OLIVE OIL AND SARDINES.
Col. Newnham-Davis declares that "really good pure olive oil is almost unknown outside the boundaries of Italy. An Italian gentleman never eats salad when traveling in foreign countries, for his palate, used to the finest oils, revolts against the liquid fit only for the lubrication of machinery he so often is offered in Germany, England, and France."
This is somewhat misleading. While inferior or adulterated olive oil is certainly served in many otherwise respectable European restaurants, even in Paris, I have eaten delicious olive oil made in France. Spanish oil usually has a flavor too strong for most of us, but when it is carefully refined this is not the case. In Lyons I was once the guest of a family of epicures who preferred Spanish oil to any other, and their salads certainly were delicious. But, on the whole, the finest olive oil comes from Italy.
The superiority is purely a question of Flavor, for all olive and other table oils have the same food value.
Many factors combine to make Lucca and other Italian olive oils so pleasing to the palate. The soil is specially adapted to the cultivation of the olive tree, and care has been taken to select the best varieties. The old Roman epicures, who gathered their delicacies from all parts of the world, already preferred Italian olive oil, especially that of the variety known as the Licinian and grown in Campania.
No less important than soil and variety is the proper harvesting of the crop. In Asia, as well as in Greece and in many parts of Spain, much of the oil produced owes its inferior quality to the fact that the olives are knocked off the trees with poles or shaken off. The Italians who make the best oil pick the olives by hand and deliver them at the mills without bruises.
These same Italians subject the olives to four successive pressings. The oil from the first, known as virgin oil, is the finest, and as it is also the most expensive, unscrupulous dealers may and do sell the yield of the following and increasingly inferior pressings under that name. Eternal vigilance is everywhere the price of getting pure food and the best of it.
There is food for thought in the official information that Spain exports large amounts of olive oil to France and Italy and that the greater part of this is reëxported from those countries, largely in the form of mixed oil. In 1911 Spain exported 90,419,723 pounds of olive oil, valued at $7,397,977.
Much good has no doubt been done by the Italian Society of Permanent Chemical Inspection, for the analysis of food products and official certification of purity. The honest grower of and dealer in olive oil suffers much from the competition of the cheap oils.
In the interest of honesty a law was passed in Spain in 1892 providing that all cottonseed or rapeseed oil imported into that country must be denatured by the addition of 1-1/2 per cent. of wood tar or petroleum and also that all imported olive oil found to contain cottonseed oil or other similar products shall be rendered unfit for consumption in the same manner.
The dangerous nature of the competition to which the olive grower is exposed is illustrated by a remark made by commercial agent, Julian Brode, in the Consular and Trade Reports (August 29, 1910.) Writing from Alexandria he says: "The natives, most of whom are Mohammedans and large oil consumers, have been educated to substitute cottonseed oil for the olive oil they formerly used, and the latter is now found only in the houses of the wealthy. The change, which has taken place in Egypt, and which is now taking place to a great extent in Turkey, can likewise be made in Tripoli, Tunis, Algeria, Morocco, and other Mohammedan countries if proper efforts are put forth."
Bearing in mind the remarks in a preceding chapter regarding cottonseed oil the word "educated" in the above quotation is painfully sarcastic. It is purse versus palate, cheapness versus Flavor, which remains for the wealthy alone to enjoy and get the benefit of.
It is in the sardine industry, however, that olive oil is fighting its hardest battles. The oil in a box of sardines costs, if genuine, more than the fish in it. Consequently, efforts are being made to substitute cheaper oils. From regions where sardines are canned in wholesale quantities come reports of annually decreasing imports of olive oil, with a corresponding increase in the imports of cheaper oils. Were it not for the public's "prejudice" in favor of Flavor in oil, the olive would doubtless be kicked out altogether. I have read in a consular report that "cottonseed oil has been selling about fifty per cent. cheaper than the olive oil used in packing. This saving, the packers say, would be given to purchasers of their goods."
The dear, generous, philanthropic packers! To think that it is not for their own sake but to help the consumers that they are so very anxious to give up olive oil, and to persuade the Government not to make them state on the label what kind of oil they use!
They point out—disinterestedly, of course!—that cottonseed oil is "claimed to be physically as pure as olive oil, just as digestible, and even a better preservative." The question, therefore, "is simply up to the manufacturers of cottonseed oil to educate the public to these facts and destroy the prejudice against their product."
In England, in the summer of 1912, a different kind of education was carried on by the importers of a special brand of sardines. In big advertisements the public was informed that a sardine is not necessarily a pilchard but may be the chinchard, the herring or the small mackerel, or the brisling which fattens on the small shellfish of the Norwegian fjords. All of these become sardines only when they are cured. The flavor depends in part on the kind of fish canned, the food they eat, the time of the year they are caught and, in part, on the way they are cured. For the better grades olive oil is used, but for the cheaper class trade coarse olive oil is taken, or cottonseed or peanut oil. Of olive oil there are fourteen grades and the best of these is the right kind if you want the best sardines.
Here were interesting things for British sardine buyers to ponder. They were thus warned not to continue to ask the grocer simply for sardines, but for sardines of a particular kind put up by a reputable firm. If the firm which boasted that it used the best fish and the best of the fourteen grades of olive oil has a wise head it will live up to its claims. In such things honesty is by far the best policy—in the long run.
Smoked sardines are almost, if not quite, as good as those simply packed in olive oil. They are usually marketed as Kieler Sprotten and should be better known in this country.