[georgia]

Every child I know thinks canned black olives make perfectly splendid finger puppets.

I was well into adulthood before "real" olives became a staple of our diets and cookery. In our neighborhood, those canned black olives were exotic. And, to tell the truth, I still use them in one or two old recipes that I've made for years. Those dishes wouldn't taste the same with Kalamatas or Nicoise or Gaetas! (But those are "family" dishes, not "company".)

[Judy]

It's not just the canned black olives, Georgia. I have lovely memories of my 2 younger brothers sitting sucking the stuffing out of green stuffed olives and doing the same thing.

And my son did exactly the same thing when he was younger.
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[msue]

I'll never forget the night my father told me that monkeys make pimento-stuffed green olives. The first monkey pokes a hole in the olive, the second monkey stuffs in a pimento, and the last monkey pops it in his mouth to polish it!

I can't recall if that made them more delicious or not. We love olives now, but I can't look at a pimento-stuffed olive without thinking of the simian production line that made them possible.