the field pretty open.
We both really liked food and, since the start of our relationship, food and cooking and eating together had been a pretty key element. In fact, from when we first met, Jason was always rummaging around for scraps of paper to jot down some recipe he’d just made, or to write down the pearls of wisdom from a restaurant chef who’d just revealed some cooking secret. In fact, it became a joke that my job was to be constantly buying pretty notebooks to paste in all these scraps of paper, saying there was no point having all these ideas if you could never find them again.
We talked about running a restaurant but everyone we know who does it says, ‘Don’t don’t don’t.’ It’s such a commitment of time and single-mindedness—you don’t have the flexibility to do a bit of this and a bit of that, you have to stick with it totally without deviation, every day, every hour. It’s a life equivalent of an each-mouthful-the-same plate of risotto rather than the mixed meze we were after.
One day we were in the Grove shopping centre in Hollywood. A place that by all accounts should be horrific and terrifying because it is such a model of super-clean, super-straight, super-capitalist, super-nice America, but which for some reason doesn’t quite make you choke in the way that it should. Well, at least there was a shop there we really liked, called O&Co. It’s part of that French chain L’Occitane which does stinky unguents to slather yourself in—but O&Co is the food bit that does mainly olive oil and also a few other things like vinegars and mustards. In the one in the should-be-scary Grove, they had lots of different olive oils that you could taste. We’d go in there for a free lunch of bits of slightly stale bread dunked in delicious olive oils from around the world.
Our favourite became an olive oil which was made entirely from Leccino olives and came, improbably, from Uruguay. It was quite smooth and fruity but had a definite peppery kick and a freshness that was just mmmm.
One Saturday we went in for our customary cheapskate snack lunch and the lady there, who knew our game but didn’t seem to mind as actually, doh, the joke was on us—given how much oil we bought from them—said, ‘You’re fond of that Uruguayan oil, aren’t you?’
‘Well, yes, sure.’
‘Well, we’ve had a 25-litre barrel arrive that’s badly dented. We can’t really use it as we need a perfect one for the display. But we could sell it to you for cheap if you were interested?’
Interesting.
‘How much?’
‘Well, shall we say $150—after all, it’s a 25-litre barrel.’
What dilemma and confusion it threw us into. We loved it, it was definitely a bargain. But $150? And 25 litres? It seemed a bit decadent. We went away, telling her we’d have a think about it. It sounds ridiculous now but we really did hum and haw for ages thinking about that barrel of oil. Should we shouldn’t we, should we shouldn’t we? Then on Monday morning in the office, I just had a feeling that it was a good thing to do and phoned her and said, ‘If you still have that oil, we want it—we’ll come and pick it up this evening.’
When we arrived, she’d laid out not just the barrel but also about 50 empty half-litre cylindrical tins with their little green lids, so that we could decant the oil at home. We packed up our booty in the car and drove home feeling quite pleased with ourselves.
It was there, attaching the little tap to the barrel and pouring out oil tin by tin, that one of us, we can’t even remember which, said, ‘Why don’t we make olive oil? We love it. It would mean good outdoor physical work and we could be really proud if we made oil that was halfway as good as this stuff.’
So that was it. Life decisions needn’t be so terribly taxing. We would make olive oil in our new life. That was that.
We went a bit mad with that oil for a few weeks. We were like crazed apothecaries, experimenting with every kind of flavouring we could think of. In the end we had about thirty little bottles in the cupboard: oil infused with basil leaves, oil with pieces of rosemary thrown in, oil with bits of garlic that we’d try to ‘home-sterilize’, infusions with mint, some with lemon; every herb and leaf that we could lay our hands on was somehow stuck into a bottle of oil and left to mature in its dark home.
In the end most of it wasn’t particularly good and a lot of it went mouldy—which gave us a new-found respect for those Christmas trinkety oils you buy containing baubles of chilli pieces and rosemary. However, in a way, that wasn’t the point. Those witching hours stirring cauldrons and making pulps of herbs and concentrating on olive oil were really the start of our plan.
One evening, we decided to have an olive oil tasting. If we were really going to make this stuff, we needed to know our onions. We had invited a bunch of friends round. They weren’t perfectly qualified for the job in that none were olive oil experts; they were all Hollywood producers more used to viewing rough cuts than reviewing condiments. But they all loved food and had a good spread of knowledge levels and food snobbishness, so we thought it’d be interesting.
Jason had been devouring every book on the olive he could get his hands on, whether it was about olive cultivation, cooking with olive oil or the historical significance of the olive tree. That night would be a prime opportunity for him to show off his burgeoning knowledge.
Our search for fine olive oils to taste took us to Joan’s on Third, a small but well-stocked delicatessen in West Hollywood. They have a mouth-watering display of international oils and a great café with yummy food and fine coffee (depending on which member of staff strikes up the machine). It’s not cheap though and the four bottles of olive oil we picked up cost around $80. We couldn’t help wondering how much of that the olive farmer claps eyes on.
Jason had read that olive oil is the oldest unadulterated food in the world. And when you think about it, even wine has preservatives added nowadays. Olive oil is the crushed fruit, nothing more, nothing less. Pure as can be. Another of his favourite facts at that time concerned the distinction between ‘green olives’ and ‘black olives’. We, like many, had always assumed that there were different species of olive which turned out either green or black. Imagine our delight when we discovered that no, there was no more difference between a green and a black olive than between a green banana and a yellow—it’s just a question of ripeness. How we would be able to wow our friends with these great new factoids.
Thankfully, when we wheeled this out later that evening, everyone was impressed. Jason sounded positively erudite. ‘Each olive variety has a specific moment when it’s in prime condition—that is, when the oil will be at it finest. The Leccino variety, the one from our Uruguayan booty pack, produces its fruitiest, grassiest oil when it’s just turned black. The Coratina produces the bitter, spicy oil it’s famed for when it is half purple and half green…’
‘Does that mean you have to go round picking the ripe olives one at a time?’ asked Rex, ever thoughtful of the labour costs of a job, having always been a film’s purse-holder.
‘Well, no, you pick a whole tree at once when say 50 percent of the olives are the right colour,’ Jason said confidently.
‘And what about the difference between olives for oil and olives for the table?’
‘Of the hundreds of types of olives, there are specialists. Some, like the black, wrinkled ones from Greece called Kalamata, are best for the table, others like the little pert Picual from Spain are revered for their oil. But there’s no olive you can’t eat, nor one you can’t make oil from.’
Only about 10 percent of olive oil produced is in the
