The New York Times, December 19, 1897, p. 24:
OLIVE OIL OF PROVENCE.
An Old French Mill Where Primitive Methods of Manufacture Still Prevail. USED FOR THREE CENTURIES Processes Followed in Getting the Oil from the Fruit as Practiced by the Provencals-- A Curious Little Town of Southern France.
VELAUX, France, Dec. 1.-- About the time that our friend Columbus was getting ideas into his head of another continent across the great water, aome one established a mill at this place for the extraction of oil from olives. In course of time that mill with all its original machinery and appurtenances, as well as another mill at Tortosa, in Spain, became the property of Mr. J. E. Blanc, who is, in the language of this part of the world, a "fabricant negoclant d'Huile d'Olive," or, as we should put it, a manufacturer of and dealer in olive oil.
Mr. Blanc is either Mister or Monsieur, as you like, as he has spent nearly twenty of the happiest years of his life in New York and other parts of America, and keeps an office at 43 Broad Street. When he learned that Mr. Pressly, the United States Consul at Marseilles, and I were desirous of seeing an olive oil mill in operation, he kindly invited us to come out here with him. Hence the dating of this letter from a little Provencal town that an American traveler would otherwise have been very unlikely to stumble upon.
It is not as easy for an American to gain admission to an olive oil mill as might be imagined. The manufacturers in general have an idea that Americans want to learn the secrets of the trade, though it is one of the simplest processes in the world; and that having learned them we will set out olive groves all along the Hudson and the Mississippi and some of our other creeks, and steal away their business.
Mr. Blanc, however, being more than half American, is a man of advanced ideas, and has no hesitation about letting his friends see his oil made and sit down with him and help eat it after it has dripped from the press.
A Quaint Bit of Provence.
Velaux is not one of the places that you find marked upon a map of the world with a large black dot. But on a map of this department of France, which is called Rouches-du-Rhone, or Mouths of the Rhone, it can be found five or six miles back from the shore of the Mediterranean, on a branch of the P.-L.-M. Railway that cuts across from Rognac to Aix.
About twenty-five miles west of Marseilles is a large bay with a very narrow entrance, an arm of the Mediterranean which the French Government is talking of utilizing for navy yards and naval repair station; and on the north shore of that bay is Rognac. From Rognac the branch train runs inland and soon enters the a large well-tilled valley, on the north side of which is a high hill crowned by a village and the remains of a castle, both of which look old enough to have been built by the Romans; and that is Velaux.
The train runs through the valley, and on alighting we had a mile to walk up hill, over a beautifully hard and smooth macadamized road, between stone walls that are still in good repair, though evidently as old in many cases as the crumbling castle. And this is Provence.
The old folks call it so still and cling to their own languaged, though other Frenchmen say is is only a dialect, and Government has taken away even the name and divided the old territory into departments. The old inhabitants, however, do not like this change; and not only do they still call themselves Provencals, but they dote upon one or two Provencal poets, who print their works in Provencal on one page and in French on the opposite; and they would see nothing either tempting or nourishing ina meal that was not prepared according to the rules of the Provencal notebook.
I have learned in a few days to hold a very high opinion of these old Provencal people. They are kind, amiable, obliging, industrious, religious; and they cook like angels.
Farms Without Houses.
We had hardly taken 100 steps in the big valley before I saw that there was something strange about it, but is was some time before I could make out what it was. Here were the familiar fields, just as we have them at home, some newly plowed, some in grass, many covered with olive and almond trees. Walls between the fields, some shade trees, good roads--it might have been a fertile valley America by shutting one eye to the ancient town on the hilltop, for all but the one indefinable thing.
And presently I discovered what it was--there were no houses among the farms. Here from my window on the hilltop I can count you every house in this valley that runs ten miles in one direction and two or three miles in the other. There is the station, with a little inn beside it, both modern. Then comes a great stone affair, with towers, that looks like an old castle, but is a winemaking concern. Then there is a small house at the turn of the road, unoccupied, and just at the foot of the hill are two or three comparatively modern dwellings, one of which is Mr. Blanc's summer residence. But those are all; here are 100 farms in sight and not a single farmhouse, and it is the want of them that gives the landscape its unfamiliar look.
"That is the survival of ancient customs," Mr. Blanc explains, when I ask about it. "In old times, the provinces were continually at war, and a farmer who lived in a detached farmhouse would have been an easy prey to the enemy. For their own protection and the safety of their stock they built their houses in a group, and so the villages were formed. They had further to go to work, to be sure, but in case of attack they had a better chance for defense. Now that there is no such danger the custom still survives, and throughout the south of France you always find the farmers living in the neighboring village."
The wine place with the towers we could admire only from the outside, as the olives and the breakfast were waiting. It was evidently built in such shape that it could be defended, but in more recent times a large residence has been added at one side. Across the road were large vineyards; and in the vintage season, I am told, you can go to the mill with a cask and buy the grape juice fresh from the press for 5 cents a quart. There need be no question about the purity, for you can stand there and see the grapes put in and catch the juice as it runs out. Later on, when the juice has turned into wine, it sells for 8 or 10 cents a quart. The common retail price of this ordinary table wine in Paris or Marseilles is 12 or 15 cents a quart.
In the Olive Mill.
When the top of the hill was reached the oil mill was one of the first buildings, just past the old church with a Virgin Mary on the front wall inclosed with a wire netting, presumably so that the boys cannot throw stones at her and break her. The basement of the mill, in which is the machinery, is on a level with the ground, with the warehouse above, and a dwelling adjoining. We were taken through the front door up a tile-paved stairway, first into the office and thence into one of the warerooms where olives and almonds are stored. Everything was of stone, as old and solid as one of the castles on the Rhine.
The busy New Yorkers who go to 43 Broad Street to buy this oil have little idea, I imagine, of the romantic place from which it comes. In this dark wareroom have been stored olives and almonds certainly for three centuries, perhaps for four. The floor is of tiles, the beams like trunks of great oak trees, the stone walls thick enough to stand an old-fashioned bombardment. Best of all, the machinery is exactly what has been in use here from the beginning, with the exception, I believe, of one iron screw press, which has a modern look. Making olive oil is precisely the same process now as it was in the earliest Biblical days.
Here in this wareroom are tons of almonds in sacks and tons of olives lying loose upon the clean floor in heaps. Above is another wareroom of the same size, also packed full. The olives come not only from the plantations belonging to the mill, but also from neighboring planters. When I pick up one of the olives and bite it I find that it is hard and extremely bitter--as unpleasant to the taste as a green persimmon. Then by asking questions I learn two things about olives: first, that those we buy in bottles and eat raw are treated with charcoal to destroy the acrid taste, and secondly, that the olive in its ripe state is not green, but purple like a plum. The olives of our American acquaintance are always green because they are picked before they ripen.
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