Ode to Olive Oil

"I spent hours this weekend picking olives in my garden," my friend Michelle remarked the other day. She and her husband have a beautiful house on a hill overlooking Grasse, complete with the ubiquitous olive trees that populate this region.

(Note the ladder propped against one of the trees.)

November marks the start of olive season, so why not harvest your olives to make your own olive oil? Michelle proudly displayed her buckets of black and green olives mixed together. All olives start out green and turn black as they ripen but apparently you don't have to separate them for the purpose of making olive oil.

We met at Moulin de la Brague, the third largest olive mill in France, where the same family has been extracting oil from olives for over 150 years.

One of the mill workers weighed Michelle's olives, and then, to our surprise, threw them into a communal bin with lots of other olives.

Posted signs warned that inferior or damaged olives will not be accepted, but we didn't need to worry.

Michelle's olives passed the test, even if her outlay was a bit small by local standards. The olive growers milling about the moulin waiting for their lots to be weighed, their olives to be squashed, or their payments to be processed, had typically brought a few crates of olives.

While the olives were being washed, crushed (along with their pits), mixed and pressed, we wandered around looking at the old and new machinery and learning about the process of making olive oil -- an ancient art dating back thousands of years.

Homer called it "liquid gold" and the early Egyptians credited their goddess, Isis, with teaching them how to cultivate olive oil. Greek mythology claims that Athena won the city of Athens after bestowing an olive tree on the city's residents -- a gift deemed more worthy than those offered by Poseidon.

I was grateful to receive a gift of my own that day. Michelle's first efforts at olive harvesting resulted in four slim bottles of freshly pressed oil. And being a wonderful friend, she rewarded me with one of the bottles.

On my way home from Opio, I stopped at our favorite boulangerie for a fresh baguette, and at the Oasis des Fruits for tomatoes and avacados. Et voila! Lunch is served.

"Freshest I've ever tasted," Jeff effused between bites.

There's something about the taste of good olive oil that inspires us all. But instead of penning my own ode to olive oil, I'll share part of that written by the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda (no relation to the Czech writer, although Pablo did choose his pen name, Neruda, to honor Jan).

Ode to Olive Oil

In
The dry
Olive Groves
Where
Alone
The blue sky with cicadas
And the hard earth
Exist
There
The prodigy
The perfect
Capsules
Of the olives
Filling
With their constellations, the foliage
Then later,
The bowls,
The miracle,
The olive oil.