Old-Fashioned Olive Oil from Provence

The Particular Taste from “Matured” Olives

Courtesy Moulin Castelas

I ONCE THOUGHT THAT THE BEST olive oil in the world must be the one from the Moulin Jean-Marie Cornille in Maussane-les-Alpilles near Les Baux in Provence. Not that I was necessarily wrong but that a single “best,” with so many things, is a flawed concept, and I hadn’t tasted really good oil from anywhere else. The 400-year-old Cornille mill is the centerpiece of the Coopérative Oléicole de la Vallée des Baux de Provence, one of the area’s largest olive oil producers. The oil had none of the bitterness and pepper that we associate now with good oil. The color of the oil was gold, the texture was buttery thick, and the flavor was pronounced. The oil had more character than any other I’d yet tasted. It seemed very real. I was influenced, too, by knowing that the US importer was Kermit Lynch, otherwise a wine importer; I especially respected him. (He still imports the oil.) I bought bottles of the Moulin Cornille oil in the US, and once or twice I bought a bottle at the mill. There were no choices, as I remember, just one kind of oil. In contrast, French mills today, including Moulin Cornille, produce multiple oils — modern, old-fashioned, organic, non-organic, single-variety, and flavored.

The Provençal novelist Jean Giono wrote about the harvest as it was in the early 1950s: “Two days before carrying the olives to the mill, you piled them all up together, and immediately they began to ferment. When you plunged your bare arm into the pile, you felt a lively heat. That was the moment to take them. They gave off an extraordinary odor to which the men of the civilization of oil were very sensitive.” The presses were the old vertical kind, with a screw turned by human strength.

There was a logic to the fermentation. The olives were piled up at home or at the mill because mashing and pressing, in batches, took time, and often the olives arrived at the mill faster than they could be handled. They were put in the attic. After four or five days, they had softened, which made them much easier to mash to a paste in the stone mills of the time, and it increased the yield of oil from the press. Olives naturally release carbon dioxide, and the heart of the fermenting pile filled with it, excluding oxygen, while the outer olives were exposed to air, and sometimes mold would grow. The oil could have defects of moldiness, vinegariness, and rancidity. Besides, wherever olive paste and oil are exposed to air, they start to oxidize. Equipment that isn’t kept impeccably clean gives off-flavors.

When I was in Provence in 2000, hardly any modern olive oil was yet made in France. Italy was way ahead; modern oil had spread from Tuscany and begun to dominate in the 1980s. When I got to know that oil, including from visits to mills during the harvest, the fresh flavor was a revelation. It helped that there was an increasing amount of continuous production in stainless steel; the paste was made much, much faster using knives rather than stones, and the oil was separated using a centrifuge rather than a press. (Stones may have a slight flavor advantage, but they’re slow.) Continuous production first appeared in France in 1976, but it had hardly any impact for a long time.

Still, by 2000 there was a little modern oil. I went to see Jean-Benoît and Catherine Hugues who had groves in Les Baux, where the trees are surmounted by the ruins of a 13th-century castle set on the crags of the Alpilles Mountains. Les Baux is marked by dryness, heat, and limestone soil. The Hugues’s oil, called Castellines (you can find it in the US), was primarily modern, but out of curiosity and, I think, with some ambivalence, they had also begun to produce some old-fashioned oil. Now they have their own mill, but both kinds of oil were then made for them at the co-operative Cravenco mill using continuous production.

The fermentation for the old-fashioned oil had been shortened; it was carefully monitored and wholly anaerobic. The olives were put in a closed container that quickly filled with CO₂. Previously, the olives often got too hot. That no longer happened. (Technicians say the olives should start out below 8 degrees C, or 46 degrees F. The temperature is monitored daily, and a time-temperature formula determines when they’re ready.) Various words were used to describe this carefully made old-fashioned oil, as it sought a place in the market and struggled to be recognized by the European Union. For the fermentation there were coufi (Provençal, the same as the French confit) and chômé (French, meaning “heated”). For the taste, there were fruité noir (“black fruity”) and goût à l’ancienne (“old-fashioned taste”). The phrase currently approved for labels is “olives maturées,” which doesn’t mean that the olives are riper but that they are “matured” via fermentation. Apart from label requirements, producers seem to prefer “fruité noir.” There was and is a popular demand in Provence for the old taste as well as a demand elsewhere from chefs and home cooks interested in special flavors.

You might think the fruité noir oil couldn’t be extra virgin, but well-made black fruity oil normally meets the standard, which is less than 0.8 percent free acidity, a measure of rancidity. The problem is the oil doesn’t have the right flavor profile for extra virgin, so the EU says it has to be labeled plain virgin. Jean-Benoît Hugues was one of those who worked hard on the appellation rules and getting the olives maturées oil approved by the European Union under the Appellations d’Origine Protégées.

To give an idea of the resistance, the Italian adjective that describes oil affected by an anaerobic fermentation is riscaldo, “heated,” and it’s never positive, always a defect. Very little olive oil in the world is virgin, because apart from years with challenging weather, it’s easy enough for a grower to achieve extra virgin. The traditional Provençal oil, confined to its virgin category, is such an exception in the world that several months ago when I wrote about fresh modern oil, I completely overlooked it, which is a reason why I’m writing about it now.

Fruité vert oil, like the fresh oil that’s praised everywhere, is now the usual kind produced in France. It recalls one of the milder Italian oils, as opposed to intense, bitter, and peppery Tuscan. Apparently in France, there had always been a little oil at the start of the harvest with “greener” flavors and some pepper and bitterness, and that provided the needed precedent for the fruité vert of the AOPs.

The aromas of the green fruity oil, per the specifications for the Vallée des Baux AOP, include at least two of these aromas (I can’t improve on the list): fresh-cut grass, apple, bitter almond, raw artichoke, fresh hazelnut, and tomato leaf, along with some bitterness and pepper. The more traditional Vallée des Baux oil from olives maturées is oilier in texture and neither bitter nor peppery. It includes at least two of these aromas: cured olives, black olives, olive paste (tapenade), cacao, mushroom, cooked artichoke, truffle, and sourdough bread. The taste of the fruité noir oil from the Cornille mill has changed slightly from when I first knew it. The oil is a little lighter in weight and flavor, and like other black fruity oil now, it has a touch of pepper and bitterness.

Of France’s nine AOPS for olive oil, three — Vallée des Baux-de-Provence, Aix-en-Provence, and broad Provence — recognize the oil from “olives maturées” alongside modern fruité vert oil. Better growers harvest the olives for either kind at the point where they are turning from green to violet. About 20 percent of all French olive oil is now fruité noir; in the Région Sud (Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur) it’s over 25 percent. The fruité noir commands a higher price.

The South of France has as many as 200 olive varieties, and the ones that became dominant in different areas were selected partly by climate. Those in the north are more resistant to cold; those in the south are more resistant to heat. The fermentation wasn’t typical of all oil, and it doesn’t work well with every variety. In some places in the world, olives are now raised as hedges to accommodate mechanized production. In the Baux, Aix, and Provence AOPs, a tree must be given at least 24 square meters of space. More than a third of France’s olives now are organic.

(I should say, although it complicates things further, that certain mills also make a third kind of oil, not necessarily under an AOP, called fruité mur and sometimes labeled that way. The olives are picked late, black or nearly black, just as olives once commonly were. The oil is mild and sweet, with no little or no bitterness or pepper. That’s the sort of oil made under the Nyons AOP.)

Production peaked in Provence around 1840, when the trees covered 168,000 hectares. Then came competition from seed oils. Then, after the loss of grapevines to phylloxera toward the end of the century, came a wave of replanting, in which vineyards replaced many olive groves. In 1929, more trees were lost to a hard freeze. Fifty thousand hectares of olives remained in 1956, when in February an extended hard freeze killed two-thirds of the trees to the roots. Today when you see a tree composed of a circle of several trunks, you know it was reborn after 1956.

The only oil that used to be used in France’s grande cuisine was olive. Ernest Verdier with his brother ran one of the great luxury restaurants of 19th-century Paris, La Maison d’Orée. In his Dissertations Gastronomiques, he said, “The oil must be pure olive and of the most recent harvest.” Olive was the oil for everything, including mayonnaise. (I point that out because for a long time the common recommendation has been neutral oil with maybe a little olive.) Verdier surely used the best oil he could find, but the flavors of modern fruité vert oil are much more adaptable to grande cuisine.

The traditional cooking of Provence, however, isn’t grande in that sense: it’s the cooking of poor people. And if you don’t know the black fruity taste, you don’t fully understand the traditional flavors. Cooks balance the fruité noir oil with other strong flavors — garlic, onion, anchovies, sautéed lardons (as in salade frisée aux lardons), bell peppers, parsley, mushrooms. The primary traditional use, with garlic, is to dress salad, including a salad of warm chickpeas. The leftover chickpeas make soup, and a final garnish with the fruité noir oil goes well in that too. The oil makes aïoli, ratatouille, anchoïade, tapenade, and many other dishes, including less well-known ones, such as chard with anchovy and beet salad with anchovies. (I’ve also made a nontraditional bell pepper tart.) If you’re being really regionally careful, pissaladière and mesclun, both from Nice, use that region’s somewhat different oil from the Cailletier olive (the same as the Ligurian Taggiasca), which doesn’t lend itself to fermentation. Current cooks find the fruité noir oil goes with goat’s-milk cheese and with shellfish in paella. Chefs experiment. Giono wrote that, before baking, the dough for the flat Provençal fougasse was sprinkled well with sugar and new olive oil. Dessert, too, is open to exploration. ●