Buying a bottle of olive oil can be like buying a bottle of wine, says Nancy Harmon Jenkins, author of “Virgin Territory: Exploring the World of Olive Oil.” Jenkins is one of the chefs at this year’s Tucson Festival of Books — she’ll be here with her daughter and sometimes co-author, Sara Jenkins.
The bottles are filled with “essentially the same except olive oil doesn’t get better with age,” Jenkins says. “Good olive oil isn’t going to be cheap. Look at the label, and if it doesn’t say where and when it was produced, including the year, don’t expect it to be as good an olive oil of the same quality as say, a bottle of Château Mouton Rothschild.”
The 78-year-old has spent more than 50 years exploring Mediterranean cuisines and discovering olive oils from around the world.
You’ve lived around the world.
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I grew up in Camden, born and raised on the coast of Maine. I couldn’t wait to shake the dust of Camden from my heels, so at 15 I left for school and ended up in New York after college. I met my husband, Loren Jenkins, an unemployed graduate student who ended up taking a job with an international wire service. We lived all over the world, including London, Madrid, Paris, Beirut, Hong Kong and Rome.
Around 1986, we returned to the states and decided to go our separate ways. In 1992 I had a strange accident, a fall, and I decided I’d be more comfortable back in Maine. Until recently that’s where I’ve been living six months out of the year, and the other six months in Tuscany, but I’ve cut back on that.
Why Mediterranean cuisine?
I love the whole Mediterranean region. The food is so interesting, the spices are so interesting. The attitude towards food, and the table and dining and being together — it’s all very interesting.
We were just in Turkey and Istanbul — it’s an intriguing city — and now I’m consumed with trying new spices in my cooking.
Tell me about the Mediterranean diet.
It actually means something very specific to the region. In general, Mediterranean cuisines rely on three main ingredients: wheat, grape vines and olive oil. From there, it becomes more general. Spain and Greece are the largest users of olive oil. Spain adds rice as a strong foundation. South of France, you find eggplants, tomatoes, vegetables.
Italians can’t talk about Mediterranean cuisine without pasta. In North Africa, where there is a stronger Islamic presence, it’s more lamb, goat meat but no pork; couscous is introduced.
How did your interest turn to olive oils?
I learned to love olive oil while living in Beirut. I had lived in Spain twice under Francisco Franco’s dictatorship and there were very tight controls on pricing for everything. That meant there was no premium for making really good olive oil, so most of it was pretty rancid but used everywhere.
Then I go to Lebanon and taste fresh olive oil and my eyes and my palate just opened up.
There have been questions in the news lately about the purity of olive oil.
There’s fraud in nearly all food, including the United States. All you have to do is read the labels in the grocery store to see what is being put in our food.
I also get tired of being told that there’s no such thing as Italian olive oil, it’s all Spanish.
There are many small Italian olive oils, but they cannot be produced for $10 to $15 a bottle. Educate yourself about what good olive oil should taste like, and read the label.
