How Clovis, New Mexico Made Our Cilantro Green Olive

People ask where the Cilantro Green Olive recipe comes from like they expect a marketing answer — a focus group, a test kitchen, a chef in a white coat with a clipboard.

The real answer is a green ceramic bowl on a porch in Clovis, New Mexico, sometime in the late seventies. My grandmother made it on Sunday afternoons because the olives were cheap, the cilantro was loud, and the heat from the day made everything taste sharper.

What goes in (the way she told it)

She never measured. The recipe, as she'd describe it, went like this:

"A handful of cilantro, un poquito más than you think. The good olives, the ones in the jar with the pimento, drained but not too drained. Some onion — chop it finer than you want to. A jalapeño if the kids aren't around, two if they are. Salt. Tomato if the tomato is good. If not, don't bother."

That's it. That's the recipe.

Why it travelled

It travelled with my dad when he left Clovis. It travelled to Zanesville, Ohio, when the family business started in 1986. It went into the rotation because customers kept asking what is that one — the green one, with the olives, that doesn't taste like anything else.

We never changed it. The jar is the porch.

The one thing we did add

We taste-tested the green olives. Different brands, different brines. We landed on the Spanish manzanilla because it has more bite. My grandmother would have called this fancy. She would have eaten it anyway.

The Cilantro Green Olive is one of our originals. One jar = roughly four porch afternoons.