Of Ritual and Change

Changing the olive brine has become a Wednesday Night Ritual. That’s a good thing because there are no other Wednesday Night Rituals. It goes like this. I carry the four jars from their incubational space in the guest room to the kitchen counter. I fill up the electric kettle and flick it on. Then I prepare a large glass bowl with cold water, a holding pen for the olives as the jars are thoroughly washed and refilled. (Ben warned that if you leave the olives out of water for too long, they may become discolored. I didn’t test it.)

There is a precise science to replacing the brine. First, I dump in four tablespoons of salt and add a couple of inches of boiling water -- not more. Then, with the lid closed, I shake the jar to dissolve the salt. If I add too much water, the jar becomes too hot to handle. (Also, if I’m not careful, I sometimes get a mist of boiling water in my face during the shaking part.) Then I dump in the rinsed olives, and finally top off the glass with more boiling water. If errant olives float up and risk being exposed to air, I add a plastic bag weighted down with water. And then it’s on to the next jar.

It sounds so simple, and it is, but there was a great deal of trial and error to perfect the process. The first time I opened the jars I discovered a layer of white scum floating on the surface. Mold, apparently because the top olives were not fully submerged. (Don’t let this put you off of sampling my olives; the white scum easily rinsed off and there appeared to be no lasting damage.) And, I confess, the first week I did not know, or did not remember, to add salt. And so the olives sat for the first seven days in brine consisting entirely of boiling water. The implications of this error remain to be seen.

White scum

Like a familiar person spotted out of context, my olives look different in their submerged state. Larger, greener. More perfect, less blemished. Perhaps the glass magnifies them somewhat. Or perhaps the liquid does cause them to swell. Or maybe both. But when the olives emerge from their glass houses for the Wednesday Night Ritual, they, Cinderella-like, seem to revert temporarily to their former, more familiar, less polished, selves.

And that’s not the only change that the olives have undergone in their new incarnation. Within days, many of the deep-purple/black olives largely shed their dark hue, looking like younger, greener versions of themselves. The phenomenon was deeply intriguing. Imagine if I, like the olives, emerged from a salt bath not merely cleansed and in superior health, but actually as a younger and greener version of myself. Restoration or regression?