Page:A Practical Treatise on Olive Culture, Oil Making and Olive Pickling.djvu/63

 those regions have but little love for butter and entertain a very moderate esteem for the culinary art of northern people. Let him that has not traveled in those favored sections and tasted their delicious cooking throw me the first stone! I was born there; from my early infancy I was fed on that most excellent and nutritious kind of cooking; I have kept it up through most of my life and feel happy to transmit it to my children who like it as much as I do. How often we permit ourselves to enjoy an innocent and pleasant joke towards the guests who sit occasionally at our modest table. I order for instance an omelet cooked with oil in place of butter. I keep this from my guest; I watch his countenance; he tastes it; "by Jove!" exclaims he, "what a fine omelet!" and I reply with an insinuating smile: "Oil cooking my friend!"

It was to supply the place of good oil, whose production was beginning to fall behind the consumption that the use of butter was introduced and became more and more general as the adulterations of the oil became more and more frequent. It is thus that those sophistications gained many proselytes to the cause of butter; but let us produce a strictly pure olive oil in California, where we have to help us to it a most exceptional soil and climate, we will gain back many followers to the old cause, and, in view of the enormous demand we have to meet in the United States alone, which will keep increasing