Invasive autumn olives have a long, rewarding season. Ripening from late summer through fall, their small red drupes are tart, sweet, gelatinously juicy, and tannic, like an unlikely meeting of red currants with tomato and persimmon.
Photography by Marie Viljoen.
Autumn olives ripening in New York City. Introduced to the United States from East Asia in the early 19th century, Elaeagnus umbellata received a boost when it was widely planted in the mid 20th century to rehabilitate strip mines and to contain erosion beside highways.
Silver-stippled autumn olives are also called Japanese silverberry. Picking autumn olives does in fact help curb the small trees’ spread, although to be effective, you would have to be thorough.
In spring, autumn olive flowers are richly perfumed.
The fruits appear in late summer/early fall. Stuffed full of autumn olives, birds pass the seeds as they travel.
A bumper crop of autumn olives (2022). In the age of Monsanto and resistant superweeds, eating invasive plants has never seemed more virtuous.
Goumi, the fruit of Elaeagnus multiflora, is larger than the autumn olive.
A bowlful of autumn olives, about to be washed. But as their tannins recede, the drupes (each fruit has one elongated seed) become softer and a sweet edge begins to smooth the sour.
A foodmill separates the narrow seed from each fruit.
Like pulped and strained tomatoes, autumn olive juice separates. Their pale juice separates distinctively, and quickly, from the solids, after the ripe fruit has been put through a food mill.
Autumn olive relish with salt-cured egg yolks, cucumbers, and labneh.
Cooked down and seasoned with salt and ground coriander, the carmine pulp is an intense, easy condiment, spooned onto seared pork chops, smeared into the fixings for grilled cheese sandwiches, or added to the tidbits that make open face crackers bristle with lunchtime temptation.
Because of autumn olives’ high levels of lycopene, which is not water-soluble, freshly-milled pulp and juice will separate. I find that slow stirring while the jam is boiling helps the clearer juice cook off.
Autumn-Olive Jam