October is the month for harvesting olives in Croatia. I thought about this recently when cooking in my Kerala kitchen as I opened a jar of imported olives, knowing in advance that they would never hold a candle to the  quality of artisanal food. When we lived in Paris one could buy olives by the kilo at the marché, with numerous varieties to choose from. But here in southern India I have to settle for rather industrial Spanish imports at the table and memories of unparalleled flavor in my mind.

In reality, there are two harvests—one for olives that will be cured, and one for olives that will be pressed for oil. On smaller islands the frenzy of activity is much more evident for the latter—perhaps because fewer people cure olives anymore. The island people found me to be quite the curiosity. Here I was, a newcomer, trying to do all the traditional things that most young people were attempting to abandon.

There was no commercial production or agriculture on Koločep, one of smaller of the 5 Elafiti Islands, that sit like an extended constellation from the city of Dubrovnik. All gardens and orchards are for personal use, but there are people who certainly had large amounts of land in one sort of production or another. Our very overgrown home garden was a small example—there were figs, pomegranates, mandarinas, plums, carobs and of course, olives—none of which have been pruned  for what looked like decades. Continue reading →