“One martini is all right. Two are too many, and three are not enough,” James Thurber
and another favorite:
“I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I’m under the table,
after four I’m under my host.”
Dorothy Parker
These days, they’re not even actual pimentos anymore. They’re pimento puree and sodium alginate which has been gelled up and cut into a strip that’s then inserted into the olive.
Also available in the UK, are green olives stuffed with sun-dried tomatoes (lovely IMO); and we get them stuffed with Greek feta cheese (OK, but not my favourite). I’ve never encountered blue-cheese-stuffed olives over here: my first instinctive response is not to like the idea much – but wouldn’t unilaterally write blue-cheese-stuffed off without tasting them.
Found in the websites of a couple of brands of olives:
pimiento (actual strips), anchovy, pimiento-and-piñon paste, boquerón (same fish as anchovy but pickled in a way that leaves it white), tuna in escabeche (a vinegar-based sauce), blue cheese, serrano, garlic, chorizo, onion, hot chili, sweet’n’sour chili, hot chorizo, manchego, indian curry, indian massala, strawberry, date, mango, cherry, fig, papaya, coconut, apricot, pineapple, blueberry, kiwi, jalapeños, piri-piri (pepper, not sauce), almonds, pickle.
Found at CostCo a few weeks ago a large (naturally) jar labeled “Olives stuffed with garlic and jalapeno.” We figured it’d be some of one and some of the other but it turned out each was stuffed with both. Nom nom nom. It lasted about a week.
I’m pretty sure it was when Archimedes lowered himself into a tub of olives. He realized that fewer olives were displaced if his pushed his fingers, toes, and other miscellaneous dangly bits into the holes of the pitted olives as he exclaimed “Gemista!”
They are very, very common here in Melbourne. I think that perhaps Greeks didn’t get into the “stuffed” olive thing?