by Tom Stobart
There are many ways of cooking octopus – it may be boiled or grilled – and the techniques for making it tender vary almost as much as those for cooking rice. The following method comes from Spain, where very good octopus is to be had.
When caught, the animal is quickly turned inside out, which kills it, then soundly beaten against the rocks. The red colour turns to grey. (Greeks say that the octopus should be beaten 40 times, but such exertion is hardly necessary.) Octopus bought fresh or frozen from the market must be beaten well with a bottle or a rolling pin. The insides are taken out (keep only the ink sac if the recipe calls for it) and the beak and eyes cut away. In the octopus, unlike cuttlefish and squid, the tentacles and not the body are the best part. Put a wine cork in the head (a Spanish trick to float the animal and ensure even cooking). Drop it into boiling water, no salt, with a potato – a big one for a big octopus and a small one for a small. Cook gently. When the potato is cooked the octopus is cooked. Take it out of the water, cool it, remove the skin and peel off the horny suckers. Cooked this way, octopus is white, tender and appetizing. Cut into convenient pieces, it may be simply dressed with chopped parsley, oil and lemon juice for a seafood salad. Other recipes cook octopus with wine, onion, garlic, tomato, peppers, herbs and oil. There are even recipes which include bitter chocolate. Dried octopus is good made into a soup, or it can be grilled. The Japanese are reputed to consider that the eyes are the best part.
[Octopus – French: poulpe, pieuvre German: Seepolyp, Krake, achtfüssiger Tintenfisch Italian: polpo Spanish: pulpo]
OFFAL in its general sense means garbage. In butchery, it is the bits of the carcase that are not straightforward meat, fat and bone. Thus it includes the head and all the main internal organs, notably *liver, *kidney, *sweetbreads (thymus), *tripe (stomach), *heart and *lights (lungs).
OILS. See fats.
OKA. See yam (oka).
OKRA, okro, ladies’ fingers, or gumbo (Hibiscus escufentus) belongs to the mallow family. It has edible rocket-shaped pods, sometimes with 5-7 prominent ridges or with slight spines, coloured deep or light green, and of various lengths up to 20 cm (8 in). In buying, it is safer to choose small pods, as the long-podded varieties should be picked every 2-3 days; old ones are tough and fibrous – these plants belong to the same family as cotton, Deccan hemp and Cuba bast – all fibre plants – and are themselves used to make paper.
Okra has yellow flowers rather like cotton, grows 1-2 m (3-6 ft) high, and needs a frost-free warm climate. It is native to Africa and came via Egypt to Mediterranean Europe in the 13th century It was probably taken by slaves to the Caribbean (where it is still very popular) and to the US, where it is an essential ingredient of Creole gumbo. Okra is grown in huge quantities in the southern states for the canning industry – it is very mucilaginous and therefore useful for thickening canned soups and sauces. It is used very differently in Greek, Balkan, Turkish, Middle Eastern and Indian cooking. Even the canned okra from the countries of the eastern Mediterranean is different to the canned okra of America.
Okra has a delicious flavour, but the mucilage gives it a slimy texture which many people dislike. In gumbo, this is necessary and is even added to with *filé powder, but in the Levant, where okra is a very important food, attempts are made to reduce the mucilaginous quality. The fresh pods are soaked for half an hour to an hour – even more – in vinegar, lemon juice or mixed vinegar and water before being cooked. Alternatively, they may be sprinkled with salt and left in the sun for an hour to dry. (Dried okras, small ones threaded on strings, are a common sight hanging in the shops in Turkey, and are kept in this way for use in winter. They are soaked before use and often stewed with mutton.)
In the US, okra is usually sliced, but in the Levant great care is taken to pare off the stalk without cutting into the pod. Cutting the pod lets the mucilage come out. Okra is usually fried before cooking it with meat, onion, tomato or whatever the recipe calls for. Frying also reduces the glutinosity. If you are using canned okras, American ones are best for American recipes and European ones (from Greece, Cyprus or Turkey) for Levantine recipes. Rinse canned okras before using them. As they are already cooked, they should be added late in the cooking and not treated as if fresh. However, fresh okras are usually available in Greek or Indian shops.
Bamieh bi zayt. This is a well-known hors d’oeuvre in the Lebanon. It seems to show off okra to perfection. Pare the tops of 3 cups of small okras, and, after washing, dry them well. Make a paste by pounding together a good handful of green coriander leaves, 8 cloves of garlic and ½ teaspoon salt. Also peel 10 small or pickling onions.
Fry the okras in plenty of olive oil until they are tender but still firm and green. Take them out, then fry the onions until they are golden. Pour off most of the oil and fry the pounded herb mixture a little. Slice 3 tomatoes into the bottom of a pressure cooker. Cover with okras neatly arranged on top. Put the onions on top of that, and sprinkle with about ½ cup of lemon juice. Add the fried herb mixture, and a little water, only just enough to stop the contents burning. Close the cooker. Cook for 12 minutes, open and simmer until the juice is almost all evaporated. Season with more salt if necessary, plus a pinch of sugar and pepper to taste. Place in a serving dish, arrange the vegetables, cool and chill.
OLALLIE. See raspberry.
OLIVE (Olea europaea) is almost certainly a Mediterranean native and may be descended from the oleaster, the wild olive which grows in many places around the Mediterranean. (The oleaster has tiny olives which are nearly all stone, and the bushes are very prickly.) Olive trees are very long lived and perhaps span a thousand years – some gnarled old relics are supposed to have been planted around the time of Christ. The very old trees still bear fruit. In the past, the olive was one of the mainstays for life in the Mediterranean basin, growing a little way inland around most of the coasts and penetrating a few miles into the mountain valleys. It also grows over a large area of Spain (the world’s largest producer) and in a few inland places south of the Alps, where it has been planted. It was taken to America by the Spaniards. Today, it is also grown in California, South Africa, Australia and many other areas where there is a suitable climate. Some of the many varieties are more suitable for pressing, others for preserving.
Olive oil. For oil the olives must be ripe. In the primitive method, the olives are crushed in a trough under a huge rolling stone like a millstone, and the liquid is squeezed out. This is purified by floating it on water – the streams run red in January with the washings. These old methods are still used in some mountain villages. The modern method is to squeeze the pulp under hydraulic presses and separate the oil with a centrifuge. Oil which is made by pressing, without any other treatment, is called virgin oil. However, there are considerable differences in the virgin oil from country to country. In Spain, for instance, virgin oil is often very rank – only Spaniards brought up on it would like it. In Italy, the olii vergini are divided into various grades: olio extra vergine with 1.0% acidity, olio sopraffino vergine with 1.0-1.5%, olio fino vergine with 1.5-3.0%, and olio vergine with 3-4% acidity. Acidity, in fact, is the criterion by which oils are judged, but the buyer, visiting some village in the mountains to find an excellent salad oil, will pour a little into the palm of a hand, rub his hands together briskly to heat the oil and then cup them to smell it. Poor oil, with an acidity too high for eating, was in the past known as lampante (lamp oil, more or less), and it was used for burning. Even 25 years ago, olive oil was still being burned in lamps in remote places. The dross (sansa) left over from pressing still contains some oil, and this is extracted with solvents, which also extract other resinous substances. Poor olive oil, like seed oils, can be treated, first with an alkali to neutralize the acids, then by heating the filtration through earths or charcoal to remove the colour, and finally by steam-stripping in a vacuum to remove the flavour. Lampante oil which has been stripped is called olio rettificato in Italy; oil from the extracted residues is olio di sansa rettificato. Ordinary olive oil
(olio di aliva) would consist of stripped oils with 5-15% virgin oil added for flavour, but if it is made by extraction from the sansa, it should be so labelled (Olio di sansa e di aliva).
Italy is usually associated with the production of the finest olive oils. But whether the finest comes from the Italian or the French Riviera is a matter of opinion and taste. Italy exports fine oils, but does not produce enough for her own requirements and has to import oil from elsewhere. Turkey, Tunisia and Morocco are other important producers. Some of the oil produced in Spain is excellent, but the Spanish themselves often have a love for very rank olive oil called aruja (which once upset the stomachs of tourists), which is at its worst if the olives have been allowed to get over-ripe and to lie on the ground, or if the trees were infested with insect pests. Georges Sand, in Winter in Majorca (which was written after her disastrous affair with Chopin in the Monastery of Valldemosa), said that you could always recognize a Mallorquine home by the stink of the oil. To this day, I have friends who find food quite tasteless without a good slosh of semi-rancid olive oil. AII olive oil is costly, and good olive oil is very costly and hard to find – but it is worth looking for.
Because light affects oils adversely, the best you can buy – short of visiting the farm – will be in cans and not in clear glass bottles. Once the can is opened, what is not for immediate use should be kept in small, full bottles in the refrigerator. There is much to be said for the custom in many Italian households of using oilseed oils for cooking and olive oil always as a condiment which is always on the table for dressing vegetables and salads.
Pickled olives. To most of the world outside the olive-growing regions, there are three sorts of olives: green ones with stones, stuffed green ones (usually stuffed with pieces of sweet red pepper or anchovies but also with almonds, tunny, or even hot green chillies) and black ones. The counter in a market in Spain, Italy or Greece will confront the newcomer with a bewildering number of types for sale. So taste them before buying as you cannot tell their quality by eye alone.
Black olives are ripe olives. Commercially, they are usually black, but home cured ones may be brown or sometimes mottled, some may be wrinkled and others plump. The simplest way of preserving black olives is as follows. Select good, ripe olives, free of fly. Soak them for 24 hours in several changes of fresh water to remove some of the bitterness. Then put the drained olives into jars, fill the jars with cold 10% *brine – just strong enough to make a fresh egg almost float from the bottom. Put some carob leaves in the top of the jar to make sure that the olives remain under the brine. Leave the olives for 4-5 months before trying them. There is a belief that olives should be picked only when the moon is waxing.
Green olives are unripe. They are put down from September until the fruit ripens around Christmas. As soon as the olives are properly formed, in September, some are picked as broken or squashed olives. They are split by hitting them gently with a mallet before putting them in pure water which is changed every day for up to two weeks. At the end of this time, most of the bitterness will have leached out (but some should remain).Then a brine should be prepared, again at about 10% strength (100 g per It or 2 oz per pt), which can have fennel, bay, chilli, savoury or garlic boiled in it to taste. When it is cold, this pickle is poured over the olives. A slight lactic fermentation and the natural acidity of the olives makes them keep. After 2-3 months (by Christmas), these olives are ready to eat. Again, always ask to taste broken olives before buying – vendors in Mediterranean markets expect it; to ask is polite. Broken olives bought loose can be kept in a polythene bag in the refrigerator for a few days, but should be allowed to warm to room temperature before serving. Firm, bitter broken olives are excellent with bread as a simple opening to a meal.
After the September-October olives come the more familiar green olives. By this time, the olives are more oily. The original method of removing the bitterness was to soak the olives in *lye, but it is now more usual to employ caustic soda solution, in which the olives are soaked for six hours. You can observe the penetration of the caustic soda by cutting into an olive; when the colour change has reached almost the stone, the olives are ready. They have then to be soaked in frequent changes of water for three days to remove all the caustic soda. For pickling, the same 10% brine with flavourings is used as for black olives, which are ready to eat in a few days. In Spain, not everyone likes this quick method, and the bitterness of the olives is removed by soaking in changes of water over a 15-day period.
When the olives are just starting to colour, it is time to make what the French call the olives d’été, to be used the following summer. These olives are simply put straight into the 10% brine (perfumed as usual) and sealed in bottles. These olives are bitter (olives amères is an alternative name); the salt, the fermentation that takes place are perhaps substances in the olives, make them keep quite safely. When the olives are violet, just before they are quite ripe, they are also pickled in 10% herbed brine, usually after some knife cuts have been made in each one. These olives taillées, laid down around Christmas, are ready by April. They replace the early piccolines, which by this time have begun to soften or take on the taste of leather which is so characteristic of poor commercial olives. Shrivelled olives, which are to be pressed for oil, are also pricked, allowed to bleed, and treated for a day or so with the salt and herbs (they are olives piquées or pricked olives).
The nature of pickled olives depends not only on the method that has been used but also on the variety of olive. In Spain, for instance, many are named with simple, descriptive country names. There is the aceituna zorzaleña, a small round olive which gets its name from being a favourite food of certain birds (zorzales). Varieties named by their shape include the picudilla (pointed) and the tetuda (breast-shaped); a common type is known as aceituna corval (long). Olives may be called after a place (e.g. Sevillanas). A very small olive is the manzanilla, and the one reckoned to be the best of all is the aceituna de Ia reina (olive of the queen), which is very large. However, size is the last criterion by which to judge eating olives. Californian olives are often enormous but taste of nothing, while the tiny olives from Liguria taste excellent.
The olives used in cooking are usually black, but green olives are sometimes called for. It is a great mistake to add either indiscriminately to dishes as olives, especially green ones, do not marry well with all flavours. Because olives stuffed with red pepper look decorative when sliced across, they are often used to decorate snacks in which their taste or texture is unsuitable – caviar or scrambled eggs, for instance. And black olives will not do as imitation bits of truffle.
[Olive – French: olive German: Olive Italian: oliva, uliva Spanish: olivo, oliva, aceituna]
OLOROSO. See sherry.
OMUM. See ajowan.
ONION (Allium cepa) is certainly the most commonly used flavouring vegetable in the world and has been in cultivation for so long that the wild ancestors are unknown. In China and Japan, another onion species, A. fistulosum, has been cultivated since times immemorial. The onions are variously classified by botanists with daffodils in the family Amaryllidaceae, with the lilies in the Liliaceae, or in their own family, the Alliaceae. The genus Allium includes *garlic, *leeks, *chives and *shallots as well as onions. From the cook’s point of view, onions are recognized by taste. There are dozens of species, of which some twenty grow wild in Europe. Tests carried out during World War II showed them all to be edible, although not necessarily nice. For instance, the wild garlic known as ramsons (A. ursinum), though used in a cheese, is fairly horrific in a camp stew, but an unknown species of onion I used in Kashmir was excellent. In Europe, most onions are cultivated varieties of A. cepa, which is the important species over most of the world. There are an enormous number of varieties with a wide variation in texture and flavour, as well as in season, size, flesh colour and keeping quality. Onions of a particular variety can be milder at the beginning of the season than they are at the end of it. Some Continental chefs say that you cannot
make certain regional dishes properly without the correct variety of onion. For example, an authentic Flemish carbonnade cannot be made without strong Flemish onions (and the right beer), but they would be a disaster if used in a salad which calls for the mild, sweet Valencia onions.
Cooks who are well alerted to the quantity of garlic required in a dish are not always so sensitive about onion, perhaps because it is such a basic ingredient. Not only do onions vary in quality and intensity of flavour, but also in their usefulness for cooking. Some onions are naturally tough or remain tough when baked, boiled or fried. Others are watery and difficult to fry crisp.
For keeping, those with thick, dry outer skins and a neck dried off to a mere wisp are best. Often they are not the ones with the best flavour, and they may be hard and tough. Onions that have sprouted, have a woody core, feel soft when squeezed or are wet should be avoided, as should any that smell musty or are rotted around the neck. Even if part of a bad onion can be salvaged, it always has a bad flavour. Cut onion or chopped onion, if allowed to stand, soon gets a nasty smell (which is only tolerable in the kebabs of an Eastern bazaar where it is a part of the local colour). lf chopped onion has to be kept handy, it should be lightly fried in butter (a chef’s trick) and stored in the refrigerator. As onions are available all the year round, there is no need to preserve them. They are shipped from the Southern hemisphere in winter. Dried onion flakes can be useful in emergency, but some people use them too often.