Olive Oil

So, about that olive oil Florence Fabricant put in her NYT Food Notes column a few weeks ago, you remember? You know Florrie – the only woman besides my wife for whom I would take a bullet. The oil, the Israeli one that was selling at Dean & DeLuca for some exorbitant price? Comes in two olive varieties, barnea and manzanilla. Perfect for Passover. Well, as you might imagine, it irritated the heck out of me, first of all because it was an OLIVE OIL, attributed to bleeding DEAN & DELUCA (as we used to say, make-uh-me-pyookah, just to be silly; no offense intended); and second, because the price was so off-the-wall, as we would expect for anything found there. Which is not the point. The POINT is -- WHY and HOW would anybody, any importer, choose to premier their product, particularly an olive oil or a cheese, someplace other than Fairway? It baffles me. The importer would sell fifty times as much, would get paid much faster, and would get re-orders of increasingly enormous quantities like clockwork.
So I come across the importer’s who- and whereabouts on-line. E-mail him a sanitized version of the query above, receive a prompt and very courteous reply and offer to send samples, which of course I accept.

So a few days later I receive a bottle of each. Not even HALF-liter bottles. God forbid a liter. 375-milliliters which is 12.7 fluid ounces. The oil is decent, nothing I’d write home about, nothing I’d go out of my way to stock for our customers except for the virtue of it being Israeli. I go out of my way to support Israel. The barnea olive provides some finishing pepper, resulting in an oil only slightly more than not-completely-unexceptional; this manzanilla is completely unexceptional. Let us olive oil freaks not mistake “gentle and fragrant” with “bland and forgettable”. This Israeli manzanilla is decidedly the latter. All that’s well and good and usual and typical, and I often find myself railing at Florence for some of the choices she makes, and then I catch a gander at the importer’s price list that came with the dwarf samples. I almost choke on my tongue. This genteel and gentile-sounding, Massachusetts-based importer apparently shamelessly asks for more than twelve dollars for a less-than thirteen-ounce bottle, albeit a “cobalt-blue” bottle, which, when light shines through the yellow oil, results in very pretty green up until the oil level stops and the “cobalt-blue” neck takes over. So, for more than thirty-three dollars per liter WHOLESALE you too can support Israel AND this fine, yet supercilious-sounding (The Harrington Trace Corp. – sounds vaguely goy-horse-y, no?), obviously new-to-the-game importer. Me? I believe I’ll pass. Thirty-three dollars wholesale for a bottle of not-even-very-good olive oil. Plus shipping. Add 5%. Patently absurd. Look, you’re going to shop at stores that insult my intelligence, you get what you deserve. These stores know who they are.

Fairway Redhook (Brooklyn) is a juggernaut. The store’s a mind-blower. You will flip out. I have never been so excited about anything in my life, and my partners feel the same way. Nothing cooler than Fairway; nothing.

New crop Nyons AOC is in; this oil is buttah. Crazy about Nyons oil. Extremely rare; hardly anybody growing olives up there anymore. France’s northernmost olive oil, like Italy’s Lago di Garda. It’s not Provence here. Well, that’s not really true. Provence, a state of mind more than a finite geographical locale, starts at about Montelimar, or at least that’s what Roy Andries de Groot would have me believe. If you’re driving, and driving south, heading for the paradise that is Provence, Roy once wrote that at Montelimar, about twenty miles north and a bit west of Nyons, you’ll begin to smell rosemary and thyme and sarriette, which is wild summer savory. These fragrances mean you’ve entered Provence despite the fact that you’re still heading south through Dauphine, the classical region above Provence.

Mr. De Groot , dead about a decade now, is one of the few food-world journalist superstars. MFK Fisher, Elizabeth David, Patience Gray, Madeleine Kamman, Mimi Sheraton, Waverly Root, George Lang, to name a few. Roy lived in a sprawling loft in the Westbeth building. I used to bring him stuff I was excited about back in the late ‘70’s – olive oils and cheeses; sit around with him and taste stuff and talk about it. Don’t remember how I met him; he was completely blind. Probably one of his comely assistants came to my counter. In any case, having known him makes me, marks me as having participated in real history, sort of like having been near the Bastille in July of 1799 or something.

I digress about Mr. De Groot because of the power and memory of one of the books he wrote, one that re-read forever will re-infuse me with the passion for food and location that should have half-lived, that is, diminished by half – years ago. The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth, about two old maids who ran a b&b in Dauphine, way high up a road from The Valley of Chartreuse.