The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society

by Chris Stewart

  Next, when you deem it right, you make up a seven percent brine solution – you know, seventy grams of salt to a litre of water (thank heavens for the metric system); or, if you are Alpujarran, you could add salt until a fresh egg floats upon the surface. You then place the olives in the solution and they will keep for pretty much as long as you want. That just leaves the aliño to add – the mix of oil and herbs that give the preserved olive its particular flavour.

  You want to do this every few months, after you’ve reckoned the number of olives you’re going to get through in the near future. You rinse the salt away in a dozen or so changes of water, and then pour in your aliño, flavoured as your imagination dictates. The Alpujarrans, being conservative folk, tend to stick with salt and garlic, but in more adventurous parts of the country there is no end to the variety. To start with the least agreeable, they might include a sprig of bitter rue – one of the foulest-smelling plants, though some people swear it imparts the subtlest of nuances to the mix. Less conventional but more attractive concoctions might feature lavender, rosemary, thyme, oregano, fennel seeds, coriander, caraway, harissa, chilli, lemons (fresh or preserved à la marocaine), orange and lemon peel.

  It’s a matter of taste, of course, but after a decade or so of experimenting, I can report that the orange and the olive go together like a dream, and that the combination of Moroccan preserved lemons and harissa is, as the Spanish would have it, para chuparse los dedos – ‘to suck oneself the fingers’.

  So, the aliño decision made, you create your mix, add it to the olives you’ve already stuffed in jars, top up with olive oil, leave for a week… and start eating. Cookery books state rather primly that you can keep this stuff in the fridge for up to two months, but I reckon it’s okay out of the fridge for two years and more, albeit that they do gradually lose something of their bite.

  Picking the eating olives is, for most farmers, just a prelude to the real business of producing oil. This takes place a month or so later, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, and it is when the sticks and Honda vibrators come out in earnest. There is no more of the delicate milking, but instead what seems like an all-out assault on the trees, whacking them until every last olive has fallen. Afterwards they look a sorry sight, like beaten boxers, with torn and broken branches hanging limp.

  This sight – so at odds with the beauty of the silvery leaves, the sheep nibbling grass around the ancient trunks – always haunts me a little when we begin the harvest, and each year I find myself starting off by milking the trees for the by now purpley-black fruits. I climb the first tree and run my open fingers down each laden branch to send a shower of olives pattering down onto the nets spread below. There’s a glorious sensuousness to the feel of the perfect little fruit, glistening with oil as they slip through your outspread fingers. The smell, too, of being high in the crown of an olive tree is incomparable. Bernardo across the river says it’s like green tomatoes, and the very essence of olive oil. Then there’s the peace of it, the sound of the pattering olives, the breeze in the leaves, the rushing of the rivers, and you up there dappled with warm winter sunshine.

  But Manolo, to whom this sort of thing is typical of the bizarre notions brought by guiris, considers my performance with blank incomprehension, and sets to in time-honoured fashion with his barra. And before long I am at it, too, whooshing and clacking my cane at the branches. If you milked a tree for oil olives, it would take you the best part of a day to pick just one tree. And, although you might think that a very agreeable way to carry on – being under the impression, as you probably are, that there are no deadlines, timetables or stress in the countryside – it’s simply not viable. Once an olive falls, it ceases to be nourished by the tree and the acidity starts to develop, and for the best olive oil you want your acidity to be as low as possible. The ideal is to press your olives within twenty-four hours of picking them, though this is seldom practicable unless you have your own mill. If I were to milk all my trees by hand, the first olives picked would be over a month old, and completely rotten, by the time I’d sacked them up and taken them to the mill.

  Time, then, is of the essence for all olive farmers, and with this in mind I try to tempt my friends from the city to come and help with the harvest. For the price of a few bottles of olive oil and a week of good food and wine, I’ve established that you can have a cheap and contented workforce and, if the weather is right, then everybody has a wonderful time.

  It’s hard to make a living – or indeed anything at all – out of small-scale agriculture, and olives are no different. When I bought El Valero, however, I was certain that our olive harvest, along with the flock of sheep, would provide the backbone of our fragile economy. It didn’t matter that we had sold our entire first orange crop for a paltry £50; olives would be different.

  Unfortunately, the odds were stacked against us. For a start, our olives hardly seemed to be growing. I sought advice, as usual, from Domingo, who assured us that this was no fault of our own – it was simply a vecería, that curious phenomenon where, every other year, groups of olive trees decide amongst themselves to gather strength for the following year by yielding little or no fruit. That year most of the trees on our farm seemed to have opted out, and of the pitifully few that hadn’t, the bulk of their olives dropped in the winter winds and were wolfed by the sheep. When it came to the reckoning, we had collected barely a couple of hundred kilos to press.

  We cast about for someone to mill such a tiny quantity, and were directed to Manolo El Sereno, in a village north of Granada. His apodo – Sereno means ‘nightwork’ – refers to the fact that, somewhere back in the last century, he was the lamplighter for his village. He had long retired, though, and was now, as he told us proudly, the owner of the smallest olive mill in the world.

  Driving up with our sacks, I humped them into his mill, which was set up in a little room next to his bathroom. With a saucepan he ladled the olives, glistening and oily black, into the funnel on top of the mill, and started up the grinder. I jumped back and opened my mouth (which is what you should do to prevent your eardrums splitting in the event of high-volume sound), for the noise was unbelievable. The grinder is a powerful hammer-mill that graunches up the olives and shatters the stones, preparing the pulp for the pressing.

  I stared in open-mouthed stupefaction at the awesome machine with its horrendous roaring, its sound amplified still louder by the tiny tiled room. Manolo, who seemed impervious to the din, busied himself down in a corner of the room, messing about with the arcane paraphernalia of home olive-milling. Then suddenly a tiny gobbet of flying olive mash whizzed past me and spattered on the white tiles. Then another and then some more. Perhaps this was the way the thing worked, but soon my glasses were caked with a thick layer of olive pulp and there were purple splodges all over the gleaming white walls. I backed into a corner, shielding my eyes from the flying sludge. Surely this was not the way it was supposed to be.

  ‘Ay, Manolo!’ I shouted into the ear-splitting roar. But he didn’t hear me. The grinder raced on. If it carried on at this rate, then the whole of my olive harvest was going to end up on the walls of Manolo’s mill. I ventured from my cover to tap Manolo on the shoulder, but just then a thick lump of flying olive flesh caught him square in the ear.

  He looked up in consternation. ‘Hostia! – The Host!’ he cried. ‘I’ve left the door open!’ He leapt to the switch and shut the monster down, leaning on the door as it whined slowly to a stop, thick clods of purple sludge oozing round the edges. Then he cleared the muck from round the door, shut it tightly and started the whole process over again.

  From the grinder, the masa – a thick sludge of olive flesh, skins and shattered stones – was ladled into a great tub to rest before going into the press. Vile brown muck, it looked about as unappetising as a thing can look. There it reposed for a few hours. I got fed up with watching this part of the process, and repaired to a bar in search of faster-moving entertainment. When I returned, the sludge was in the press
, a tall steel cylinder with a mesh at the bottom and a spout. From the spout dribbled a thin stream of viscous liquid.

  ‘This is the first pressing,’ said Manolo. ‘The oil’s coming out under its own weight. This is the extra-double-virgin stuff. I’ll put it in separate bottles for you.’ We watched the oil dribbling out for a bit.

  ‘How long will it take for it all to come through?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ll leave it tonight and all day tomorrow, then I’ll let it stand to let the jamila settle out. The jamila is the water that the olive contains along with the oil. The oil is lighter than the water, so it floats on the top.’

  A few days later Manolo rang to say our oil was ready. He had put it in neatly labelled plastic Coca-Cola bottles. I don’t know quite what I expected, but its arrival, and our first tasting, was not as exciting as I’d hoped. I’d never been that sophisticated a connoisseur of oils; indeed, to speak plainly, I’d hardly have known nor cared about the difference between olive and sunflower. These days, I can talk olive oil as passionately as the next man, and can appreciate that at the gastronomic end of the market its production and maintenance is as delicate and complex a matter as that of wine. But back then, one oil seemed much like another to me, and the stuff in the two-litre plastic Coke bottles, fruit of our first harvest, did little to convince me of any magical properties.

  Still, the year after Manolo’s milling, things looked better, as we had been assured they would. In fact, it looked like there was going to be a bumper harvest – far too big for Manolo’s tiny mill to deal with – so we cast around and made enquiries about other local mills. The one thing everyone told us was that all commercial millers are thieves, and will stop at nothing to screw you. It seemed that there was no way to avoid this, as all millers are the same, always have been and always will be.

  When I pressed Domingo for an explanation, he suggested that millers always had an advantage over their public, as they were cunningly well versed in the ways of counting and weighing, while their customers were often illiterate and unskilled in the finer points of mathematics. When times were hard – which they usually were in rural Spain – it was difficult for the millers, finding themselves in this position of power, not to be corrupted. Something of this proclivity had found its way into the millers’ gene pool, and thus to this day honest millers are scarcer than hen’s teeth. Domingo illustrated his contention with examples of dastardly behaviour. And, as well as cheating their customers, it seemed there wasn’t a miller in the area who hadn’t been fined for adulterating his olive oil with cheap bulk oils.

  The thing looked bleak, and we made careful enquiries as to which crook to entrust with our business. Domingo advised – for a ‘cleaner, more honest sort of deceit’, as he put it – the appealingly named Cuatro Culos, who performed the deceit so neatly and seemingly ingenuously that it was almost a pleasure. ‘The good thing about Cuatro Culos’, he told us, ‘is that he admits that he screws everybody. He can’t help it, he says; he was made that way. And he’s a very nice man, generous and charming. If you’re going to get ripped off – and you certainly are going to get ripped off – then you might as well be ripped off by somebody nice.’

  It was a well-marshalled argument, and there was a sense of fun about Cuatro Culos’s very name – which, of course, is really his apodo or nickname. It means ‘Four-Bums’ and Domingo explained that it was a nickname passed down, along with the proclivity for deceit, from generation to generation. It has, as have many of the best apodos, an appealing ambiguity about it. This particular apodo usually indicates the occurrence of gluttony somewhere in the family history, but it could also be taken to mean someone who is capable of crapping on you in a big way. Either interpretation could be suitable for a miller, of course.

  We chewed over all this, and I was on the point of driving off to be fleeced by Señor Culos when, for some reason I can no longer recall, I plumped instead for Miguel Muñoz of Las Barreras, a miller with a reputation for utter and shameless venality.

  The crop that year was as good as any I have harvested: over two thousand kilos, beaten and plucked from the trees by a band of pickers that included a Swedish professor of Cultural Anthropology, a marine biologist and a teacher of comparative religions. We stuffed the crop into old sheep-feed sacks and stacked them under cover from the rain that by good fortune started to fall just as we finished the harvest. I rang the mill to ask when I could bring them in. ‘I can’t possibly do them this week,’ said the miller. ‘I’m stuffed up solid with a backlog. Bring them in next Tuesday.’

  The rain stopped and the temperature rose a little and the week ran its course. On the Tuesday morning I rose before dawn in order to be the first man at the mill and avoid the rush. I heaved the sacks into the trailer and headed across the valley for town; I had a niggling sense, throughout the journey, that I might have trodden in some dog shit.

  The sun was just touching the tops of the Sierra Nevada as I pulled into the mill yard. There were trucks and tractors, cars and trailers and mules already there. Mountains of sacks and crates of olives were stacked up in every available space, and scores of big-built, bovine-looking men with caps on were standing around in what looked to me like chaos. So much for my early start. I thought about turning round and trying Cuatro Culos, but this course of action was made impossible by the fact that I couldn’t actually turn round; it was too tight a manoeuvre, and I couldn’t unhitch the trailer without unloading it – and, once I’d unloaded two thousand kilos of olives, I certainly wasn’t going to load them back on again.

  I launched myself instead upon that sea of milling men and tried to discover what I was supposed to do next. ‘No mate, not a clue…’ ‘Sorry, can’t help you…’ Some muttered and mumbled, while others just shook their heads unknowingly. Others still seemed baffled and disconcerted by my Spanish. Finally a man in a blue boilersuit suggested that I ‘try down below’.

  I walked down the hill to the lower part of the mill, where in a cavernous shed the furious machinery of oil extraction was roaring and clattering and thumping. I stepped gingerly in amongst the howling shades – the floors in these mills are slippery as ice from all the spilled oil. ‘Is the chief here?’ I asked a small brown man in a T-shirt with the slogan ‘Marbella Yagtht Club’.

  By gestures he indicated that the chief was to be found high upon a catwalk suspended in the shadows, ministering to the raging machinery. I slithered up the steel stairs and stopped. Here was the chief and another man. Neither acknowledged my presence. The other man watched while the chief helped out a huge and terrifying machine. The noise was deafening. THUMP THUMP THUMP went the bit that punched up the olive-caked capachos or pressing mats. As each mat burst to the top of the pile, a puncher-slider rammed it across to the next part of the machine with a hellish hiss of oily air. Here great steel teeth gripped the mat and shook it like a dog shaking a rat. Some of the alpechín (the spent mush of pips and skins) fell off. The mat flapped up and was jerked across to the third part of the process. Here the chief picked off any bits of mush that had survived the shaker, risking his wrists and forearms as the terrible rams, pistons and thumpers worked their pitiless way with the capachos. Finally a layer of thick brown olive mush was slurped onto the mat by a giant nozzle. On and on it went: THUMP hiss crash clonk, THUMP hiss crash clonk blurp.

  I watched the process for a bit, spellbound. The mill chief was too involved in his process to notice me, or to follow the usual conventions of nicety. He was, in effect, part of the machinery, and, as he was standing on an oily steel catwalk without any kind of protection, I reckoned the probability of his actually becoming part of that machinery was pretty high. Eventually, though, I tired of the spectacle, and remembering that my car and trailer were slewed across the narrow yard in such a way that nobody could get in or out, I shouted across the middleman at the chief, ‘ARE YOU THE CHIEF?’

  I know it sounds silly, but what other opening gambit could I have used? In any case, there was not a flicker o
f response. ‘ARE YOU (formal form) THE CHIEF?!’ I tried again.

  ‘Yup,’ he said, pulling off a torn mat.

  Silence, while I weighed my next words. You have to get this right when you’re shouting at the top of your voice in a foreign language at a man who seems determined to ignore you. But there’s no alternative. You have to just take a deep breath and brace yourself for humiliation.

  ‘I’VE BROUGHT A LOAD OF OLIVES AND I WANT TO KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH THEM,’ I yelled.

  Flap went the machine, thump hiss crash clonk blurp gloop. I couldn’t be sure the chief had heard me. He was still concentrating on the machine.

  ‘I’VE GOT A LOAD OF OLIVES. I RANG YESTERDAY. YOU SAID YOU COULD MILL THEM TODAY!!’ The chief muttered something across the middleman. ‘WHAT?’ I shouted.

  The middleman turned to me and said: ‘How much you got?’

  ‘A couple of tons.’

  ‘Can’t possibly do them today,’ said the chief at last. ‘I’m short-handed and we’ve got a big backlog. Stack ’em in the yard with a piece of paper with your name on and the number of sacks.’

  ‘WHEN, THEN?’

  ‘Maybe tomorrow…’

  I had no option but to do as bidden. So I scrawled my name on the sacks, left them in the yard and went home, resolving to come back next day and watch them being milled.

  Next morning I managed to arrive before the mass of olivareros. ‘Hola, buenos días,’ said the chief, friendly as you like now we had got to know one another a little. ‘We can start on your olives right away. You want to tip them in the hopper over there?’