Fresh Picked Olives?

[Athena]

@Chronos

No, silly, Athena told them.

[Tom_Tildrum]

Think, too of those delicacy coffee beans that are harvested only after the civet cat eats them and poops them back out. How desperate was that guy for his morning cup?

[silenus]

I am of the opinion that civet coffee, like many other foods and inventions, was a direct result of the discovery of cannabis. Or maybe mushrooms.

[Qadgop_the_Mercotan]

@Lynn_Bodoni

So now we have food fads where the chefs blacken everything, or put cilantro in everything, etc. Gotcha.

My newest creation: Blackened cilantro!

[not_alice]

@Hilarity_N.Suze

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?

Meats were salted for preservation since ancient times, including places where olives are grown in Europe.

I will suspect meat started being cooked the first time a caveman brought a dead mammoth or whatever back to the campgrounds.

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

@beowulff

@silenus

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.

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.

I read somewhere (I think it might have been that History of Salt book) that this is pretty much exactly what happened. People noticed that olives became palatable after they’d been sloshing around in sea water for a long time. It was no jump to simply start brining them in jugs after that.

[not_alice]

@Diogenes_the_Cynic

@beowulff

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.

I read somewhere (I think it might have been that History of Salt book) that this is pretty much exactly what happened. People noticed that olives became palatable after they’d been sloshing around in sea water for a long time. It was no jump to simply start brining them in jugs after that.

Since I am currently reading Salt by Mark Kurlansky, I just looked in the index for olives.

It says:

But the Egyptians learned early on that the bitter glucides unique to this fruit, now known as oleuropeina, could be removed from the fruit by soaking in water, and the fruit could be softened in brine. The salt would render it not only edible, but enjoyable.

It doesn’t say how they learned that, other than:

The Egyptians of 4000BC believed that the goddess Isis, wife of Osiris, taught them how to grow olives.

But immediately prior, it says:

A great source of Egyptian food was the wetlands of the Nile, the reedy marshes where fowl could be found, as well as fish such as carp, eel, mullet, perch, and tigerfish. The Egyptians salted much of this fish. They also dried, salted, and pressed the eggs of mullet, creating another of the great Mediterranean foods known in Italian as bottarga

From this I conclude they already knew how to salt food for preservation, and so tried it with olives.

I live near the olive capital of the US, and judging form the millions of trees I pass in groves regularly, they are not likely to survive in wetlands. So I doubt that a random olive just happened to fall in some natural salt water when there was already an active salting industry.