Ramblings that prove all roads lead to food.
Why I'm Crazy About Olives Part Two
Posted 07-27-2008 at 01:47 AM by izbnso
I am the first and only member of my family of origin that can claim to be a Mobile native. Both my parents were from a region in central Alabama called the Black Belt, a place where the air is thick with the smell of the rich dark earth that once grew King Cotton and now sprouts corn, peanuts, soy beans and peaches (up in Chilton County). Georgia might be better know for peaches, but road side stands all over the central part of the state all have giant hand painted signs heralding the arrival of Chilton County Peaches.
Daddy’s people hit the Black Belt just prior to statehood. Some came from Connecticut through the Carolinas and Georgia and the rest came straight from Virginia. Through a clever marriage to a much older spinster who happened to own a substantial amount of acreage, one of my ancestors became a land owner of considerable wealth. When she predeceased him he quickly married her much younger and more attractive niece, who was my great-great-grandmother.
By the time I arrived in this world the only portion of that vast parcel of land left in the family was eighty acres belonging to my grandfather’s brother. I would have to check family records to know if he was in his late eighties or early nineties when he passed away before my sixth birthday, regardless he always seemed as ancient as Egypt to me. However, until the day he died he kept cows and a passel of dogs even though his working of the land had shrunk from acres and acres to a “garden” only a few rows deep.
My father ended up with that land and growing up we would travel back from where ever his career had taken him and we would walk through the overgrown woods and somehow he was able to pick out of the wisteria and kudzu vines the places where a barn once stood and the imaginary line that separated the fields from the garden. The only things that I was ever able to spot were the last two remaining pear trees that had been planted by my grandfather and his brother just after the first Great War and the large puddle that was the remains of what had been a pond put in by those brothers with only a mule and their own two sets of hands.
The last time I was there those pear trees still put off fruit, but to get at the pears you needed a large to truck to hold a tall ladder so that you could climb up with a long stick to try to knock the pears out of the trees. We did go through all of that just once. The variety of pear is a mystery, but they are pears meant for canning not eating. We didn’t can them, I made wine. The process took a little research and some guidance from my grandmother, who had witnessed her older brothers make wine during Prohibition. Home made pear wine is best aged for about a year. Oh, it’s drinkable and pleasant as soon as it stops fizzing, but the one bottle we forgot about for quite some time was exquisite.
Lest you think my grandfather had been disinherited, he had gotten his own section of the family land. But unlike my great-uncle, who never married, my grandfather had children for whom he wanted a better life. He sold his inheritance and moved his family to Montgomery, the state capital. The plot he purchased there was smaller than the one he sold, but not by much, and closer to all of the amenities of modern life at the end of the second Great War.
Even though he was out of the “country” and worked for a wage he never gave up agriculture and horticulture as a way of life. The theory and history of working the land fascinated him. One tale of Alabama agriculture had captivated his imagination when he was a young man.
Over in the western part of the Black Belt, in Marengo County, lies Demopolis, which literally means The City of the People. Circa 1814 a group of Bonapartists fled France when their emperor was defeated. They had been prominent citizens and supporters of Napoleon and they feared for their lives during the brief Bourbon Restoration. The government of the United States offered them sanctuary, so long as they did something productive.
So in 1817 they decided to come to the fertile lands of frontier Alabama with roots and saplings from their native France. They formed the Vine and Olive Company and were allowed to purchase land at $2 and acre on the condition that they cultivated crops. There on the banks of the Tombigbee River these fine French ladies and gentlemen tried to grow the grapes and olives of their homeland. They failed miserably and by 1825 there was virtually nothing left of the Vine and Olive Company.
There were two theories during the 19th century as to the reasons for the failure of the French expatriates. The first, and initially the most popular, was that you just couldn’t grow grapes and olives in Alabama. My grandfather believed that it wasn’t the crops that failed, but the aristocratic idiots who were seen working the fields in clothing that was finer than the Sunday best of their American pioneer neighbors and who didn’t have any personal experience in France with which end of the shovel was used to dig.
According to family legend, sometime before he married my grandmother, my grandfather made a trip to the Demopolis area in hopes of procuring one of the olive trees rumored to have been left behind. He returned home with a sapling and planted it on his land. By the time he moved his family to Montgomery the original tree had died, but not before dropping a few olives and starting a new generation of trees.
So another sapling was taken with him to his new home. My grandfather passed away before my parents met and so did the second generation of his olive tree, but not before the third generation was planted just in front of the house. By the time I was old enough to be aware of the various flora surrounding my grandmother’s home that olive tree was as tall as the neo-classical cottage she lived in, with a deep V at its base that would have been perfect for climbing if olive trees didn’t also have rather large thorns on them.
It was at the base of that tree that my father told me the story of the Vine and Olive Company and his father’s ability to grow olive trees in Alabama that put off green olives as big as the end of a grown woman’s thumb. All this Frenchness fascinated me, after all as a Mobilian I knew that French mystic. Not to mention green olives were a particular favorite of mine, my taste buds had not yet matured to the darker varieties.
Daddy said that the olives would darken up, but the birds and squirrels never left them alone long enough to do so. He pulled out his pocket knife and cut into the olive to show me the pit, and here I thought it would hold a pimento.
Being an olive lover, I wanted to taste one. My daddy has always had the sweetest good natured grin and I remember that grin spreading across his face as I insisted on trying an olive straight off the tree, even though he had warned me that it wouldn’t taste remotely like the kind Mama put in our salads. I should have listened to Daddy.
The next thing I wanted to know was just how you made that thing on the tree taste like the ones from the jar. It was Mama’s turn to give a little bit of education. She had looked into the process years before, when she had first realized what was growing in her mother- in -law’s front yard, and pronounced it too much work when you could just buy them in the store.
My olive enthrallment never left me and eventually I graduated to black olives and then to oil cured and every kind of olive under the sun. When I was grown and my grandmother had left her home to live between my parent’s house and that of my father’s only sister I made a trip out to the old place. I found, to my surprise, with no one there to keep the expansive yard mowed the deer kept the grass mostly in check but all around the olive tree were little olive saplings. Some were no more than knee high, others as tall as I am, which isn’t all that tall. It didn’t take me long to return with a shovel in hand.
At the time I was a history major at nearby Auburn University. I dug trees for me and trees for my Ren and Ref professor whose area of specialty was Early Modern France. Having spent time studying in the Provence she was thrilled to get a tree that would put off actual olives. There’s that French mystic again. I planted mine post haste.
By the time my husband’s career took us back to the Mobile area, my olive trees were too young to put off olives but too big to be moved. I swore as soon as we were settled I would go back to Grandmother’s and get me another tree. But life happens and I never made it back.
Because I'm also long winded...Continued in Part Three
Daddy’s people hit the Black Belt just prior to statehood. Some came from Connecticut through the Carolinas and Georgia and the rest came straight from Virginia. Through a clever marriage to a much older spinster who happened to own a substantial amount of acreage, one of my ancestors became a land owner of considerable wealth. When she predeceased him he quickly married her much younger and more attractive niece, who was my great-great-grandmother.
By the time I arrived in this world the only portion of that vast parcel of land left in the family was eighty acres belonging to my grandfather’s brother. I would have to check family records to know if he was in his late eighties or early nineties when he passed away before my sixth birthday, regardless he always seemed as ancient as Egypt to me. However, until the day he died he kept cows and a passel of dogs even though his working of the land had shrunk from acres and acres to a “garden” only a few rows deep.
My father ended up with that land and growing up we would travel back from where ever his career had taken him and we would walk through the overgrown woods and somehow he was able to pick out of the wisteria and kudzu vines the places where a barn once stood and the imaginary line that separated the fields from the garden. The only things that I was ever able to spot were the last two remaining pear trees that had been planted by my grandfather and his brother just after the first Great War and the large puddle that was the remains of what had been a pond put in by those brothers with only a mule and their own two sets of hands.
The last time I was there those pear trees still put off fruit, but to get at the pears you needed a large to truck to hold a tall ladder so that you could climb up with a long stick to try to knock the pears out of the trees. We did go through all of that just once. The variety of pear is a mystery, but they are pears meant for canning not eating. We didn’t can them, I made wine. The process took a little research and some guidance from my grandmother, who had witnessed her older brothers make wine during Prohibition. Home made pear wine is best aged for about a year. Oh, it’s drinkable and pleasant as soon as it stops fizzing, but the one bottle we forgot about for quite some time was exquisite.
Lest you think my grandfather had been disinherited, he had gotten his own section of the family land. But unlike my great-uncle, who never married, my grandfather had children for whom he wanted a better life. He sold his inheritance and moved his family to Montgomery, the state capital. The plot he purchased there was smaller than the one he sold, but not by much, and closer to all of the amenities of modern life at the end of the second Great War.
Even though he was out of the “country” and worked for a wage he never gave up agriculture and horticulture as a way of life. The theory and history of working the land fascinated him. One tale of Alabama agriculture had captivated his imagination when he was a young man.
Over in the western part of the Black Belt, in Marengo County, lies Demopolis, which literally means The City of the People. Circa 1814 a group of Bonapartists fled France when their emperor was defeated. They had been prominent citizens and supporters of Napoleon and they feared for their lives during the brief Bourbon Restoration. The government of the United States offered them sanctuary, so long as they did something productive.
So in 1817 they decided to come to the fertile lands of frontier Alabama with roots and saplings from their native France. They formed the Vine and Olive Company and were allowed to purchase land at $2 and acre on the condition that they cultivated crops. There on the banks of the Tombigbee River these fine French ladies and gentlemen tried to grow the grapes and olives of their homeland. They failed miserably and by 1825 there was virtually nothing left of the Vine and Olive Company.
There were two theories during the 19th century as to the reasons for the failure of the French expatriates. The first, and initially the most popular, was that you just couldn’t grow grapes and olives in Alabama. My grandfather believed that it wasn’t the crops that failed, but the aristocratic idiots who were seen working the fields in clothing that was finer than the Sunday best of their American pioneer neighbors and who didn’t have any personal experience in France with which end of the shovel was used to dig.
According to family legend, sometime before he married my grandmother, my grandfather made a trip to the Demopolis area in hopes of procuring one of the olive trees rumored to have been left behind. He returned home with a sapling and planted it on his land. By the time he moved his family to Montgomery the original tree had died, but not before dropping a few olives and starting a new generation of trees.
So another sapling was taken with him to his new home. My grandfather passed away before my parents met and so did the second generation of his olive tree, but not before the third generation was planted just in front of the house. By the time I was old enough to be aware of the various flora surrounding my grandmother’s home that olive tree was as tall as the neo-classical cottage she lived in, with a deep V at its base that would have been perfect for climbing if olive trees didn’t also have rather large thorns on them.
It was at the base of that tree that my father told me the story of the Vine and Olive Company and his father’s ability to grow olive trees in Alabama that put off green olives as big as the end of a grown woman’s thumb. All this Frenchness fascinated me, after all as a Mobilian I knew that French mystic. Not to mention green olives were a particular favorite of mine, my taste buds had not yet matured to the darker varieties.
Daddy said that the olives would darken up, but the birds and squirrels never left them alone long enough to do so. He pulled out his pocket knife and cut into the olive to show me the pit, and here I thought it would hold a pimento.
Being an olive lover, I wanted to taste one. My daddy has always had the sweetest good natured grin and I remember that grin spreading across his face as I insisted on trying an olive straight off the tree, even though he had warned me that it wouldn’t taste remotely like the kind Mama put in our salads. I should have listened to Daddy.
The next thing I wanted to know was just how you made that thing on the tree taste like the ones from the jar. It was Mama’s turn to give a little bit of education. She had looked into the process years before, when she had first realized what was growing in her mother- in -law’s front yard, and pronounced it too much work when you could just buy them in the store.
My olive enthrallment never left me and eventually I graduated to black olives and then to oil cured and every kind of olive under the sun. When I was grown and my grandmother had left her home to live between my parent’s house and that of my father’s only sister I made a trip out to the old place. I found, to my surprise, with no one there to keep the expansive yard mowed the deer kept the grass mostly in check but all around the olive tree were little olive saplings. Some were no more than knee high, others as tall as I am, which isn’t all that tall. It didn’t take me long to return with a shovel in hand.
At the time I was a history major at nearby Auburn University. I dug trees for me and trees for my Ren and Ref professor whose area of specialty was Early Modern France. Having spent time studying in the Provence she was thrilled to get a tree that would put off actual olives. There’s that French mystic again. I planted mine post haste.
By the time my husband’s career took us back to the Mobile area, my olive trees were too young to put off olives but too big to be moved. I swore as soon as we were settled I would go back to Grandmother’s and get me another tree. But life happens and I never made it back.
Because I'm also long winded...Continued in Part Three
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