A Provencal recipe

This week I opened the bedroom window to find myself face to face with our landlord. His limbs were bear hugging the branch of a tree as he inched ever higher into the blue sky. In London I would have called the police and reported a peeping tom but this is Provence and so I gave him the benefit of the doubt.

“Salut,” he waved cheerily at me from his vantage point directly into our bedroom.

“Salut,” I called back nonchalantly, while thinking to myself that all he was lacking was a pair of binoculars.

His hand groped forward pulling at another stray branch and shaking it vigorously.

“En remasse,” he offered by way of explanation with a beaming smile on his face.

A short time later I was outside helping out, stripping olives from the tree, which this year because of the high average temperature are bounteous.

It seems to be my luck in Provence to always end up with the purists. When I’ve harvested grapes its been with vignerons who insist on doing every row by hand and now my landlord was adamant that a handpicked olive leant a noticeably more peppery flavour to the oil. So there were no mechanical harvesters, not even batons to beat the branches with, instead there was hour upon hour of labour as we dropped each individually picked olive into the net on the floor.

At least I was learning as we picked. Here’s a simple recipe used by my landlady:

Keep the green olives in water for 8 days, changing the water every day. Then add salt, garlic and aromatic herbs and some oil and leave the flavours to infuse for a week.