Читать книгу Made in Italy: Food and Stories - Giorgio Locatelli - Страница 39

‘A taste so good it makes you cry’

A beautiful, slightly salty, bitter olive can be so good it makes you cry, but a bland olive that tastes of nothing, or that has been pitted and drowned in marinade in a supermarket tub, is a disaster that makes you want to cry for a different reason. If I go into a restaurant and they serve an aperitif with a bowl of tasteless olives, I think, ‘Forget it’ – what a terrible start to a meal. What upsets me most are the insipid olives you find on most takeaway pizzas. Often they are not even true black olives, because the really jet-black varieties, as opposed to violet-black or brownish-black, are quite rare. Mostly they are green olives that have been ‘dyed’ black by putting them in a water bath and running oxygen through them. Then they are treated with ferrous gluconate, a colourant, to give them their shiny, bright black appearance. How unnatural is that?

You can’t eat an olive straight from the tree, whether it is unripe (green) or ripe (purplish-black), because it will be far too bitter. They all have to go through a salt-curing process first before they are edible. One of my favourite olives is the small, black and quite delicate Taggiasca, the variety grown in Liguria that was first planted by the Romans. Liguria is a beautiful place, high up in the mountains that stretch all the way to Monaco. You drive there from Milano on a grey day and suddenly you are in the sunshine. They say that Caesar’s armies fell in love with Liguria. After thirty-seven years of conquering Turkey and having the Ottoman Empire at their feet, they found this paradise, almost like a spa – where it is never too cold, even in winter, and never too hot, even in summer; where there is hardly any rain, and the Alps protect the countryside from the storms that blow in from France, pushing them on towards the East. So they defeated the resistance of the Ligurians and decided to stay there.

The olives are grown on terraces and the silvery trees are beautifully twisted like no other olive tree, pruned low so they can be harvested easily by hand. Some of the trees are extremely old (they can bear fruit for around six hundred years) but so strong that even when they have been hit by frost and some of the roots have died, you will find four more little trees have sprung up on top. Traditionally, the olives are cured by soaking them for forty days in fresh water, which is changed daily, then putting them into a brine of water and sea salt scented with thyme, rosemary and bay.

This is the way we buy them in the restaurant – in their brine, never ready-marinated. Then, if we want to, we can rinse and dry them, and mix them with olive oil, crushed chillies and garlic. I always buy unpitted olives, because the bitter flavour that is so important is concentrated in the stone.

It is ironic that in the UK olives are so, so popular now – yet many people have never tasted a really good one. Let us not forget that olives are a fruit. If you go shopping for peaches, you are careful to choose ones that are ripe and unblemished. Yet, when people buy olives, they are often content to buy cheap ones that have been pasteurised (which dulls the flavour) and commercially pitted and stuffed – not with fresh anchovies or capers, in the way that people in Italy might do at home, but with strips of synthetically flavoured paste. The artificial flavourings are pushed in by machines that can pit and stuff a thousand olives an hour, no doubt in factories run by the sort of people who get excited about making extra money from packing one less olive into each jar.

The best olives, the kind that you can find in good delicatessens, cost a little more because they have been freshly imported from the region where they were grown, with the stones left in. If they are pitted, this will have been done at the last minute, and if they are marinated and stuffed, it will have been done by hand, with fresh ingredients. Sometimes you can even find a Greek or Italian delicatessen that will sell fresh (uncured) unpitted olives in season, which you can cure yourself. If you come across them, buy a kilo and put them into a sterilised jar with 200g sea salt. Seal it tightly and store for twelve to fifteen days, turning the jar upside down one day and then upright the next, until enough brine is made to completely cover the olives. Then you can leave the jar upright. Beware, though – home-cured olives have a really powerful, pungent bite.