Olive vegetables are dark in color, rich in oil aroma, and delicious, making them a daily side dish for Chaoshan people. Famous.

The "Chenghai County Chronicle" of the Ming Dynasty contains: "Products and fruits include olives, and those that are small and pointed are better." "Vegetables include mustard greens, which can be salted."

Olives and salted mustard leaves (commonly known as sour pickle leaves) are carefully cooked to become black olive vegetables, which are appetizing, help digestion, and increase appetite.

The traditional production process of Chenghai olive vegetables is: clean the olives, soak and rinse them with water, and filter out the sour water; then select the salted pickles, chop them with a knife, and put the olives and mustard leaves Pour into the iron pot, add peanut oil and an appropriate amount of salt, cook over low heat until almost cooked, add chopped red pepper, garlic, a little sesame, peanut kernels and other accessories, mix well, and cook for another five minutes.

Olive vegetables are a side dish unique to the Chaoshan region. They are fried with the mellow taste of olives and the plump leaves of mustard greens. Its exquisite production technology can be traced back to the Song and Ming Dynasties. With the characteristics of "clear, fresh, refreshing, tender and smooth", it can be said to be a rare flower in the famous Chaozhou cuisine.

The olive vegetable production method is exquisite and requires eight processes: first, select green and plump fresh olives to remove their bitterness, and then stir-fry them repeatedly with mellow peanut oil and salt to extract the fragrant flavor and retain their preciousness. Add selected mustard leaves as the olive oil ingredient, and control the heat at different times. Stir slowly, and the olive juice and sesame oil gradually penetrate into it, making it gradually black and shiny. After being simmered for more than ten hours and seasoned with spices, the olives are smooth and refreshing. Taste it under the chopsticks, your tongue and intestines will be fragrant, chew it carefully, the fragrance will remain on your teeth and cheeks, and it has a unique flavor of "the fragrance of horseshoes returning home after stepping on flowers". Moreover, olive vegetables are rich in precious nutrients of olive oil and multiple vitamins, which can stimulate the spleen and promote digestion. It is a natural green and healthy food of Chaoshan pickles.

Olive vegetables are a well-known Chaoshan salty side dish. They are not only loved by Chaoshan people at home and abroad, but also praised by many outsiders after eating them. Not only that, black olives are also an important raw material for Chaozhou vegetables like preserved vegetables and pickles. Using it to fry rice or steam meat can produce an indescribable oily and delicious flavor. I have always been curious, why do young green olives turn into shiny black olives after being boiled with pickle leaves? And under what circumstances was such a black food with a unique flavor created?

There is such a folklore about the creation of black olive vegetables: every summer, after the raging typhoon blows, olive flowers will always fall to the ground in the olive grove. Olive flowers are immature green olives, which are still far away from the autumn and winter picking period. The olive fruits are small, green, fleshy and tender, and taste sticky and astringent. There was a clever daughter-in-law who was reluctant to let olive flowers rot in the field, so she picked up a basket and took it home to cook. Because in the old days, every household had a pickle urn, and there were always some pickle tails (leaves) piled on top of the urn. My wife took out these pickle scraps, washed them, chopped them, and put them into the cast iron tripod (pot). Boil it with olive flowers. Her original intention was just to use the waste and save it for later consumption. Unexpectedly, a miracle really happened, and black olive vegetables were born!

From a technical perspective, the key to creating black olive vegetables is roasting olive resin. However, the invention and application of this technology had been mastered by the Nanyue people, the ancestors of the Chaoshan people, in the Tang Dynasty at the latest. This is because olives are originally a fruit tree native to South Vietnam. In addition to being fond of eating olive fruits, South Vietnamese people are also familiar with olive tree planting techniques and can comprehensively utilize the various values ??of olive trees.

Liu Xun of the Tang Dynasty recorded this in "Lingbiao Luyi": "The olive branches are all tall, and their seeds ripen in late autumn. Southerners attach great importance to them and chew them raw. The taste is bitter and astringent. The fragrance is better than that of chicken. There are wild trees with many seeds, which cannot be stepped on the edge. But if you carve a few inches below the roots, put some salt in them. Over time, the seeds will fall off the branches like peach gum. People in the south pick it, fry it with its skin and leaves, and mix it into black glutinous rice, which is called olive sugar. After drying, it will become firmer with glue and water. "It is mentioned here that the branches of the olive tree will become stronger. The skin leaves secrete a kind of milk fat, which turns into a black glutinous substance after being roasted, so it is called olive sugar.

Olive resin is not only used as an adhesive for ships, but with good quality, it can also be used as a spice or medicinal material. Zhou Qufei of the Song Dynasty mentioned an "olive fragrance" in his "Lingwai Daida", saying that it was "composed of olive wood knots, shaped like black glue, with a unique meaning of being pure and strong, and tasted in Coptis chinensis" , above the liquidambar."

The olive culture inherited by the Chaoshan people from the South Vietnamese is first reflected in their hobby of olive fruits. Chewing olives is like drinking kung fu tea. The taste is difficult for non-believers to understand. When local chronicles record olives, the most important thing is quality. For example, Jiaqing's "Chenghai County Chronicle" said olives: "Those that are sharp and small are beautiful, while those that are round and large are less beautiful." Guangxu's "Haiyang County Chronicle" said: "Their There are green and yellow varieties. The green ones have a astringent taste, but the yellow and sharp ones with three edges are better. The three-edge olives mentioned here originate from Lutang Township in Chaoyang Jinyu. In 2005, a five-hundred-year-old king olive tree with 158 kilograms of fruit was auctioned for 527,000 yuan, setting an astonishing transaction record.

The second is the comprehensive utilization of olive trees. The olive tree is tall and tall, and the wood is light and soft. Therefore, Zhang Dai said in "Night Sailing Ship": "This wood can be used as a boat raft, and everything it passes will float." According to ancient times, the biggest feature of shipbuilding is that it does not require iron nails. With olive trees, the shipbuilding industry All the necessary wood and adhesives are available, and sailing becomes a piece of cake. Therefore, we say that not only Chaoshan people’s black olive vegetables may be related to olive sugar, but also their lifestyles such as sailing may be related to olive sugar. This may be able to answer why the ancient Chaozhou Maritime Chamber of Commerce was so famous, and why the ancient waterway: "Wanli Shitang" started from Chaozhou and passed through the South China Sea Islands to reach foreign countries.