Olive oil, part 2

Somewhere out there is a book on olive oil that’s waiting to be written.  It probably won’t be written by me, but I keep bumping into interesting stories, facts, recipes, and images about olive oil that need to be laid out in a narrative.  For example, in Food: A Culinary History by Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari, I found references to olive oil being used as a perfumed grooming aid in Mesopotamia and Egypt before it was used as food. There’s something about the image of a man rubbing ginger-scented olive oil through his hair before laying down for dinner (really!) that needs more explanation.

I don’t want to go back that far, though. Olive oil is almost as prevalent in our diets these days as salt and pepper. I’m exaggerating, of course, but how much? Go into a high-end grocery store and undoubtedly more than half of the oil section will be olive oil. The range will be from regular (i.e., not extra-virgin) to house brand extra virgin to a bewildering supply of oils made from special olives or particular locations or in a particular manner. The olive oils will be complemented by a variety of oils made from different nuts, avocados, sesame seeds, and coconuts, oils infused with truffles, garlic, peppers, and lemon, and oils that range from a few pennies per ounce to many dollars per ounce. Somewhere, too, there will be some bright yellow ordinary vegetable oil. In a more mainstream grocery store, there will be lots more vegetable oil and less of the gourmet super-expensive oils but olive oil is still likely to be most prominent selection.

My Irish grandmother never used olive oil. She used shortening, which meant Crisco. I don’t know what my other grandmother used, because she wasn’t all that good as a cook and I don’t ever remember having the “opportunity” or desire to see her in action in the kitchen.  It was at her house that we learned the value of TV dinners and eating out. But back to my Irish grandmother – she always had a big blue can or two of Crisco in the pantry which she used liberally in her baking and frying.  Since frying was the only technique of cooking ever used in that house (except for an occasional roast beef) she went through those cans pretty quickly.

Technically, shortening is any solid or semi-solid fat but that’s generally not how the word is used.  Crisco didn’t require refrigeration (unlike butter), was inexpensive, and safer on the stove than many other oils. Nowhere in the product description is anything about taste, however, because the taste of the cooking fat was just not anything anyone thought about in those days. If something was too greasy or oily there might be objections, but the flavor of the fat wasn’t ever an issue.

I’ll add that adding fat as a flavor element was equally a non-issue. I don’t ever remember having a salad at my grandmother’s house, so salad dressings weren’t part of the picture. Vegetables were boiled and served with “oleo” (what our family called margarine).  The purpose of the oleo was to come somewhere close to the flavor of butter (a.k.a. “the high-priced spread”) but that was the only flavor consideration.

My mother was a little different, but only a little. She didn’t like the taste of margarine and so when company was coming, she used butter. For family cooking, though, she still used margarine because it was cheaper.  She also used Mazola corn oil instead of Crisco, largely for health reasons. The bottles of bright yellow corn oil were often marketed as being healthier for frying and baking than the solid goop from the blue cans. It’s hard to say if there’s any truth to that because there isn’t a lot of nutritional information available about how these products were made at the time, and they have undoubtedly reconfigured their composition today.  There was also something more modern about it and the 1950s and 1960s were all about being modern.  I should add that in our house as kids, we often did have salads but salads were dressed with bottles of salad dressing, not with a home-made dressing.  So except for the occasional pat of butter on a pile of boiled vegetables, fats were useful for how they cooked food but not for their taste.

Now I’m looking at my pantry and I count nine different oils (with butter in the refrigerator). In order of use (more frequent to less frequent) there is regular olive oil, extra virgin olive oil, canola oil, peanut oil, toasted sesame oil, red palm oil, canola oil in a spray can, and black truffle oil. I’m not including a rosemary infused olive oil I made myself in this list – just what I’ve purchased at various places. What’s more, I actually use all these oils, except for the truffle oil that only comes out for special occasions.

Whenever I cook anything that isn’t Asian, olive oil is almost always at the foundation of the dish. When adding oil as a flavor element, I reach for the bottle of extra virgin olive oil. When frying, roasting, or sautéing vegetables or starches, it’s the regular version.  I usually prefer flavorless canola for fish and meat, although sometimes I’ll change things up with peanut or olive oil. Sesame and toasted sesame are for my Asian excursions. The red palm oil was recommended by our veterinarian for those occasions when I cook for our parrots – it’s a fabulous source of vitamin A and birds have trouble getting vitamin A with a regular diet.

The point isn’t to brag (or cringe in embarrassment) about the number of bottles in my pantry but to show how things have changed in a fairly brief period of time. There are many families that have followed this same path.  For generations, cooking oils and fats were entirely functional. Today, let by an overwhelming adoption of extra virgin olive oil, oil is now a full-scaled ingredient that is central to the way we cook. Virtually every cook on Food Network or the Cooking Channel starts off by pouring a couple of tablespoons of olive oil into a saute pan.  Foodie stores outdo themselves to obtain rare and special olive oils and oil infusions.

I wonder what my grandmother would think about my pantry.