The Inquiry of Oils Well that Ends Well

Dear Tamar:

Which olive oil for what?

-Oils Well that Ends Well

Dear Oils Well that Ends Well,

Strangest (to me) fat I ever ate: yak, in tea and also maybe on a flatbread, somewhere close to Donggualin after hiking the Tiger Leaping Gorge in northern Yunnan, China. Or water buffalo, in a potent, spicy Jeow Bong, purchased in Laos and eaten, scrape by scrape, with hot sticky rice I carried around my neck in a basket.

That was in adulthood, though. As a child, my first bite of pork fat was strangest. I grew up kosher. I ate a little square of roasted fat off a pork chop and looked expectantly at the sky, trying to spot the lightning rod by which I’d be imminently slain. (I wasn’t.)

I had two noteworthy experiences with fats when I was twenty-two, living in Washington, DC. One was getting home from work at the American Friends Service Committee to find my roommate, Tim, eating olive oil from a bowl with a spoon. He’d read that it was good for you and reasoned that more was better. The second was a salad made by another roommate, a Latvian man named Sasha. I don’t remember the vegetables in the salad, but the dressing, which was one of the most delicious things I’d ever tasted, was just salt and Latvian sunflower oil.

I’ve had other fatty revelations, some annoyingly predictable—the pepperiness of dark green oil just pressed from Leccino olives harvested by hand at my friend Nancy Harmon Jenkins’s Tuscan farm; the rich sweetness of fresh walnut oil. Between the stranger (to me) experiences and the predictable ones, I’ve concluded that there is a second and less figurative meaning to the biblical promise of “the fat of the land.”

Cooking fats are not the shelf-stable global commodity we pretend. Fats are, rather, volatile, susceptible to oxidation and rancidity—the kinds of change colloquially known as going bad. Even saturated animal fats, like the yak and buffalo and pig of my early culinary experimentation, go rancid. Plant fats go bad even more quickly. Contrary to most current recommendations for avoiding spoilage, which focus on storage, my advice is to seek out the literal fat of your literal region—by which I mean the culinary fat that is grown and pressed or rendered closest to where you live.

Unless you live in a Mediterranean climate, the olive oils you ask me to assign to various cooking tasks are better traveled and older than me. Unless you’re in northern China or Laos, yak or buffalo fat would be, too. Beyond tasting bad (sort of like paint) rancid oils are bad for you—in predictable ways, like cancer and blocked arteries. I won’t answer the question: Which olive oil for what? I will answer: Which fat? And my answer will be biblical: Of the land, whenever possible. It will be fresher and taste better and be better for you and your cooking and the the land whose fat it is.

I live in the Hudson Valley. I use sunflower oil from Ancram, grown and pressed by Stuart Farr of Hudson Valley Hops & Grains for vinaigrettes and drizzling over cooked vegetables and adding to bean broth and making mayonnaise. (I buy it at the Hudson Farmers’ Market. It’s also sold at the Chaseholm Farm Store.) There are several delicious butters made locally from cows milked nearby. I love Kriemhild (so expensive it’s hard to look), and Ploughgate (better), and Vermont Creamery (economical by comparison.) For deep frying I use a high-heat oil, but I don’t deep fry that often, so I buy it in small quantities. For other high heat cooking, like roasting and sautéing, I use olive oil from California. Every now and again, I buy a good Italian olive oil from Gustiamo, an importer that I trust to minimize the time from bottling to shipping and be maternally protective of any bottle or tin in its stewardship. I’m most likely to make such an improvident purchase in the middle of winter, when there are so few vegetables, the idea of toasted bread drizzled in flavorful oil is a delight, or at the start of summer, when I anoint the first tomatoes and the first green beans with it.

Dear cook, as we near the fattest time of year, with the highest temperatures, the longest days, the starriest nights, find and use the fat of the land closest to you. As you sagely write: “Oil’s well that ends well.” And you may, depending on your location and your proclivities, find yourself adding another adage to the first, saying, to your own surprise: “Well, Oil be damned!”