Wild Australian olives
Today my mother opened a jar of olives to go with lunch and a story tumbled out.
Jacob Friedman dreamt of olive groves and vast wealth in the Mt Gambier region in the 1920s. He took wild olive stock (seeded naturally, the wild trees had reverted to kind) and grafted olive varieties imported from the country that was to become Israel. Olives take a long time to fruit and he went bust. Eventually, the trees fruited and new owners saw the olives to market.
The current bushfires devastating that region aren’t the first. When the fires turned the groves into charcoal, the owners thought all that time and work was in vain. Then there was a little miracle. The roots of the wild stock turned out to be hardier than the grafts and the trees grew back.
Mount Zero Olives now sells a lovely line in preserved wild olives, which is what we had with lunch.
These tiny olives have a duskier feel than modern varieties to my taste, and I keep thinking that if they were combined with preserved wild cucumbers (available from groceries that sell food from the Middle East - think of long, thin and rather pale variants of Lebanese cucmbers) the overall effect would be of familiar flavours with a muted undertone of something a tiny bit acrid.
January 16th, 2007 at 10:14 pm
I enjoyed reading this. Fortunately, my grandmother hands over a huge jar of home-made olives to me every year. My husband, who used to despise olives, now shares my love for them.
January 17th, 2007 at 11:33 am
Excellent bit of history and now I’m famished for olives!
January 19th, 2007 at 4:33 pm
Ooh, I love olives, especially when they have more character than the limp, soggy variety of black olives that come out of a can. My favorite way of eating them is in a Greek-style salad, with feta cheese, cucumber, red onion and tomato with a light dressing of balsamic vinegar. Yum.
January 20th, 2007 at 4:50 am
Jennifer, I envy you those olives! Writing about them made me as hungry to eat them as Stacey is.
Peggy, that’s my favourite way of eating olives, too. Kalamata olives with feta and salad vegies, always.