Fisher Mary Frances Kennedy - The good cooks book of oil & vinegar : one of the worlds most delicious pairings, with more than 150 recipes

Other Books by Michele Anna Jordan

More Than Meatballs

The Good Cooks Journal

The Good Cooks Book of Mustard

The Good Cooks Book of Salt & Pepper

The Good Cooks Book of Tomatoes

Vinaigrettes & Other Dressings

The World Is a Kitchen

Lotsa Pasta

VegOut! A Guide Book to Vegetarian Friendly Restaurants in Northern California

The BLT Cookbook

San Francisco Seafood

The New Cooks Tour of Sonoma

Pasta Classics

California Home Cooking

Polenta

Pasta with Sauces

Ravioli & Lasagne

A Cooks Tour of Sonoma

Copyright 1992 by Michele Anna Jordan

Foreword copyright 1992 by M. F. K. Fisher

New material copyright 2015 by Michele Anna Jordan

Photographs copyright 2015 by Liza Gershman, unless otherwise noted

Originally published in 1992 by Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Erin Seward-Hiatt

Cover photo credit Liza Gershman

Print ISBN: 978-1-63220-587-2

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63450-014-2

Printed in China

Plant a vineyard for your children and an olive grove for your grandchildren.

An old Italian saying

for Lucas, my one and only grandchild

&

for Californias olive oil and vinegar pioneers, especially Ridgely Evers & Colleen McGlynn of DaVero, the Sciabica Family, Bruce Cohn, Greg Hinson of O Olive Oil, and Yvonne & Jerg Hall of Terra Savia/Olivino

Foreword

C omparisons are said to be odious, but I would not find it odious at all to have anything that I have written about either oil or vinegar compared with this book, In other words, Michele Jordan and I seem to agree and I am proud to admit it.

Of course, I dont recognize many of the private product names given and I admit to real ignorance about the uses of fruit or berry vinegars. I do know and love anything connected with aceto balsamico , which for some reason I have never thought of as being especially exotic.

I also confess to a complete ignorance of using pure virgin olive oil for anything except lubricating the umbilical cords of new babies, until I was perhaps in my early teens and my mother had finally stopped reproducing. It was about then that my grandmother Holbrook died too, and the scrubby little two-ounce bottle of olive oil, which had stayed on a shelf in the medicine cabinet, was correctly moved to a shelf in the kitchen cooler. It automatically became a quart bottle or a two-quart tin. In other words, I am an addict but not a snob.

I am very glad to be in the good company of Michele Jordan. I suppose we are both more addicts than snobs, but neither of us cares one whit. I think Michele uses both oil and vinegar more in cooking than I do, but thats all right too since we both know what oil and vinegar are for: They are as necessary to us as water, or almost. And that is as it should be.

M. F. K. Fisher

Glen Ellen, 1991

Acknowledgments

A huge mille grazie goes out to the staff at Skyhorse Publishing, especially editor Nicole Frail but also the entire production team whose names I do not know, for such fine work and astonishing patience as I powered through The Good Cooks series, sliding at the last possible moment to the finish line. What a whirlwind it has been.

Thanks, as well, to L. John Harris, who shepherded the first edition of this book into print.

And thanks one more time to photographer Liza Gershman, who worked under extremely difficult time constraints to produce these beautiful photographs. And to the team who helped during those crazy sessions, thank you! Kelly Keagy, you are a rock in the best possible way and I deeply appreciate your support and understanding. Deborah Pulido, you helped in so many ways but it was your tender caring for my little dachsies Joey and Lark that touched my heart. Thank you.

Chef Evan Euphrat of Knife for Hire and Sara Ely, thank you huge bunches for saving the day on barely a moments notice. Sara, you have a remarkable eye and true talent for styling and staging. Evan, you are a blast in the kitchen!

Fabiano Ramaci, what a treasure you are. I thank you for your warmth, your friendship, your hard work on behalf of this book and for your delicious oils and wines.

Ridgely and Colleen of DaVero, what can I say? I love you both and love your olive oils, your wines, your tasting room, your ranch, your wisdom, your talent, your common sense, and, most importantly, your willingness to share it all with me.

Thanks, once again, to Cultivate, a lovely kitchenwares store in Sebastopol, for the loan of linens and props.

And to my dear friend and landlady, Mary Duryee, from the deepest recesses of my heart and soul, thank you, once again, for everything.

Finally, to my daughters Gina and Nicolle, my grandson Lucas, my son-in-law Tom, my friends James Carroll and John Boland: Look! I have come through! Thank you so very much.

Introduction to the Second Edition

I n a very specific way, the publication of the first edition of this book was a study in bad timing. I completed the manuscript in the fall of 1991 and as it wound its way through the editing and publication process, with printed galleys and such going back and forth via snail mail, the California olive oil renaissance was simmering just beneath the awareness of all but a very few people, specifically the late Lila Jaeger, software entrepreneur Ridgely Evers, and a few others. Email communication was still a couple of years in the future and the Web had opened to the public that summer, in August, 1991, and was still an electronic Wild West, sparsely populated and all but impossible to navigate. Websites? We dont got no stinkin Website.

The book, my second, hit the shelves of book storesthere was no amazon.com yetin October. In November, everything in California changed, thanks, to a large degree, to Bruce Cohn of B. R. Cohn Winery.

Bruces wife at the time was fed up with olive stains on her carpets, tracked in from ripe olives that fell from the ancient trees that came with the estate, Picholine trees planted sometime in the mid 1880s and left untended for decades. The green olives would hang until they turned black and fell to the ground, there to be trampled, crushed, and carried inside on the bottoms of everyones shoes.

So Bruce decided to harvest the olives and have them pressed into oil, which he then bottled in beautifully etched bottles.