Friendships Extended by an Olive Branch
As always in Italy, relationships, not email lists, form the connections between businesses, especially among small artisanal producers.  We visited Marta Lisi’s family olive tree farm on Saturday, and two days later she introduced us to her good friend Silvia Cavalli (pictured on the right). They met as part of their involvement with a professional olive growers association and are now fast friends, not competitors.
Silvia’s story sounds familiar to Americans; born into a family of prestigious lawyers, she learned the trade, but left after a few years to follow her passion to her grandfather’s farm. (Azienda Agricola Silvia Cavalli iContrada Calcara – 75016 Pomarico email: aziendaricolacavalli@virgillio.it ) She is hard at work building a new facility not only for storing and bottling the oil, but also for producing cheese in the spring. We took a quick tour and it became immediately clear that this was no backwoods operation. For starters, she is installing solar panels that will generate energy not only for her farm but enough to sell to the local power grid. Her farm rests high on the hillside in Basilicata with no water, but Silvia is using her solar energy to pump water up from the river in the valley below into two man-made lakes that step up the hillside to provide a water source.
Her olive trees are interesting in themselves. As part of an experiment, her grandfather grafted three types of olive branches onto the root stock: coratino, leccino, and frantoio.Â
Today, natural selection seems to be at work as one or another of the species has taken over the tree, but the resulting oil we tasted—although last year’s harvest—was robust, strong, and good, with the sharp green of the local coratino olive mellowed somewhat by the other two types.
Silvia, her mother, and a childhood friend fixed us lunch after the tour. We sat in the dining room where the family crest carved in relief on the stone chimney featured a horse (playing on the family name which means horse in Italian), and was dated 1865, a year in which my Texan ancestors were all busy dealing with our Civil War in one way or another.
We loved the simple, yet elegant, tasty meal. I loved my first go at a raw fennel bulb sliced thin, and each course that we tried showcased a different nuance of the flavor of the Cavalli oil. One of the recipes I will definitely be making at home: it is a fava bean paste made by soaking beans overnight, then boiling them for an hour or so in just enough water to cook the beans until they soften and disintegrate, I would have cooked the beans in tons of water and stock, then drained and mashed them, but it makes so much sense to cook them down in their own juice, intensifying that full bean taste.  A drizzle of Silvia’s oil, some sea salt, maybe a little bread and tomatoes, and you’re done – in a good way.
We finished the meal with local fried donuts called Pettole, dark and rich with fairy-like powdered sugar sprinkled on top. As we drove away, I was glad to have been with this circle of friends, this mix of olives grafted together, this intermingling of lives past, present, and future.