Seed Oils

The Pennsylvania Dutch have always used and valued olive oil, but costliness limited its use to those who could afford it. It is not unusual to find olive oil called for in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century recipes in which cost was no object. For the people in the country, however, the olive was an elusive berry. On the other hand, there was another trinity that supplied Dutch cooks with the cooking oils they needed. It was a trinity that consisted of safflower oil, rapeseed oil (the primary ingredient in modern canola oil), and sunflower oil.