Consuming Interest
Olive Oily
By ELIZABETH DAN ID
MR. FLAX says that English customers don't like buying olive oil in any container other than a bottle; they want, Mr. Flax says, to see the product before they buy it.
Mr. Flax should know what he is talking about. He is a highly experienced provision and delicatessen merchant (and owner of shops in Hampstead, Golders Green, Swiss Cottage and Edgware) and as such was running the self-service shop at the French stand at the Food Fair during the past three weeks. And a worthwhile sight it was. at• Olympia, that higgledy-piggledy display of French produce and Mr. Flax presiding over it, coolly dealing with the surging crowds of visitors picking everything up, opening jars, tearing the wrappings off the cheeses, swiping copies of magazines supposed to be selling for half a crown, pushing their fingers through the skins of the red peppers and breaking open the aubergines to see what was inside; and no wonder Mr. Flax believes that the product has got to be seen before anyone will buy it. I wonder if the manifestations of rough and rude behaviour at these food jamborees are not partly due to the way in which normally we are pre- vented from touching or smelling any of the food we are going to buy. 'Kindly don't touch those tomatoes,' an assistant at Harrods greengrocery department shouts furiously. And if you ask to taste a cut English cheese before buying, many shopkeepers simply refuse; while the more obliging ones allow you to try just one, and get huffy if you reject it. Is it our fault we have become a nation which buys by eye alone? How else can we buy? All the same, I must say we seem an extraordinarily contrary people as far as our food shopping habits are concerned.
If we want to see the product before we buy it, how is it that we have become such tinned food addicts? Are the pictures on the label suffi- cient to sell us the stuff? If so, then one does see the difficulty about the marketing of olive oil in tins or other non-transparent containers. A picture of olive oil, much less of olives or olive trees, on the label isn't going to convey much to anybody. And the irony of it is that never has the tin made more sense than as a container for olive oil, which stores far better when protected from the light, and is obviously cheaper and safer from a transport point of view in tins than in bottles; for the small shopkeeper with limited space at his disposal tins are a more practical proposition than bottles, and mean that olive oil is stocked much more widely over the country
The book referred to by Katharine Whitehorn in last week's 'Roundabout.' Sinectics by William J. J. Gordon, is published by Harper and Row and distri- buted in this country by [tarnish Hamilton at 32s.
than ever it was before the advent of the can container; for the customer, buying by the gallon or half-gallon tin means a worthwhile reduction in price. For example, a gallon tin of the sweet and delicately fruity first pressing Provence olive oil from the Marseille firm of Puget* was selling at the Fair for 38s. 6d.; a half-gallon was 20s. 6d., a quarter I Is. 6d. and an eighth (16 oz.) Ss. 6d. (Prices of similar oil in Soho shops such as L. Roche, 14 Old Compton Street, who import excellent Provence oil direct from Plagnol of Marseille, and at King Bomba, 37 Old Compton Street, who have a fine Nicois oil, are a shilling or two higher, but the 'propor- tionate reduction when you buy in quantity is much the same.) For people whose consumption of olive oil is small or who haven't room to keep gallon cans, Puget have put out an ingenious new pack for the 16 oz. and two-pint sizes—a card- board cone with an aluminium top embodying a spurt for pouring, and in spite of the invisi- bility of the contents, these packs were nearly all bought up at the Fair. Curiosity perhaps—or genuine appreciation of a practical idea?
Much of the original strength of the fruit flavour in olive oil depends upon the degree of ripeness of the olives when they are picked. The riper the olives (the harvest in Provence usually takes place about November) the higher the yield of oil; but overripe fruit gives a taste which is too pronounced and coarse for Northern palates. The fine oils exported by the French to England, mostly produced from the olives of the Nice-Grasse area, where the trees were unaffected by the frosts of 1956 which devas- tated the more exposed olive countries of the ‘aucluse and the Bouches-du-Rhone, are made from olives which have reached just the exact point of maturity and no more; and for the best oil they are hand-picked as opposed to being gauMs, beaten off the trees with sticks, the old country system which bruises the fruit and tends therefore to make an acrid oil. Altogether olives are a tricky and delicate fruit to deal with, and the making of good oil a highly skilled business, and it seems to me that the £2 or less a gallon we pay here makes it a cheap luxury, when one takes into consideration the hazards and com- plications, the cost of transport and the profits of importers and retailers.
Even so, with all the care and refinements brought to the production of the mild and sweet olive oils of Provence, a few English people still find the flavour too strong. 'How can I get rid of the taste of that oily oily olive?' is the kind of cri de cur one occasionally hears from a despairing reader. Nobody has to get rid of it himself. It has been done for us, by, among others, the Italian firm of Sasso, whose oil is very pure and very highly refined indeed; for an emulsion sauce such as mayonnaise in which the flavour of oil always becomes accentuated Sasso does beautifully. Of course, as is normal when smell and taste have been removed from a product, it costs a little more—around 55s. a gallon. But then, for a non-olive-growing people the taste for olive oil cannot be other than an acquired one (the Northern French are just as resistant to fruity oil as we are); those who *Agents for the Puget olive oil are French Produits des Pros inces Ltd., Farthings, Guildford Road. Horsham (Horsham 2803): also in London at WHItehall 8776. acquire it via Sasso, whose sales have increased five times in as many years, which only goes to show how tastes are evolving, will perhaps eventually be inquisitive enough to have a try at the oils which have been allowed to retain a little more of their original character, and which show off especially well, I think, not only as dressings for the obvious green salads but with hors-d'ceuvre salads such as purées of aubergine, sliced raw mushrooms and, perhaps most of all, for the seasoning of white haricot, red kidney bean, green lentil and other salads made from dried vegetables; these really do benefit from the lift given them by fruity oil.
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