Black olive ice cream, why not? – 06/11/2023 – Gross Kitchen

Life has its funny things.

Me, just me, in a scenario that could be on a L’Occitane flyer. A rural hotel room in Provence, southern France, with pseudo-rustic furniture, a bathtub in the middle of the room and the smell of lavender penetrating the pores until it permeates the brain.

These are the small privileges of being a journalist specializing in superfluous subjects.

On a small table, there were some gifts for me. Gifts of the best kind: to eat. Some honey biscuits, some almond toast with garlic and a black olive paste.

Provence, in the south of France, is famous for its olive groves. Small, artisanal, high quality production.

My French is enough to understand labels, but my vision and attention are very poor. The jar of olives said “confit’olive”, well, olive preserves.

I grabbed the garlic toast and had a blast.

The olive stuff was sweet. If the garlic hadn’t been there, maybe it would have been nice.

I went back to the jar and, now aware that I have a deficit, I examined the label with my eyes squinted to read the smaller letters.

The second ingredient in the paste was sucre – sugar.

I crossed the road and went to the village of Lourmarin, another scenic area with rich Americans strolling through the alleys. In a small square, the Ravi ice cream shop, the best of the three or four existing ones.

I check the flavors and there it is: olive oil with pine nuts and candied black olives. Out of personal curiosity and a sense of duty, I ask to try the ice cream.

“Interesting” is a good word to describe it. Same word used to refer to potential sexual partners who are not exciting enough for physical engagement. One proof was enough. Per hour.

Who has never caught – out of curiosity, lack of options, sympathy or, come on, interest – someone merely interesting?

In a village the size of an olive, I ended up having fun later with that ice cream. It was one of the desserts in the restaurant at the Le Moulin hotel, in the center of the village. I ate everything and enjoyed it, in the heat of the novelty.

I almost fell in love when, at a fabulous dinner at La Bastide, at the top of the Luberon, I was faced with such a dessert: black olive ice cream with chocolate and sugary black olive textures. Weird in the sense of Brazilian Portuguese and in all other languages ​​– a delicacy.

The next day, I woke up with some moral hangover.

It seems that Provence wanted to push sweet olives on me at all costs.

Obviously it makes sense that we find sweets made with olives strange. The entire historical line that brought us here – from the Portuguese to the Greeks – places the olive as a salty food.

It turns out that olives are not naturally salty.

It’s bitter. No, that’s very little. Fresh olives are inedible because they are so astringent. It needs chemical treatment to become palatable.

And the treatment that the guys in the ancient Mediterranean had was salt, easily extracted from the sea or land. There was no sugar, honey was rare and expensive (as it still is). Sweets were precious, olives were banal. So salty.

In cooking, much of what is sweet or savory is pure convention. A social construction, to use the current lingo.

Brazil has guava and banana plantations because the land favors guava trees, banana trees and sugarcane fields. If olive trees were as good as jabuticabeiras, we would have olives. Sweet like French.

Brazilians find it strange that Japanese eat rice and bean sweets; Japanese immigrants to Brazil were horrified by the salty rice and beans.

It’s a cultural burden that’s difficult to shake off.

As much as Provence tries to convince us that olive jam is the best, there is a cultural obstacle of a few thousand years. Who knows, who knows, in the next incarnation I will beat him.

LINK PRESENT: Did you like this text? Subscribers can access five free accesses from any link per day. Just click the blue F below.