After buying a small farm in Provence complete with 150 neglected olive trees, foreign correspondent Mort Rosenblum followed the fruit outward across the Mediterranean.

He wrote a book, which shaped into a study of how olives are grown, pressed, traded, cooked and mythologised across France, Italy, Spain, Greece, North Africa and beyond. Alongside a fair few recipes.

Its oil has lit homes, anointed bodies, carried religious meaning, sustained rural economies and attracted adulteration, protectionism and organised crime. He moves easily between ancient cultivation and modern production, village mills and industrial processing, recipes and trade politics. The book is generous, eccentric and alert to the way taste is produced by land, labour and inherited knowledge—not merely purchased in a handsome bottle. 

Absolute Press paperback, 1997. First UK edition. Light rubbing and shelfwear to covers; clean internally with a sound binding.