What does an olive, fresh picked off the tree, taste like? Is it good? Is it even edible?
I was just thinking that even though, for example, MOST figs are dried, I sometimes see fresh figs for sale. However, I’ve never seen an olive that wasn’t pickled, oil-cured, or at the least, brined. The leads me to conclude that olives are inedible, or “only technically edible” (ie, not poisonous but untasty) when fresh. True?
Olives are incredibly bitter and inedible right off the tree.
I have a large Olive tree.
I’ve made my own olives, both with brine (takes many weeks), and lye. One day, I decided to taste a fresh olive (I knew they were bitter, but I wanted to see how bitter). The taste is indescribable - fantastically bitter, with grass-like undertones. The bitterness stayed on my tongue for a long time, even after washing my mouth out.
Which leads to the question: How in the hell did primitive man discover how to make olives palatable? It’s not like it’s a linear progression like beer , wine or bread.
Presumably they were very, very hungry.
Dammit, these things must be good for something. How about if I smack it with a rock?
Nope.
Put it in the fire for a while?
Nope.
Soak it in salt water for a couple of months?
Ah ha!
I’ve pondered this question with friends. Our conclusion is: one day, some starving peasant came across some olives that were washed up on the beach, and was able to eat them. That was the spark that lead to the discovery of brining.
Of course, this is just a WAG.
Another related question. How long do the ripe untreated olives taste bitter? If on just filled a container and let them set for months or years would they eventually become eatable?
No, silly, Athena told them.
They get moldy.
If you leave them on the tree, they start to shrivel, and lose some of their bitterness - the birds will eat them after several months.
Besides being bitter and disgusting, raw black olives will also turn your mouth blue or black for a few hours.
Along those lines, how desperately hungry do people need to be to figure out how to eat fugu? “Maybe this time it won’t kill us.”
Either the big guys in the tribe force the littlest guy to eat it, or, my favorite theory, the littlest guy walks around camp pretending to eat it. “Yum, yum!” notes whether or not the big guys who take it away from him die, and what parts they ate.
There was an active salt trade according to Salt by Mark Kurlansky (which I am currently reading).
Once you have the idea to salt something you are going to try it with everything and see what happens.
I’ve wondered about this for any number of “processed” foods. I have an ex whose family owned a vanilla farm, and it’s a pretty involved process to get the finished product. They ferment it really precisely. Same with tea. And various cheeses (not fermentation, but manipulation).
I’ve always assumed people either sat around experimenting or came across the food in a half-decomposed state and refined the process through trial and error. Like maybe, you’re wandering around the forest looking for a grub to eat and dig up a vanilla bean pod that has been naturally fermenting under some leaves and decide it’s likely to be non-poisonous.
Ah. That explains the various food trends of putting today’s Favoritest Ingredient in everything…our ancestors did it, and mostly survived. So now we have food fads where the chefs blacken everything, or put cilantro in everything, etc. Gotcha.
Ha - the original salt fad hasn’t gotten here yet. Its close though, I live just down the road from America’s Olive Capitol.
I was referring to methods of preserving the food though. Why wouldn’t you try it with everything when you have no refrigerators and precious little grows in winter once you know how to do it?
Well, yeah, if the food’s gonna go bad anyway if you do nothing to it, you might as well do everything you can think of to try to preserve it.
However, this doesn’t explain the abomination that is cookies with black pepper in them.
I’ve wondered this.
I think some of them must have fallen into a vat of salt water by accident and somebody said, Hey, maybe we could eat this!
Or by they time they got around to it, they must have known there were various ways to prepare things that made a difference. I mean, when did they start cooking meat?
I picked and ate one off a tree in Italy and nearly barfed. Fucking disgusting.
Fugu’s danger is not obvious. If you clean it like any other fish (removing the liver, where the toxins are), you can cook it and eat it like any other fish. (I have – we used to catch it all the time when I was a kid; my grandfather knew how to clean them – it’s not hard.)
At some point, someone ate improperly cleaned fugu as sushi and they learned it was dangerous.