OIL.

THE sorts of olives, as well as grapes, are very various about Montpelier: the names of some of them are as followeth :

1. Groosau, a large olive.

2. Pichulina, little.

3. Verdal, middle-sized.

These three sorts are good to eat, and the last also is good for oil, and a great bearer.

All these are little olives, and used only for oil: they plant them promiscuously in their olive-yards, and mingle the olives in making oil. That which they principally regard in the plants is, that they be of the sorts that are the best bearers, and if they have not enough of those, they plant others, and inoculate them. The slips will grow, but they commonly use off-sets from the roots.

Their time of planting is February, March, and April. Their olive-trees last to a great age; they say two hundred years. When the old stocks are faulty or decayed, they let up young off-sets from the roots round about, and when they are grown up to any con

siderable bigness, cut away the old stock close to the ground; and when the remaining young trees have not room to spread, because of their neighbourhood, they transplant them, till they leave at last but one standing.

They set their olive-trees ordinarily in quincunx, the rows at thirty or forty feet distance in their arable ground; for this hinders them not from ploughing and sowing corn in the same ground.

They dig about their olive-trees every year, and about the same time they dig their vineyards, and sometimes at others; and lay soil in the trenches they open about their roots; this is usually done in March, and the soil they use is horse dung.

In pruning their olive-trees, which they do about the beginning of March, I observed them to cut off the top branches; I suppose, to make them spread.

About the beginning of October they gather the olives, yet green, that they intend to pickle for eating (for about the end of October they turn black) and having carefully picked out those that have worms, they soak the sound ones, in the strongest ley they can get, four, six, or eight hours, according as they design to eat them sooner or later: the longer they soak in the ley, the more of their bitterness is taken away, but they will keep the less while. This ley they buy for this purpose at the soap-boilers. After they have been soaked in ley, they put them into water, which, for the three or four first days, they change two or three times a day, and afterwards once; in all a fortnight: this they do to take away the taste of the ley. The ley and water they use both cold. When this is done, they put them into pickle of salt and water, and so keep them.

I have been told, that cutting each olive in two or three places to the stone, and so soaking them in fair water seven or eight days, changing it every day, will take away their bitterness, and prepare them well enough for the pickle: but they count the ley the better way.

They often pickle them also after they are turned black, cutting them in two or three places to the stone,

and then soaking them about a fortnight in water changed every day, and then boiling them in salt and water, which is the pickle they keep them in. These have a much worse taste than the green, having no very pleasant mixture of bitter and oily: but the good housewives think they will go much farther (for they are oftener food than sauce there) and so in their private families are commonly used.

They count their olives ripe enough for oil about St. Catharine's day, the 25th of November; and about that time they begin to gather them: though I have seen them let them hang on the trees, and not gathered till the latter end of January.

In the gathering there will be leaves and branches mixed with them; to separate these they lay them down in a heap in a field, and a workman, taking up a few in a shovel, throws them into a winnowing sheet set up at a good distance from him, whither the olives come alone, the leaves and branches falling by the way.

The manner of making oil is this;

They take four septiés of olives a little heaped, and put them into a mill, which is drawn by a mule, where they grind them, as tanners grind bark, to a fine pulp, one standing by as the mill goes round, and shovelling in a little of the olives or pulp towards the centre, and clearing a part of the stone at the bottom, where he stands with a shovel, which he doth so by degrees and in succession, that I believe the mule goes round forty or fifty times for his once.

They being sufficiently ground, they put them into a stone trough, two whereof stand between the mill and the press; out of these troughs they take the pulp, and put it into frails, and spread it in them equally, so that they may lay them plain one upon another. Of these frails there were, when I saw them press, twenty-four upon each pedestal; viz. in all forty-eight; in which were contained ten septiés of olives. Sometimes they press twelve septiés of olives at once, and then they use more frails proportionably.

The frails being filled with pulp, and placed evenly and upright upon the two pedestals in equal number,

they set the press a-working, first lifting up the screw end, and so the other end of the beam, sinking upon the hinder pile of frails, and pressing them, may make way for the putting in the wedges into the great mortise, and discharge the wedge in the little mortise, which, whilst they were placing the frails upon the pedestals, supported the beam; which being taken out, they work the screw the other way, and so bringing down the screw end of the beam press both on the fore and hinder pile of frails; a man attending in the meantime at each pile of frails with a lever in his hand, which resting in the groove or gutter where the oil runs, he thrusts against the side of the pile of frails, whenever he perceives it begin to swell out on any side, and thus keeps it upright from leaning any way whilst it is pressing, especially at the beginning; another man in the meantime not ceasing to turn the screw till the great stone at the end of it be clear off from the ground.

When the oil ceases to run, or but in small quantity, they lift up the screw end of the beam, and then putting a wedge in the little mortise, bring down the screw end of the beam again, and so lift up the great end that pressed the frails, and so bringing the beam to a level (the whole weight whereof lies upon the wedge in the little mortise, which supports it in the middle) discharge it clear from the frails.

Then they take off all the frails, except the eight or ten lower, on each pedestal, and stirring the pulp in one of the frails taken off, replace it again upon those that remained still on the pedestal; and then one pours on it a bucket of scalding water; after which he stirs the pulp again, and lays it flat and equal as at first, and then stirs and puts on another frail as before, with a bucket of scalding water poured on it; and so they serve them all, till all the frails that were taken off are replaced on the two piles as at first; and then they set the press a-working again as long as any quantity will run; and then lifting up the beam again, take off all the frails, stir the pulp, and pour on fresh hot water upon every frail, a little bucket-full as at first, and then press as long as any thing will run, screwing the stone up clear from the

ground, and letting it hang so a good while. When not one jot more of liquor will be pressed from the frails, and they perfectly cease running, they let down the stone, and that pressing is done; and then one with a broad, but very shallow skimming-dish of brass, skims off the oil from the water, puts it into a brass vessel like a tumbler, but holding, as I guess, about three pints, and out of that pouring it into the vessels of the owners by a brass funnel.

When the oil is well skimmed off from the water, they pull out a stopple in the bottom of the cistern, and so let go the water, which runs into a great cistern called hell, which is locked up and out of sight; into this hell all the water that hath served in pressing the oil, runs, and is made so, that though it be always full of this water, yet the water alone runs out, and the oil that swims on top stays behind, by which means all the oil that escaped the skimming-dish is here caught: but this I suppose belongs to the master of the oil-press, for every body's water runs in here to the former oil and water.

N. B.

I. That the mill which grinds the olives is much after the same fashion with that which our tanners use to grind bark, only with some difference.

As, 1o, that in the centre of the oil-mill there stands up a round stone, very smooth and true wrought, about two feet English in diameter, and about the same height, which the inside of the great grinding stone touches in its going round about it, so that no olives can escape the great stone towards the centre, nor get beside it that way.

2°. That the floor of the mill, upon which the great turning stone bears in its turning round, is also of hard stone and smooth, and a little shelving, the declivity being towards the centre; to answer which, the edge of the turning stone which is to grind the olives, that it may bear in its whole breadth upon the stones in the floor, is not cut with a direct perpendicular to the sides, but the line of the inside of the said grinding stone, and of the edge or circumference, make an angle something