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Vol. 2 No. 2, April 2007

Best wishes for a slow and flavourful 2007.

Contents

• Olive oil frangiture
• A nice pot of Camellias

Olive oil frangiture

An almond-flavoured cream made with olive oil? A particularly fragile type of olive oil? Or maybe even something named after that sixteenth-century Italian nobleman the Marquis Muzio Frangipani who invented a perfume for scenting gloves? None of these. The olive oil producers displaying their wares at the olive oil festival of Valdottavo (a small village about 10 km north of Lucca) on 23, 24 and 25 March were going one better than wine vintages. They weren’t just proclaiming their 2006 vintage; they were distinguishing the oil made from olives picked and pressed in October from the November pressing, which in turn was bottled separately from the December pressing. Olives are pressed at a mill called a frantoio and a pressing is called a frangitura (pl. frangiture). All olives start out green and turn black-brown when fully ripe. Like other fruit, different varieties of olives ripen at different times and those on each tree ripen over a period of time. By about the middle of October some olives on a tree will be dappled green and brown, during November more and more turn uniformly dark brown and by December most are very dark brown, almost black. The small artisan oil producers who selectively pick the ripening olives by hand can keep each month’s pressings separate.

Is there any point to this or, not having enough hands to pick all the olives at once, are they just making a virtue of necessity? I poured a tiny pool of green November oil into the palm of my hand and allowed it to warm up for a couple of minutes; I sniffed the pungent aroma rising from the warmed oil and then slurped it into my mouth with plenty of air: fruity on the tongue, a bit bitter at the back of the palate and then lightly peppery in the throat. The December oil was golden instead of green, less aromatic and mellower in flavour: less bitter and less peppery and too tame for me. Lastly the October oil: a more intense version of the November oil. I didn’t like it as much, but olive oil tastes are changing and more consumers are looking for more bitterness and pepper. I sometimes wonder whether, in our headlong rush for exotic new flavour combinations, we’ve forgotten the joys of subtle tastes. At least bottling and labelling by frangitura gives you a chance to choose the one you like best, although you might have to come to Lucca and pay a visit to the olive estate to indulge this choice (with Sapori e Saperi, of course).

Not many olive oil labels even show the year in which it was pressed, let alone the month. The year is important, since unlike wine, olive oil doesn’t improve with age, though a six-month old oil is more suitable for delicately flavoured food than a brash young upstart oil. After 18 months senility has set in: even the most intensely aromatic and flavourful oil eventually becomes bland, barely tasting of anything. Don’t expect a date on industrially produced oil, but many of the small artisan producers here give a ‘best before’ date which is worth heeding.

If you want to read more about olive oil, I found Jim Dixon’s ‘An Olive Oil Education’ well written and informative: www.culinate.com/read/first_person/An+olive-oil+education

A nice pot of Camellias

Now that Sapori e Saperi is offering day itineraries, I’m looking for foodie adventures for every day of the year. Doing the research (meeting new traditional producers and eating great food) is anything but onerous, but by the end of March a haze of fresh green was hovering in the woods and I thought I’d have a break from food and indulge my other passion, gardening. I checked the St Andrea di Compito camellia festival website for details. I should have known there’s no escaping from food in Italy. Right there on the home page, cheek by jowl with lectures on the history, breeding and growing of camellias, was the Slow Food snail announcing tea workshops. The penny dropped; tea leaves come from the Camellia sinensis shrub. I booked into the Sunday morning workshop on black tea, because I happen especially to like whole leaf Assam. Green tea was fine for the break in the tai chi class I used to teach, but it doesn’t satisfy my 4.00 pm craving for a nice pot of tea.

I turned up at the Villa Orsi on time at 10.30 am in this tiny village just south of Lucca to find that none of the other tea enthusiasts had arrived yet. This festival isn’t on the main tourist route and Italians wouldn’t be in a hurry on Sunday morning. I took the opportunity to look at the 18th and 19th-century camellias in the villa garden, still flowering strongly on this third weekend of the festival. Along with the magnolia, the exotic camellia had been the tree of conspicuous consumption for the landed gentry at that period. Back on the village green, outside the main marquee where new and old breeds of camellia were on display, they had sneaked in some more food: examples of all the the wild herbs of the area that are still used as food and medicine. Each herb was represented by a large specimen growing in its own pot with a sign giving its Latin and vernacular names, its origin, habitat and traditional uses. But that’s another story.

Finally my two co-tea-tasters arrived, a mother and daughter team who had recently opened a teashop in Pisa, with the, I suspect, vain hope of weaning their compatriots off their much loved coffee. The workshop itself was presented by two aspiring tea growers from Barcelona. Two years ago they’d decided that the Canary Islands had just the right conditions for growing Camellia sinensis and had come to St Andrea di Compito to learn how. Why here? Why not India or Sri Lanka or China? Simple -- because there’s an experimental tea plantation right in the centre of St Andrea di Compito! And there on the table to prove it was a box containing three tea bags made with the first Italian tea (production hasn’t really taken off yet).

To tell the truth, I hadn’t expected the workshop to be very interesting, but I was wrong. These young Spaniards were passionate about tea and we learned what makes the difference between green, oolong and black teas; which shape pot should be used for each type of tea and why; how hot the water should be for each, how much tea to use and how long they should brew; that the pot must be kept covered for black tea, but should be open for green; we tasted the difference between the first and second brews (with the same leaves); and at every stage we sniffed and tasted green and black teas from the same regions from China, India and Sri Lanka. The presenters’ tale had a sad ending. Since they left Spain, the climate of the Canaries had changed so dramatically (they now suffer more and stronger Atlantic storms) that they are no longer suitable for growing tea.

As I walked across the village that afternoon, my mind was filled with the panorama of rolling hills covered with waist-high camellia shrubs through which I’d wandered for a whole glorious day near Nuwara Eliya in Sri Lanka many years ago. Somewhat disappointingly, this ‘tea plantation’ turned out to be more of an outdoor laboratory with the camellias in large terracotta pots lined up in shade tunnels. Still, now that I’ve heard about how the leaves are treated after they’re picked, I intend to return when they’re less busy to see how it’s done.

Here’s a link to a site that is so informative and interesting that it makes you want to order their tea: www.sensationalteas.com/tea101.html

I suspect it’s significant that the owners of both sites I’m recommending are based in Oregon.