Tom Mueller - Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil

For Gino and Rosetta Olivieri

When a native of the Mediterranean had to leave the shores of the sea, he was uneasy and homesick; like the soldiers of Alexander the Great when he left Syria and advanced towards the Euphrates; or the sixteenth-century Spaniards in the Low Countries, miserable among the fogs of the North. For Alonzo Vzquez and the Spaniards of his time (and probably of all time) Flanders was the land where there grows neither thyme, nor lavender, figs, olives, melons, or almonds; where dishes are prepared, strange to relate, with butter from cows instead of oil.

Fernand Braudel , The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II

CONTENTS

A reconstruction of the seventh century BC oil mill discovered at Ekron, Israel, which could produce about 500,000 liters of olive oil per year. Courtesy of Jean-Pierre Brun

Bas relief in the memorial temple of the pharaoh Seti I, in Abydos, Upper Egypt, showing the gods Thoth and Horus anointing Seti with scented oils. Jim Henderson/Alamy

Greek athletes oil up before a competition, which made their skin more supple and enhanced their physical beauty, making them appear, as classical writers pointed out, like gleaming statues of the gods. Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin/Art Resource, NY

Olive oil was so vital to sports and bathing in the classical world that small containers for scented oil, called aryballoi , have been found in hundreds of archaeological sites throughout the Mediterranean. Courtesy of Maria Rosaria Belgiorno

Greek women bathing and anointing themselves with oil (note the aryballoi su sp ended from the tree) on a vase from the fifth century BC, much as Homer described Nausicaa and her handmaidens four centuries earlier in the Odyssey . Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY

Greek men harvesting olives by beating the branches with canes, a technique condemned by Roman (and modern) agronomists because it bruises the fruit and damages the trees. Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, NY

Perhaps the earliest method for extra ct ing olive oil, still being used by these women in Jerusalem in the early twentieth century, involved crushing olives by hand with a stone roller, placing the resulting paste in a bag, and twisting it to draw out the oil. Courtesy of Jean-Pierre Brun

The olive harvest as depicted by Sano di Pietro, in a fourteenth-century monastic calendar from Siena called the Codex of the Nuns (under the month of October). Scala/Art Resource, NY

Renaissance apothecaries used olive oil in a wide range of salves, unguents, folk remedies, and nostrums. Note the amphora-like terracotta jars on shelves behind the counter, and the young apothecarys assistant seated in the lower right-hand corner, blending up a new concoction with a mortar and pestle. Scala/Art Resource, NY

Pilgrims used ampullae, also called pilgrim flasks, to collect lamp oil and holy oil at shrines around the Mediterranean, which were thought to heal illnesses and protect against demons. This Coptic ampulla shows Saint Menas, the fourth-century Egyptian martyr and wonder-worker, flanked by camels. Runion des Muses Nationaux/Art Resource, NY

A state-of-the-art olive oil mill circa 1600, as depicted in an engraving after Jan van der Straet, which appeared in Nova Reperta (New Discoveries), a manual celebrating technological breakthroughs. Nova Reperta, plate 13, engraved by Philip Galle

Provenal oil production is limited today, but at the turn of the nineteenth century the region supplied oil to a number of foreign capitals, including the royal courts of Sweden, Luxembourg, and Russia, and to Vietnam, a former French colony. Courtesy of Mark Wickens, http://pages.infinit. net/wickens/

This skull of a Roman-era athlete on Crete, discovered in a tomb near the town of Hagios Nikolaus, wore a crown of golden olive leaves that had been set on the deceaseds brow, which over the centuries became laminated to the skull. Nikos Psilakis

Some nineteenth-century explorers in North Africa believed that the remains of Roman olive presses were cultic structures from some lost pagan ritual. Courtesy of Jean-Pierre Brun