing olives is extremely well-covered, Rosenblum vividly describing the one favored in most olive-growing countries, the modern continuous system (which uses linked centrifuges to grind up pulp), often highly automated, and the traditional method of using a tower press, which is a very interesting device (though labor-intensive and on the decline outside of niche markets). There are considerable debates in the industry over exact methods, particularly on the use of water and its temperature.

Olives are big business; an industry producing about $10 billion a year as the world consumes nearly 2 million metric tons of olive oil each year. In some areas consumption is quite high; the average per capita consumption annually in Greece is five gallons of oil. Though Spain produces 37% of the world's oil compared to Italy's 19 % and Greece's 17%, it only has a 16% share of the American market (compared to Italy's 70% and Greece's 3%). Ten brands dominate the American domesticate market; most labels are small, sold only regionally or instead growers sell their olives to Italy to produced blended oils for export as a "Product of Italy" despite being grown perhaps in Tunisia, Greece, or Turkey. Rosenblum investigated the corruption that existed in the industry, from waning Mafia influence in Italy to adulterating olive oil with seed oil to cheating in some areas to gain EU agricultural subsidies.

Sales in olive oil have grown a great deal, particularly in the United States, thanks to a growing consensus on its healthfulness. Monounsaturated, olive oil drives out bad cholesterol without reducing the good. Rich in antioxidants, it has been shown to reduce the risk of breast cancer.

The author provided some valuable education to the consumer about oils. Extra-virgin for instance means that the amount of free fatty acids - mostly oleic acid - is below 1 percent, with the organoleptic properties (aroma, taste, and body) rating high. Virgin oil, rarely found for sale, has up to 2 percent acidity. Both are produced by "first-press" or "cold-press" methods. Plain olive oil, (or "pure"), is refined inferior oil used mainly for frying, treated with steam and chemicals and mixed with some better oil for a little flavor and aroma. Pomace oil comes from the first-press leavings, refined to bring it below the 3.5 percent acidity level that designates lamp oil, though often pomace is instead used to make soap (the oil for soap may have 40% acidity). "Lite" oil has the same number of calories (125 per tablespoon), simply being a refined olive oil with less extra virgin added, a clearer color, cheaper to make, and inferior.

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.

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 delightful book by an American journalist based in France is much more about the geopolitics, history, and economics of olive growing than about the culinary role of olives and it's oil. It is also much more about olive oil than it is about the fruit, especially since commerce in the oil dwarfs trade in the fruit. Aside from it's being especially well written, it benefits most from it's being written entirely from a first person point of view. Aside from references to selected European Union regulations and documents, all of the text relates conversations between the author and his subjects, the olive growing farmers of the Mediterranian and California. The story starts in the author's own home where he himself raises olives in a small farm in Provence, France. From there, the story travels to other Provencal olive groves, Italy, Spain, Morroco, Greece, and Israel / Palestine.

The book provides a wealth of information for your understanding of olives, olive growing, and the production of olive oil. The most interesting aspects of this story were the domination of olive oil commerce by Italian firms, in spite of the fact that Spain is the world's largest producer of olives and the differences between various methods of extracting oil and how these different processes may affect the quality of the oil.

This book is a very good read, especially for foodies. Just don't expect much information about the culinary and nutritional values of olive oil. There are other books dedicated to olive oil which cover this very well.

I expected an amazingly well-written book when it was recommended to me. How else could a book about olives make it into print? In fact, the first chapter was near-classic, beginning with the olive you take for granted at the bottom of your martini glass and whisking you through the meaning and world history of this fruit and back to your martini. Unfortunately, the remainder of the book trailed off into a journalistic study of the olive's modern condition in the Mediterranean world with a few too many descriptions of oil presses and related olive-industry machinery. While the remainder of the book lacked the polished cohesiveness of the introductory chapter, the book is still an excellent and well-written account of an oft-overlooked fruit. After all, the author did make the "little green lump" at the bottom of my martini enticing enough for me to experiment with a few gourmet oils and plant an olive tree in my backyard.

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).

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.

As an olive lover, I bought this book as soon as I saw it. Rosenblum discusses the sociological, historical, literary, religious, political, medicinal, geographic, gastronomic, gustatory, criminal, commercial, cultural, and horticultural world of olives, and the passionate and quirky people who love them. Throughout the book, the author describes his own journey from olive indifference to olive lover and grower.

If you like travel writing, this book will especially appeal to you as you follow Rosenblum around the world in his quest for knowledge about, as he describes it in the book's title, this "Noble Fruit." Even if you are not fanatical about olives and olive oil--which I am--it is still a fun, fascinating read.

If I could give this book more stars, I would.

This is a beautiful book. If you enjoy olives, you'll find yourself caught up in Mort Rosenblum's warm, engaging writing style. I've given several friends this book along with jars of olives and olive oil as a gift. Each time, the recipient has said they were surprised to receive a book about olives, but once they started reading it they couldn't put it down. This is definitely one of those wonderful word of mouth books that good cooks want to share with eachother.

Do not expect a guide with lots of tecnical information and graphics. Expect instead a well constructed book with lots of good stories, some recepies and a wonderful travel through the olive and olive oil long and venerable history.