Is olive dish delicious? How to make olive dish delicious?

I believe many people have eaten olives, right? But those who have not eaten it will definitely ask if it tastes good? Let me introduce it to you below.

Basic introduction of olive vegetable

The production process of olive vegetable can be traced back to the Song and Ming Dynasties. After processing, it has the characteristics of "clear, fresh, refreshing, tender and smooth", which can be said to be a wonderful flower in the famous Chaozhou cuisine. Olive vegetable has a dark color, rich oil fragrance and tempting taste, making it a daily home dish for Chaoshan people.

Characteristics of olive dishes

When you pick up your chopsticks and taste it, your tongue and intestines will be fragrant, and when you chew it carefully, the fragrance will linger on your teeth and cheeks. It has a unique flavor of "the fragrance of horse hooves returning home from stepping on flowers"; it can stimulate the appetite, help digestion and increase appetite.

Olive Vegetable Folklore

Every summer, after a violent typhoon passes, there will always be olive flowers falling to the ground in the olive grove. Olive flowers are green olives that have not yet matured. At this time, it is still far from the picking season in autumn and winter. The olives are small, green, tender, and immature, and they taste sticky and astringent. There was a clever daughter-in-law who was reluctant to let the olive flowers rot in the field, so she picked up a basket and took it home to boil. Because in the old days, every household had a pickle jar, and there were always some pickle tails (leaves) piled on the top of the jar. The clever daughter-in-law took out the pickle scraps, washed and chopped them, and put them into the cast iron tripod (pot) to cook with the olive flowers. Her original intention was just to make use of the waste and save it for later consumption. Unexpectedly, a miracle really happened, and black olive vegetable was born.

Olive vegetable related development

From a technical perspective, the key to inventing black olive vegetable is to fry olive resin. However, the invention and application of this technology was mastered by the Nanyue people, the ancestors of Chaoshan people, at least in the Tang Dynasty. This is because olive is a fruit tree native to Nanyue. In addition to eating olives, the Nanyue people are also familiar with the cultivation technology of olive trees and can comprehensively utilize the various values ​​of olive trees. Liu Xun, a Tang Dynasty scholar, recorded this in his book "Lingbiao Luyi": "The branches of olive trees are all tall, and their seeds ripen in late autumn. Southerners value them and chew them raw. Although they taste bitter, their fragrance is better than that of chicken. There are wild ones with dense seeds on steep trees, which cannot be climbed by ladders. But if you carve a hole about an inch below the root and put salt in it, the seeds will fall off overnight. The branches and nodes produce a fat like peach gum. Southerners collect it, fry it with the bark and leaves, and mix it into black dough, which is called olive candy. It is used to fill the gaps in boats. After drying, it is as firm as glue and paint, and it becomes even stronger when exposed to water." It is mentioned here that the branches and nodes of olive trees secrete a kind of fat, which becomes a black dough-like substance after frying, so it is called olive candy. Olive resin is not only used as an adhesive for ships, but also can be used as a spice or medicinal material if it is of good quality. Zhou Qufei of the Song Dynasty mentioned a kind of "olive fragrance" in "Lingwai Daida", saying that it was made of "olive wood knots, shaped like black jelly, with a unique clear and strong taste, and better than Coptis chinensis and Liquidambar formosana".

The olive culture inherited by Chaoshan people from the Nanyue people is first manifested in their love for olives. Chewing olives is like drinking Kung Fu tea, and the taste is difficult to understand for those who are not experts in this field. When recording olives, local chronicles attach the most importance to quality. For example, the "Chenghai County Chronicles" of Jiaqing said that olives: "The small and pointed ones are beautiful, while the round and large ones are slightly inferior." The "Haiyang County Chronicles" of Guangxu said: "There are green and yellow varieties. The green ones are astringent, and only the yellow ones with pointed and three-edged ones are good." The three-edged olives mentioned here are originally produced in Lutang Township, Jinyu, Chaoyang. In 2005, there was a 500-year-old olive tree king, which had 158 kilograms of fruit and was auctioned for 527,000 yuan, setting an amazing transaction record.

Comprehensive Utilization of Olive Vegetables

Secondly, it is reflected in the comprehensive utilization of olive trees. Olive trees are tall and straight, and their wood is light and soft. Therefore, Zhang Dai said in "Night Sailing Boat": "This wood can be used to make boats, and everything it passes through will float." According to the most important feature of ancient shipbuilding, iron nails were not used. With olive trees, the wood and adhesives needed for shipbuilding could be solved, and sailing became a piece of cake. Therefore, not only the black olive dishes of Chaoshan people may be related to olive candy, but even the lifestyle of sailing may be related to olive candy. This may explain why the ancient Chaozhou Sea Merchants Association was so famous, and why the ancient waterway: "Wanli Shitang" started from Chaozhou and passed through the South China Sea Islands to reach foreign countries.