by Mueller, Tom
Leo and his colleages at the cooperative are using only approved, natural chemicals on their trees and, starting next year, their oil will be certified as biologico, or organic. “We’re freeing the land from systematic poisoning by pesticides and other toxic agricultural products, which concentrate particularly in olive oil. Here’s another kind of organized crime, another mafia that we all need to stand up to and speak out against. Or else they’ll kill us just as sure as a hit man would.”
THE LOVELY BURN
The olive tree is surely the richest gift of heaven.
—Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Ronaldson, 1813
Olio eta egia gaña dadukate. [Olive oil and truth come to the surface.]
—Basque proverb
“The universe is chiral!” announced Alissa Mattei as I entered her airy, sun-filled parlor, where a long oak table held tasting glasses, a laptop, a dozen bottles of olive oil, and molecular models of isoprene and other organic compounds, made from toothpicks and balls of colored clay. (Chirality, I soon learned, is the characteristic of structures that, like our right and left hands, can’t be superimposed on their mirror images.) Mattei, who directed the Carapelli quality-control laboratories for almost three decades before leaving the company in 2008, when it was taken over by the Spanish food multinational Grupo SOS, is a striking figure: small, plump, with full reddish hair, and arresting scarves, and large, almond-shaped eyes that seem to look straight into your soul, with an intelligence and humor you can’t mistake, and with something else, too, that might be cunning, though you don’t really care since it’s such pleasure just to stare into those eyes, deep green like newly pressed olive oil from her native Tuscany. Since leaving Carapelli she runs Casa Montecucco, a homey farmhouse turned agriturismo, and educates people on fine oil and fine living in the Maremma, the wild woodlands of the south Tuscan coast where some of Italy’s best boar-hunting, horseback riding and Super Tuscan wines are to be had. The daughter of a Tuscan painter and a Neapolitan baronessa (you can bet her eyes are the baronessa’s), she is satisfyingly down-to-earth when dealing with guests and organizing a meal, yet now and then makes sweeping, enigmatic, Neapolitan statements—“the universe is chiral,” “everything in nature is the result of chance and necessity,” “I am an extremely generous person.” All of which, after spending a short time with her, you see are very likely to be true.
Mattei speaks matter-of-factly of fraud, which she says is endemic in the olive oil industry. “It always makes economic sense. Add 2 or 3 percent seed oil to your extra virgin olive oil, which sells for three times more, and you make money by the bucketful.” She tells the modern history of oil fraud with an intimate knowledge of names, dates, and places—the company in Liguria that invented deodorized oil, and the companies in Puglia that perfected it—and observes that chemists who devise new methods of adulteration sometimes sit on the selfsame scientific committees that create the tests to detect adulteration. She says that major oil traders routinely quote a price for deodorized oil, although selling such oil as extra virgin is illegal: the “soft refining” of the deodorization process is forbidden in extra virgin oil, which can only be made with mechanical methods. She too is developing new deodorization techniques, she says—not for fraud, but simply for the chemical challenge of eliminating unpleasant odors and tastes from otherwise good olive oil.
As she speaks, you know that the olive oil world she is describing, with its industry chemists, traders, and deal-makers, its compromises and rationalizations, is a mortal threat to olive oil quality, steadily debasing the extra virgin grade and putting unsustainable price pressure on countless small producers of high-quality oil. Yet it’s also quite clear that Alissa Mattei has a passion for fine olive oil. She has an exceptional palate, for which she’s in great demand as a consultant for Slow Food and several major olive oil producers. She is one of the world’s leading oil chemists, who knows the twists and turns of olive oil’s molecular geometry as a farmer knows his fields. And after a career at an oil multinational where, as she says, she hardly saw an olive tree, for the first time in her life she owns her own grove, slender little five-year-olds which she cossets as if they were her children, and from which she makes a gorgeous oil. Alissa Mattei is another person olive oil has touched, bringing out her inner contradictions.
She also cares about spreading the message of great oil, and lectures frequently on its chemical and sensory properties to the general public. Today I’d come for her celebrated introduction to oleic acid, the main fatty acid in olive oil. First, however, she flashed through a series of bright molecular models on her laptop to illustrate her interest of the moment, the concept of chirality. “Chiral molecules exist throughout nature. Which is a mystery, since the simple molecules that were around when life began, like methane and ammonia, are symmetrical, not chiral. How did chirality start?” Olive oil too, she explained, has a number of chiral components, such as alpha-tocopherol and chlorophyll. “So olive oil contains at its heart one of the deepest mysteries of nature!” she said with a twinkle in her eye.
“Now let’s make oil.” She handed me toothpicks and chunks of clay, and I tried to follow along as her round, capable hands rolled a series of colored balls—blue for carbon atoms, red for oxygen, white for hydrogen—and used toothpicks, which represented chemical bonds, to link three carbon atoms together. She added oxygens and hydrogens branching off from the carbons, producing a molecule shaped roughly like a capital E. “This is glycerol, the core of olive oil, which is a triglyceride—a glycerol base with three fatty acids branching off of it.” Then, to each horizontal bar of the glycerol E, she attached a fatty acid, which consisted of a long chain of carbon atoms, each carbon sporting a pair of hydrogens. Mattei explained that all fats and oils are composed of triglycerides, and differ in the length of their carbon chains. Oleic acid is eighteen carbon atoms long; lauric acid, found in human milk and coconut oil, has twelve carbons; while the erucic acid in rapeseed and mustard-seed oil has twenty-two. Like other lipids, olive oil is a cocktail of many different fatty acids, whose proportions change according to factors such as the cultivar of the olive, the climatic conditions it grows in, and the amount of water it receives. An oil’s content of oleic acid, its primary fatty acid, can vary from 55 to 85 percent. (Olive oil also contains lesser amounts of eighteen other fatty acids.) Mattei reached down the table for a portly bottle of oil with a neck tag announcing its first-place finish at a recent olive oil competition and pronouncing it The Best Olive Oil in the World. “Different oils can have very different lipid characteristics, almost as though they came from different plants,” she said. “How can there be one ‘best oil’?”
Resuming her lesson, Mattei explained that fatty acids differ not only in the length of their carbon chains but in the type of bonds between the carbons. Most carbon atoms are joined to each other with single bonds, which she signified with one toothpick. Yet halfway down our chain, between the ninth and tenth carbons, she made a two-toothpick bond instead; at this point she also plucked away a hydrogen atom, and put a 30-degree kink in the chain. This missing hydrogen means that oleic acid is “unsaturated”—its carbon chain isn’t fully saturated with hydrogen atoms. Oleic acid and other fatty acids with one double bond are called monounsaturated, while those with two or more double bonds are polyunsaturated; these two types of fatty acids are typically found in vegetable oils. Other fatty acids, whose carbon chains are filled to capacity with hydrogens, are saturated. (Butter, suet, lard, and other animal fats are made up largely of saturated fatty acids.) The numbers of kinks and missing hydrogen atoms in a fatty acid, determined by the number of double bonds it contains, have important biological implications. Saturated fats, with no bend-inducing double bonds, have straight carbon chains that pack neatly into tight crystal structures, and are usually solid at room temperature; monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats, which are full of twists and don’t pack so tidily, are typically liquid. What’s more, at a site on a fatty acid chain
where a carbon double bond exists, the missing hydrogen leaves a gap that makes the chain vulnerable to invasion by reactive molecules, like atmospheric oxygen. The more double bonds a fatty acid contains, the more easily it oxidizes, or turns rancid. Hence olive oil, which is largely monounsaturated, keeps fresh far longer than other vegetable oils, which are polyunsaturated.
Saturated animal fats, devoid of double bonds and chock full of hydrogens, keep best of all. Recognizing this, over a century ago food chemists devised a method of topping up the gaps in carbon chains with extra hydrogen atoms, thus increasing shelf life. This chemical process, known as hydrogenation, also straightens out double bonds, making hydrogenated fats lie straight and pack solid. In fact the body mistakes them for natural saturated fats and incorporates them in structures like cell membranes, where they can set off inflammatory reactions that promote atherosclerosis and heart disease.
“But enough oil theory, it’s time for practice,” she said abruptly, standing and walking into the kitchen nearby. “We have guests for dinner.” She led the way into Casa Montecucco’s professional-grade kitchen, a realm of marble and stainless steel where her husband, Luciano Cipriani, scion of a family of hoteliers and restaurateurs, was boning a Parma ham with a knife as big as a machete. For the next three hours I watched Mattei and her husband move swiftly and in perfect synchrony around the kitchen as they prepared a five-course meal for fifteen people, using impressive quantities of oil. As someone who grew up in 1970s and 1980s America with a steady anti-fat mantra, I found it liberating to see Alissa Mattei loop emerald festoons of the stuff over acquacotta soup, árista pork loin, potatoes and endives and hot peppers from her garden, with the practiced abandon of an orchestra conductor.
On a shelf in the kitchen I noticed a five-liter jug of Carapelli, which she said she used for cooking and frying—evidently she remained faithful to her former employer. Without thinking, I asked what oil she liked best of all. For a moment her jolliness faded, as if in disappointment, and I remembered what she’d said about the chemical differences in oils. Then she brightened, and reached for the award-winning oil we’d seen earlier. “The best in the world, of course,” she laughed. Then she held the bottle up to the light and squinted, as if studying its contents. “Who knows what’s really in there . . .”
“IF I WERE a king, I’d eat nothing but fat.” Thus a seventeenth-century farmer expressed his longing for triglycerides, both saturated and unsaturated, five centuries before they fell from medical and culinary favor—and before hydrogenation made them dangerous. Fats and oils are a remarkably efficient fuel, not only for lamps and furnaces and the olive’s germinating seed, but for people as well. In times of unrelenting manual labor and ever-present cold, when most people’s main preoccupation was how to fill their bellies, fatty foods were associated with health and prosperity. In church, our fat-starved farmer would have heard the advice of Isaiah to the true believer: “Eat ye that which is good, and let your soul delight itself in fatness.” He’d have heard the psalmist compare losing oneself in God to the bliss of a greasy meal: “My soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness; and my mouth shall praise thee with joyful lips.”
But which fat to choose—saturated or unsaturated? Animal fat or olive oil? By the late Middle Ages, the battle line between these ancient antagonists more or less followed the modern border between Tuscany to the south and Emilia-Romagna to the north. South of this line, despite some pockets of pork fat created by barbarian invaders, olive oil was the favored condiment for vegetables, soups, and fish both grilled and fried. To the north, in Italy and beyond the Alps, where olive trees didn’t thrive because of the cold, a few olive oil aficionados existed among the upper classes, but animal fat held sway among the masses except during Lent and fast days. Northern Europeans had mixed emotions about olive oil. They prized it for its sacred symbolism and medicinal properties, yet disliked its bitterness and bite, so different from the sweet animal fats used to season their native comfort foods. If they ate olive oil at all, they preferred milder oils like those grown on the shores of Lake Garda, but often enough they simply kept the substance well away from their mouths. Hildegard of Bingen, the German abbess, mystic, poet, and polymath, spoke for many northerners when she concluded that olive oil was excellent medicine but miserable food, which “causes nausea when eaten, and ruins other foods when cooked together with them.” Or perhaps Hildegard and her sisters were getting bad oil. Thomas Platter, an English traveler of the late sixteenth century, observed that only low-grade olive oil reached northern Europe, pressed from the lees after the good oil had already been extracted. An expression current in England in his time, “as brown as oil,” suggests this oil’s appearance—and taste.
A new campaign in the enduring culinary war between olive oil and animal fat began in the fifteenth century, with the triumphant arrival of butter. This second invasion came about not, as at the end of the Roman Empire ten centuries earlier, in a rush of wild-haired, fat-eating Germans, but through subtle changes in dietary custom, and a gradual loosening of Rome’s grip on food that occurred in the run-up to the Reformation. In certain areas of northern Europe, where no olives grew and residents had little taste for oil, modifications in canon law permitted the consumption of butter during Lent and fast days, opening the door to widespread substitution of butter for olive oil.
French and English cooks began to replace olive oil with this milder-tasting fat, long a part of their indigenous cuisine, and to weed out Mediterranean influences in their cooking. As far south as Sicily, certain gastronomes and gourmands sang the praises of this wondrously sweet new condiment. In his influential cookbook Libro de Arte Coquinaria, written about 1450, Maestro Martino, court chef to the patriarch of Aquileia, instructs his readers to prepare maccaroni siciliani with fresh butter and spices rather than with oil. A contemporary play has a group of Venetian gentlemen sitting down to plates of maccaroni covered with vast quantities of cheese, cinnamon, sugar, and “so much butter that they swam in it.” Butter even worked its way into the dreams of the poor, like the family of sharecroppers in Modena who left their fields and moved across the Po River into Lombardy, “because there, it’s said, you get gnocchi with plenty of cheese, spices, and butter.” From the fifteenth century down through the nineteenth, the struggle between oil and butter was brought to life in European paintings, literature, and street dramas as the war between carnival and Lent, with butter marching into battle in full armor at the head of an army of animal fats and dairy products, as its archrival, olive oil, leads up a host of herrings, cabbage, bread, and other Lenten allies.
Still, most southern Europeans remained faithful to olive oil, not only because of their ancient devotion to Mediterranean fare but because butter struck many of them as unnatural, even dangerous. Nobles at the court of Mantua packed ample stores of oleum bonum for a journey to England, and the cardinal of Aragon, travelling in the Low Countries in 1517, brought along his personal cook and a generous supply of olive oil. “Due to the butter and dairy produce that is so widely used in Flanders and Germany,” he observed, “these countries are overrun with lepers.” If some chefs pushed butter, others championed oil: a new generation of cookbooks appeared in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, primarily in southern Italy, which proposed an exciting new multiethnic Mediterranean cuisine oozing with oil. The prominent humanist Bartolomeo Sacchi, better known as Platina, wrote De honesta voluptate et valetudine (“On Right Pleasure and Good Health”), a gastronomic treatise which provided some of the first detailed advice on the proper use of olive oil in Italian cuisine. Like modern-day Italian cooks, Platina recommended adding oil in abundance to fresh vegetables and legumes, and more sparingly with a range of fish dishes. The common folk, too, expected their daily dose; an English traveler in Tuscany remarked on the large quantities of olive oil consumed by the Tuscans, “the rich because they like to economize, the poor because they have no choice.” In Tuscany, even humble sailors got their fix: daily ratio
ns included 28 grams of olive oil, dipped from earthenware jars stowed in the hold. Similar jars carried oil to the New World with the first Spanish and Portuguese explorers, and have been found in shipwrecked galleons and caravels on the Florida and Carolina coasts.
The Renaissance saw olive oil used in a wide, sometimes bizarre new range of ways, which made the most of its chemical properties and spiritual resonances, and boosted olive oil consumption. During outbreaks of the witch craze, judges and papal inquisitors learned that witches routinely covered themselves with secret salves and unguents, often made with olive oil, which supposedly allowed them to raise storms, destroy crops, and fly off to the Sabbath on their broomsticks, as well as numbing their limbs so they wouldn’t shrink from Satan’s touch. In some areas the mere possession of oil, together with “ointments, hurtful powders, pots with vermin or human bones,” was sufficient to justify arrest for witchcraft. Though olive oil was considered beneficial in times of plague, unctores (“oilers”) were thought to use oily substances to spread the plague. Inquisitors themselves loosened the tongues of accused sorcerers with applications of boiling oil, and sometimes executed them with still more generous doses of the stuff. Exorcists drove demons from the bodies of the possessed using holy oils and consecrated olive branches, as they intoned, “I anoint you with this blessed oil, and through this anointing free you of all curse, incantation, binding spell, written magic and charm that has been worked on you by the diabolic arts.”
