Passage II

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil by Tom Mueller (©2012 by Tom Mueller).

“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.

But which fat to choose—saturated or unsaturated? Animal fat or olive oil? By the late Middle Ages in Europe, 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, 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.

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 invasion came about 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 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.

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. 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.