For most of us in the city, the olive harvest is the last thread left.
In Béni Mellal, the family keeps a share of the grove. The eldest is the one who maintains it — he picks, or has it picked, and carries it to the mill. The oil comes back to the members of the family. Nobody buys anything. That is the whole system, and it has not changed.
The mill is the part I want you to picture: the olives are crushed under granite stones, slowly, the old way. No continuous industrial line, no centrifuge pushing through tonnes an hour. A stone mill is slow enough to keep the fruit alive in the oil — you can taste the difference the way you taste it in bread made by hand.
The oil that comes out is unfiltered, and it looks nothing like what a supermarket shelf has taught you to expect. Think of the distance between a clear bottled apple juice and the cloudy one pressed on a farm: there is no comparison. This is a paste before it is a liquid — dense, deep, a green that is almost fluorescent, because it was pressed the same day the olives were picked in the field across the road.
We bottle picholine marocaine only. It is a difficult olive: hard to grow, fragile, and it has been largely replaced, even in Morocco, by European varieties — dahbi, arbequine — that yield more and forgive more. The picholine does not forgive. What it gives, when it works, is the taste of the fruit itself: biting into a fresh olive, the green bitterness that stays in the mouth.
It is a seasonal oil, and that is not a slogan. The harvest happens once, the oil is what the harvest gives — it has nothing to do with the brands available twelve months a year. We blend across stages of maturity to hold that balance, and in 2012 we ran trials with fresh thyme and wild laurel, crushed straight into the olives.
Then the oil left Béni Mellal and arrived in Montréal.
It arrived in wine bottles. For the first years we filled the harvest into the bottles vineyards use, and Angelo Baggio took the crates into his cellar at Salute and filed them among the Italian wines he imported — which is where they belonged on a table, and nowhere near where they belonged on a shelf.
Mario Navarette Jr., at Madre, worked it differently: he served the oil as a paste, in a butter dish, and watched the room. Spread on bread, smoked over cedar — a nod to the thuya wood we work with — it stopped being a condiment.
From there it was on Laurier Street: Salute, Madre, La Chronique, Le Chien Fumant with Maxime, and others — then the fine grocers, the specialised shops, the ethnic counters. And then, for the first time, Moroccan quality in the big chains: Loblaws, IGA. For a few years it was the gift the Moroccan consulate gave for Throne Day.
It went further still. Maltodextrin, dusted over a salad — a powder that turns back into oil the moment it touches the tongue. And spherified olives, small pearls that burst in the mouth, by a Peruvian chef who took the idea as far as it goes. That is what this oil does to people who cook for a living: it makes them want to play with it.
It began as my share of the season, poured for people I knew. It is still that. An oil that, once it is in your mouth, does not leave.