O Flavor,
Where Art Thou?
by Ann Summers
fsmomaha.com
O
ur flavor seeking odyssey begins with The Odyssey, as we find
our freshly bathed hero, Odysseus, rubbing himself with
olive oil before approaching a beautiful princess. But the ancient
world had been using olive oil for lots of wonderful things since
before Homer wrote down his adventurous tale of bathing in the
8th Century BC. To get olive oil you need a Mediterranean climate,
olive trees and something to crush the olives along with their pits.
You’d strain the pulp through fine linen; let the liquid sit to separate
the oil (on the bottom) from the water and bitter juices (on top,)
then drain the oil from a bottom spout, and the rest from an upper
one.
All over “the Med” folks did this, and shipped the stuff to
northerly climes via ships in the pottery equivalent of canning jars.
The trade networks of Greece and Turkey soon became (like most
everything) Roman, and by the time that empire fell, southern
Europe, Adriatic States, and North Africa and the Near East all
produced their own oils and their own marketing. Enter California,
and then the American Southwest, and South and Central America,
each producing oils with different and distinct characteristics.
“Even Bronze Age brewers knew the
marvels of vinegar because it tastes
good, but it also restores a feng
shui-like balance to dishes. ”
Sour Grapes
If olive oil is olive minus juice and pulp, what is vinegar, then?
Since the earliest record of wine dates to around 7000 BC, it would
be no great leap of faith in human ingenuity and hunger to put
more bacteria into the same hands that made the wine in the first
place. You see, vin aigre, or sour wine, as its Latin-based name
suggests, is an acidic solution, got in a further chemical reaction
after the sugar-eating bacteria had turned grape water into wine,
some alcohol-slurping bacteria turn the alcohol into acetic acid.
One might argue that this is not the greatest trade-off; why throw
good wine after bad? Even Bronze Age Brewers knew the marvels
of vinegar because it tastes good, but it also restores a feng shuilike balance to dishes. Many cuisines of the Southern Hemisphere
use citrus for that much-needed acidic sproing to the palate, but if
you weren’t in those latitudes, or didn’t have tamarind or annatto,
or yuzu (all sour additions to Eastern diets) then you might want
to make some vinegar. The highly acidic product was also resistant
to bacterial growth, and was ideal for preserving food without
dehydrating it the way packing it in salt does. And if you had no
salt, you would ferment the living daylights of all your leftover
wine, thus saving your food from rotting and your land-bound
relatives from the temptation of drinking too much.
Love Makes the World Go Round
But much more than wine or vinegar was consummated from
these bacterial bacchanalia. Ah fermentation love, in the Biblical
sense: grape juice begets wine or grappa, crushed grain begets bread
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