foods and nations is a new series from Reaktion that explores the history – and geography – of food. Books in the series reveal the hidden history behind the food eaten today in different countries and regions of the world, telling the story of how food production and consumption developed, and how they were influenced by the culinary practices of other places and peoples. Each book in the Foods and Nations series offers fascinating insights into the distinct flavours of a country and its culture. Already published Al Dente: A History of Food in Italy Fabio Parasecoli Beyond Bratwurst: A History of Food in Germany Ursula Heinzelmann Feasts and Fasts: A History of Food in India Colleen Taylor Sen Gifts of the Gods: A History of Food in Greece Andrew and Rachel Dalby Rice and Baguette: A History of Food in Vietnam Vu Hong Lien A Rich and Fertile Land: A History of Food in America Bruce Kraig Gifts of the Gods A Hisory of Food in Greece Andrew and Rachel Dalby reaktion books To Maureen and Kosta Published by Reaktion Books Ltd Unit 32, Waterside 44–48 Wharf Road London n1 7ux, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2017 Copyright © Andrew and Rachel Dalby 2017 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers Printed and bound A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library isbn 978 1 78023 854 8 contents Prologue 7 one Origins 12 two Classical Feasts: The First Gastronomy 44 three Roman and Byzantine Tastes 75 four An Empire Reborn 106 five A Culinary Geography, Part i: Beyond Greece 136 six A Culinary Geography, Part ii: Within Greece 163 seven Food of Recent Greece 211 epilogue: Conviviality 262 References 272 Bibliography 289 Acknowledgements 292 Photo Acknowledgements 293 Index 296 Seven Food of Recent Greece T he physical geography of Greece has changed in the last 17,000 years. The waters have advanced. The Aegean is a sea of many small islands, not of a few big ones. The islands, in common with mainland hill and mountain slopes, are not forested as they once were. The drier Greece becomes, the less likely it is that the forests will regenerate. Many other changes to the landscape, like the deforestation, have happened under human control – if control is the word to use. Terraces cover hillsides, sometimes to a great height: perhaps intensely cultivated, perhaps abandoned, but what is abandoned may be brought into use again, as is happening now on Naxos, for example. Olives and wild vines once took a modest share of the sunlight. Olives now almost define Greek landscapes. Like the terraces on which many of them grow, some olive trees are carefully tended, some forgotten, but many of the forgotten ones live on and can be reclaimed. Vines, in their weedy way, take over landscapes too, ground-trained as many are, sprawling across rock-strewn fields. Lush orchards, dark green with citrus leaves, occupy irrigated lower slopes and valley bottoms. The detritus of human activity spreads far wider than it should. It’s not just buildings in use, but buildings that won’t ever be finished and buildings that have had their day; empty buildings carpeted in concrete, unlike older ruins, where fig trees and caper bushes can flourish within the walls. It’s also roads that are needed and roads that aren’t needed and roads whose construction destroyed far more of the living landscape than was necessary; it’s rubbish dumps and rubbish that didn’t ever reach a dump. 211 gifts of the gods Cookbooks and Cooks The Aegean island of Syros, though neutral in the revolutionary struggle, was serving as a refuge for revolutionaries, an embryonic national capital, at the moment when Greece’s first cookbook was published there in 1828. The anonymous author’s stated aim was to bring Italian cookery to Greeks, but by ‘Italian’ Western is meant: of the eight sweets two are English, breadand-butter pudding and rice pudding. The next Greek cookbook dates from 1863 and is also largely foreign in inspiration. Compiled by Nikolaos Sarantis and published in Constantinople, the overt aim of Syngramma Magirikis (Manual of Cookery) was to describe French cuisine to a bourgeois readership of Greeks of the city, whose traditional cooking was, to our tastes, considerably more interesting. And yet, in a strange gesture to Greek independence (a gesture that in Constantinople was surely subversive), Sarantis named three dishes after revolutionary naval commanders, Miaoulis from Euboia, Sachtouris from Hydra and Kanaris from Psara.1 The last of these had wreaked revenge on the Ottoman navy for the 1822 Chios massacre, had afterwards served as Greek prime minister and was still an active politician when Sarantis’s book was published. The next in the series of Greek cookbooks is the Odigos Magirikis (Guide to Cookery) of the celebrated Nikolaos Tselementes, Siphnian by parentage, born in Athens in 1878. Tselementes trained as a cook in Vienna. Convinced that Greek food must drop all eastern influences, he steered his readers towards the sweetness and spicelessness of Central-to-Western Europe. ‘This culinary traitor exiled olive oil and garlic, banished traditional Greek herbs and spices, ushered in butter, cream and flour,’ Jonathan Reynolds wrote trenchantly in 2004, but in Tselementes’s own time ‘uppermiddle-class Greeks, not unlike Chekhov’s Russians, clamored for this new sophistication, and the resulting bland, bloated, blubbery cuisine spread through a country yearning to be more European.’2 The cookbook sold in successive editions to a whole generation of new and aspiring housewives, and it spread across the world in translation. As Aglaia Kremezi points out, those few of Tselementes’s recipes that are most authentically Greek come from his Siphnian heritage, including skaltsounia, honey-andcheese pastries. But his everlasting memorial is moussaka (see recipe on pages 214–15), a dish with a complex history. Its name is ‘the Arabic word musaqqā, which means “moistened”,’ the Arabist Charles Perry explains, ‘referring to the tomato juices.’ In the Middle East it is a cold dish of fried aubergines dressed with a rich tomato sauce, the kind of thing that Greeks would call pseudo-moussaka and reserve for fast days. In Turkey it became 212 food of recent greece a casserole of sliced aubergine and meat; so it would have been in Greece, too, if Tselementes had not added the béchamel topping.3 Modern Writers and Chefs Artemis Leontis in Culture and Customs of Greece spins Tselementes positively as one of the ‘forces pushing towards the definition of a national Greek cuisine’. He ‘removed improvised variations and exotic flavors’; he ‘“upgraded” recipes by adding French culinary techniques to create a reproducible set of recipes’. But those scare quotes are a sting in the tail. Rather late in the day, from the 1980s onwards, Leontis continues, Greeks became aware of the contribution that the Asia Minor refugees had made ‘with some of the exotic “Turkish” spices that Tselementes had sought to expunge’, and perhaps through this recognition began to value their own local food traditions, which they had gone some way towards forgetting. At the same time the new food experts began to attain celebrity. ‘Their ethnographic approach to cooking has expanded Greeks’ imaginative grasp of what they can do with basic, seasonally fresh ingredients, time-tested techniques, and their own creative engagement’, thus at last undoing most of Tselementes’s work.4 In restaurants in Greece now the food will be better and fresher than it would be in most countries to the north and west – Greek restaurateurs are beginning to be proud of the fact – and the dishes will often betray their regional origins even in Athens, perhaps especially in Athens, because, as James Pettifer writes, ‘Athens is a city of strangers . . . Greek loyalty is ultimately to the birthplace, even if this is an inhospitable rocky island in the Aegean or a poverty-stricken mountain village in Thessaly.’ These links are if anything stronger, he continues, because during the repeated privations and famines that modern Athens has suffered, with malnutrition and deaths from starvation during both world wars, those who still had connections with the countryside and perhaps retained land where food could be grown were somewhat luckier.5 No wonder some abandoned terraces are now being farmed once again. Athens may be the publishing and broadcasting metropolis and perennially a magnet for writers and celebrities. But the would-be successors of Tselementes, the food writers and personalities of today, would be much poorer if they lacked connections with the regions, the diaspora and the world beyond. Two restaurant chefs, out of many, to begin the examples. Rightly and appropriately, Lefteris Lazarou prides himself on his seafood cookery, 213 Chrisoula’s Moussaka 5 medium or large aubergines salt, olive oil For the filling: 150 ml olive oil 1 large onion, chopped ½ kg minced beef ½ kg minced fatty pork 150 ml dry red wine 1 tbsp tomato purée, or 1 kg fresh blended fresh tomatoes 1 generous tsp ground cinnamon no more than ¼ nutmeg, freshly grated 1 coarsely grated carrot (optional, but it complements the tomatoes’ acidity) 55 g grated cheese – kefalotyri, mature Cheddar or Gruyère salt and pepper For the béchamel: 1½ litres full-fat milk 140 g plain flour 50 g coarsely grated cheese – kefalotyri or mature Cheddar 1 generous tbsp unsalted butter ¼ nutmeg, freshly grated 3 eggs, lightly beaten For the finished dish: a little butter grated cheese fine breadcrumbs First prepare the aubergines: top and tail and slice lengthwise into 1 cm strips. Place in a colander and sprinkle with salt (which will eventually be washed away). Leave to drain overnight, pressed down with a saucer. Dry the aubergines with kitchen paper. Then either fry in hot olive oil and drain, or (as Chrisoula does) lay out on aluminium foil, brush with oil and bake in a scorching hot oven. Turn once; remove when cooked through but still firm enough to hold their shape. Leave the aubergines aside while preparing the meat filling (at this stage they can be left to cool, wrapped well, and frozen, for making moussaka in the winter, when there are no tasty fresh aubergines). For the meat, heat the oil in a large saucepan and fry the onion for a few minutes over a medium heat to soften but not colour. Add the mince and lightly brown before pouring in the red wine and leaving to bubble for 5 minutes. In summer, if you have flavourful tomatoes, blend a kilo of ripe but firm fruits, drain briefly and add to the mince. In winter, substitute with 1 tbsp of good-quality tomato purée and 335–450 ml water to make up for the missing juice. Either way, leave to simmer for 5 more minutes, sprinkle in the cinnamon and grate over the nutmeg. Add pepper and cook together, breathing in the aromas. At this point grate the carrot into the mix. Leave to simmer over a low to medium heat for 30–45 minutes. The sauce should be slightly undercooked, as it will bake further in the oven, but it should not be so wet as to make a sloppy dish. (This same basic sauce can be cooked longer and served with spaghetti as a typical Greek ragu or as the filling of pastitsio.) Add a mean amount of salt towards the end of the cooking: Chrisoula advises that the meat will ‘seize’ or toughen if salted too early. When ready, remove the pan from the heat and stir in the grated cheese, which will increase the salt but also add depth to the taste. The béchamel can be prepared while the meat simmers. In a large pan, begin to heat the milk over a medium heat. Add the flour, cheese, butter, nutmeg, a good seasoning of pepper and some salt. Leave this to cook, whisking only occasionally, while the mince bubbles. It will eventually begin to thicken: remove from the heat when it has the consistency of thick double cream. Let the sauce cool for a few minutes before whisking in the eggs (which ‘fix’ the béchamel, making it easier to cut neat slices next day). Now assemble the dish. Lightly butter a 40 cm diameter round dish – or large rectangular baking dish – and put a layer of aubergines in the bottom. Sprinkle over a small handful of cheese, then spoon a thin covering of mince over that. Repeat the layers once or twice more until all the ingredients are used up. If the meat filling is rather wet – in the summer, with fresh tomatoes, it may be – sprinkle a small handful of fine breadcrumbs over each meat layer to soak up the excess liquid. Some tavernas add more breadcrumbs as a cheap meat substitute; the practice has a firm basis in tradition, especially on the islands where meat (even for a festival dish) was scarce. Finish the moussaka by spooning over the bechamel sauce: if poured it could spoil the careful composition underneath. Add another handful of grated cheese and fine breadcrumbs. Bake the majestic dish for 1 hour or so at 200°C. It will emerge blistered and coloured in places and will smell amazing. In an ideal Greek world, leave to cool to a warm room temperature before serving – or, better, until the next day. Serve with a plain chopped green salad of lettuce and rocket and some chunks of kefalotyri or mature Cheddar, and bread. Chrisoula’s moussaka. food of recent greece praising the special qualities of Aegean salt, which gives local fish an incomparable flavour. He trained as a ship’s cook, like his father. After 22 years in that trade he decided to open a restaurant ‘that didn’t move’. Founder of Varoulko in his native Piraeus, he has been a judge on the Greek version of Masterchef and a guest of the Culinary Institute of America. He claims the first Michelin star awarded for Greek cuisine. Christoforos Peskias belongs to the oldest Greek diaspora, that of Cyprus. He studied in Boston, worked as a chef in Kephisia near Athens, trained in Chicago and finally returned to Athens to found the restaurant that (for want of a better name) he calls πbox. ‘We eat what we are,’ he says philosophically, and claims to work with the classics of Greek cookery, deconstructed.6 Ilias Mamalakis, not a restaurant chef (though he has been a restaurant consultant), is a native of Athens. Author and radio and tv personality, game-show host, judge on the Greek Masterchef, he is a cheese-lover, a Slow Foodie and – no mean achievement – a French gastronomic academician. Vefa Alexiadou, doyenne of all these celebrities and described in a British newspaper as ‘Greece’s answer to Delia Smith’, born at Volo in Thessaly, reached classic status with a tv series in the form of a recipe competition that gathered thousands of traditional dishes from all over the country: ‘Some would even send me the original manuscript in their grandmother’s handwriting.’7 Vefa’s daughter Alexia, born in Thessaloniki, chef and culinary writer in her own right and editor of the cookery section of the daily newspaper Ta Nea, died suddenly in 2014. Another major figure is Stelios Parliaros. He has diaspora heritage, having been born in Constantinople. He trained in Paris and Lyon as a confectioner and it is for his sweets, ‘sweet alchemy’ as he likes to call them, that he is best known as author of recipe books, as teacher, and as journalist on the vanished daily Eleftherotypia and on Kathimerini. This leads us to other writers and journalists. Diane Kochilas, tv cook in Greece and consultant chef in the United States, comes from an Ikarian family, was born in New York, but now lives and teaches cookery on Ikaria. Aglaia Kremezi studied in London, wrote for the Sunday edition of Eleftherotypia, and now lives and teaches cookery on Kea. The food historian Mariana Kavroulaki, whose links are with Crete, edits the cookery section of To Vima and runs symposia on Greek gastronomy. Linda Makris and Diana Farr Louis are Americans who married Greeks and Greece: Makris wrote for the English edition of Kathimerini, while Louis wrote for Athens News, another lost newspaper, and is co-author of the cleverly titled Prospero’s Kitchen, on Ionian island cooking. 217 gifts of the gods Making a Meal After all, Greece has been the target for travellers for a long time. Ancient Romans came to Athens to study philosophy and rhetoric and perfect their Greek. Medieval backpackers like St Willibald, and economy-class pilgrims like Symon Semeonis, toiled along Greek roads or landed at Greek harbours on their way to the Holy Land. Crusaders came this way and some of them outstayed their welcome. Antiquarians like Cyriac of Ancona hunted for ruins and inscriptions; naturalists like Pierre Belon found long-forgotten plant species. All of them had something to say about the food, both good and bad. Greek food shows extreme geographical variation – it must, because of Greece’s uniquely varied geography – but historically there has been surprising continuity in the foods that people eat, the ways they prepare them and how they go about enjoying them. We have surveyed the prehistoric Greek foods for which archaeologists could find evidence: fruit, vegetables and herbs by way of the seeds; fish from the bones (though these are too easy to miss and were rarely found in older excavations); shellfish from the shells; meat from animal bones; bread and cheese and wine and olive oil to the extent that evidence of their making can still be recognized. For classical Greece we had the evidence of the texts that people wrote about what they ate. When they were speaking generally there was a tendency to mention bread and wine and olive oil, meat and fish – the meat because feasts centred on it, the fish because money was spent on it, bread and wine because they were always there, olive oil because it was so useful and so valuable. We may have suspected that meat is more prominent in the evidence, both prehistoric and classical, than it was in real everyday life: occasional pieces of evidence focusing on the lifestyle of poorer people directed our attention to fruit, vegetables, bread and perhaps cheese. Bread and wine and olive oil as necessities, vegetables and fruit and cheese as their usual companions, fish when possible, meat much more rarely: this, not so very different after all from what the classical sources say, is what recent travellers to Greece have learned all over again. ‘Wine and bread appeared to be the staple food of the people,’ wrote Isabel Armstrong in 1893 in her memoir Two Roving Englishwomen in Greece. She and her companion travelled on the mainland and therefore saw little of fish, but meat of almost any kind, they found, would have to be ordered in advance, ‘and the traveller does not generally stay long enough in a place to benefit from the execution of a lamb’. Eggs she noted as an occasional luxury; coffee too, something they might have had more readily had they been 218 food of recent greece men and therefore welcomed at kafenia. But what kinds of meat? ‘Until we went to Thessaly I do not remember seeing a cow in Greece, but there were sheep and goats in abundance, and so milk and cheese could be had: butter was an extravagance that we only tasted in Patras, Athens and Volo.’8 Greece at the time when these Englishwomen roved did not extend north of Thessaly. Macedonia and Thrace were solid Ottoman provinces, and a ten-year-old boy who would eventually be called Atatürk was growing up in Thessaloniki. In that northern region, mostly annexed by Greece in 1913, meat – beef in particular – was a much more regular part of the diet. So was butter, largely replacing the olive oil that is an everyday necessity in southern Greece. And it is no surprise that the pies made with filo pastry, which are so familiar all over Greece, are at their best and most varied in the north. There, too, pies are more meat-filled than anywhere else – because even where farmers keep large herds and flocks, meat cannot in reason be cheap, and pastry makes minced meat go a long way. Whatever they might find when they reached their evening resting place, travellers in Greece of the recent past had no expectation of a meaty midday meal. The Irish painter Edward Dodwell, who was in Greece around 1805, was advised to carry food with him because if he stopped at villages to look at ruins and inscriptions he would find nothing to eat but bread and cheese. His party therefore took along coffee, tea, sugar, raisins, figs, olives, caviar and halva; for those who can’t afford or don’t care to carry caviar on a long hike he recommends botargo, itself by no means cheap, but probably easier to find in northwestern Greece. The olive he rightly describes as ‘an excellent food and a good substitute for meat’; the same might be said of caviar and botargo. He considered halva (he calls it kalbaz) a substitute for butter, which is one way of looking at it. Dodwell had a feeling that readers would ask why cheese was not included among his supplies. ‘The cheese’, he excuses himself, ‘is made of goat’s or sheep’s milk, and being extremely salt, is not suited to our palates.’ He also had a problem with Greek wine, ‘frequently so resinous and pungent that as a substitute we were obliged to take raki, a strong spirit extracted from the stalks of vines taken from the wine presses,’ and that is certainly a good reason for drinking raki.9 Expecting to find bread on his way, Dodwell carried none. Leake, having no food at all with him, asked in a village in Lakonia for the makings of a lunch and was supplied with eggs, wine and wheat bread; his Greek guide, though, had to make do with ‘cold bean porridge of yesterday, which, being a solid mass, is sliced and eaten with salt and vinegar’.10 But what if there is no village? Pierre Belon, on his visit to Mount 219 gifts of the gods Dodwell’s Meal at Salona Edward Dodwell, travelling in northwestern Greece, was invited to a meal by the bishop of Salona (ancient Amphissa) in 1805. He describes the scene fully in his Classical and Topographical Tour in Greece (1819) and illustrates it in Views in Greece (London, 1821). This may be the first time the text and illustration have been printed side by side: Nothing could be more miserable! He lives with all the simplicity of the primitive Christians; there was nothing to eat, except rice and bad cheese; the wine was execrable, and so impregnated with rosin, that it almost took the skin from our lips! An opportunity however was now offered us of seeing the interior of a Greek house, and of observing some of the customs of the country. Before sitting down to dinner, as well as afterwards, we had to perform the ceremony of the cheironiptron, or washing of the hands: a tin bason is brought round to all the company, the servant holding it on his left arm, while with the other hand, he pours water from a tin vessel on the hands of the washer, having a towel thrown over his shoulder, to dry them with. We dined at a round table of copper tinned, supported on one leg or column. We sat on cushions placed on the floor; and our dress not being so conveniently large as that of the Greeks, we found the greatest difficulty in tucking our legs under us, or rather sitting upon them, as they do with perfect ease and pliability. Several times I was very near falling back, and overturning the episcopal table, with all its good things. The Bishop insisted upon my Greek servant sitting at table with us; and on my observing that Athos around 1550, was guided by a young monk from one monastery to the next. In crossing the mountain on one occasion they missed the path. They had brought no food with them and it was eventually too late to reach their destination that evening, but they came to a rivulet teeming with freshwater crabs. Their guide ‘ate them raw and assured us they were better raw than 220 food of recent greece it was contrary to our customs, he answered, that he could not bear such ridiculous distinctions in his house. It was with difficulty I obtained the privilege of drinking out of my own glass, instead of out of the large goblet which served for the whole party, and which had been whiskered by the Bishop, and the rest of the company, for both the Greeks and Turks use only one glass at meals. After dinner, strong thick coffee, without sugar, was handed round: the cup is not placed in a saucer, but in another cup of metal, which defends the fingers from being burnt, for the coffee is served up and drank as hot as possible.11 In the illustration Dodwell can be seen nursing his personal glass. Next to him is his guide, Dr Andrea Cattani of Kephallenia; facing him is his servant, with whom he would have preferred not to share a table. A Greek visitor is making obeisance to the bishop. Edward Dodwell, meal with the bishop of Salona (ancient Amphissa) in 1805. cooked. We ate them with him, and did not remember ever having tasted meat that was so delicious and savoury, whether because of our pressing hunger or because this food was so new to us.’12 The provisions enumerated by Dodwell make some sense as nourishing snack foods, but the list has a luxurious feel to it. It contrasts strongly 221 gifts of the gods with the impromptu lunch enjoyed by Xan Fielding after some hours’ scrambling down the Samaria gorge in western Crete: cheese, raw onions and paximadia (‘home-baked rusks with a satisfying nutty flavour, but so hard that they have to be soaked in water before being eaten’).13 Fielding, journeying about 130 years later than Dodwell, relied on his Greek companions to know what food to carry and to spend no money on it. So did Patrick Leigh Fermor at about the same date. This, then, is a typical supper in a cave in Crete under German occupation: a stew of beans, lentils, snails and herbs, eaten in spoonfuls from a single tin dish, accompanied by ‘that twice-baked herdsman’s bread that must be soaked in water or goats’ milk before it is eaten’ (dakos or paximadia again). Leigh Fermor and his comrades toasted goats’ cheese on the points of their daggers and drank from flasks of raki sent up from the village below.14 Finding a Meal What if invited to a meal? If in a monastery, as it frequently would be for travellers even of the very recent past, ‘the worst was the food and the filth,’ wrote Edward Lear, who from his peaceful retreat on Corfu had determined to visit and paint the monasteries of Mount Athos. He did not admire the ‘minced-fish and marmalade masticating’ monks. But this emerges from a private letter.15 Travellers reporting on visits to Greek monasteries have generally, in print, expressed pleasure at their reception and at the food they got, simple though it usually was. Leake, at the Virgin of Porto delle Quaglie, enjoyed ‘by far the most agreeable lodging I have met with in Mani’, and a very healthy supper: On the eastern side a spring issues from the side of the hill, and falls over several terraces of garden ground on the side of the mountain, which are grown with olives, caroubs, and cypresses, mixed with a few orange-trees. The garden furnishes me with a salad for dinner, and the stores of the convent some of the choicest Maniate honey. Leake’s Greek guides had earned a hot meal, so they got bean soup and salted olives.16 Those olives will recur. George Wheler in 1682 notes a monastery breakfast ‘with bread and honey and olives, good wine, and aqua vitae’ (an early mention of what later writers know as raki) which the abbot allowed himself to enjoy with 222 food of recent greece The kitchen gardens of Iviron monastery (‘of the Iberians’, from what is now Georgia). The monastery gardens of Athos have hardly changed since Vasilii Barski sketched them in 1744. his guests in ‘a kind of buttery’ after morning service. This was near Livadia in Boiotia, and Wheler went on to dine with three hermits living under Mount Helikon. Their usual food was bread and herbs, their drink water, and even those were enjoyed only on four days of each week. On festival days Wheler’s host might eat a little honey; wine he would taste only at communion. His two neighbours had a garden ‘well planted with beans and pease, and another just by it furnished with four or five hundred stocks of bees’. Wheler was entertained with ‘a plate of delicate white honeycombs, with bread and olives, and very good wine’, dining ‘with far greater satisfaction than the most princely banquet in Europe could afford us’.17 Pierre Belon visited several of the monasteries of Mount Athos, and was invited to share a Lenten dinner. The abbot ‘served us rocket, celeriac, heads of leek, cucumbers, onions and nice little green garlic shoots. We ate these herbs raw, without oil or vinegar. That is their regular diet,’ Belon observes, but he was additionally offered black conserved olives, biscuits (paximadia, not bread, because there had been no baking) and wine. During a fast they can eat all kinds of crabs, sea-squirts and shellfish such as mussels and oysters . . . They always start their meals with raw onions and garlic; their main dishes are salted olives and broad beans soaked in water, and they finish with rocket and 223 gifts of the gods cress . . . It is not only the monks who choose to live like this but the priests and other churchmen of Greece and also the common people, who during their fasts would not eat fish with blood, or meat, or any other inappropriate food even if they were to die for lack of it.18 Belon’s sea-squirts will be explained below. Monastery olives are a staple in reality as they are in these narratives. Nothing was in commoner use than conserved olives, Belon writes elsewhere, and these were quite different from the olives familiar in France, being ‘black, ripe, and kept without any sauce, like dried prunes’.19 Wheler, 125 years later, agrees: pickled olives were the Lenten mainstay, ‘not pickled green as in these parts but when they are full ripe and full of oil. They eat them with vinegar, being very nourishing and wholesome food and very grateful to the stomach.’20 Another 125 years takes us to Dodwell: ‘When the olive ripens, it grows black, and falls from the tree; it is then eaten, with bread and salt, without any preparation.’21 Those olives, like the vegetables and herbs, came from the monasteries’ communal kitchen gardens, and Belon adds that some monks had their own little gardens too. The Russian monk Vasilii Barskii, who made sketches of the monasteries of Mount Athos during his visits there in 1725 and 1744, was particularly careful to draw these kitchen gardens and the monks at work in them. Monastic gardeners did not grow much cereal, Belon observes; they had vines, olive trees, figs, onions, garlic, broad beans and vegetables, and exchanged their surplus with sailors who brought them wheat. They also gathered bayberries, pressed them for oil, Formerly a monastery staple noted by every traveller, hamades are olives gathered when already fully ripe, either fallen or about to fall, and conserved in salt. 224 food of recent greece and sent it for sale in the Balkans.22 Meat being entirely ruled out, they kept no domestic animals and did not even catch wild birds, but some monks passed their time in sea fishing, Belon observes; sure enough, Barskii depicts a monk of Esphigmenou fishing with a rod, and another in a rowing boat spearing an octopus with a trident.23 Several writers were impressed by the vast wooden casks in which wine was stored in monastery cellars. Iakobos, sacristan of Iviron on Athos, was luckily free to show Cyriac of Ancona the monastery cellars: In the absence of the Georgian abbot of Iviron, Gerasimos, who was on a diplomatic mission to the Turk, it was the sacristan himself who showed me all the important holdings of the monastery including three ancient wine casks, huge in size, for we measured the first one that he showed us, full of wine, as twenty feet long and ten feet in diameter.24 Wheler had a similar experience: when it came to the cellars, it was not the abbot but a monk who had served as interpreter, ‘a young father that spake very good Italian, being a native of Zant’ (Zakynthos), who took him to see the stocks of wine and olives, ‘which they preserve in the longest casks I ever saw, several of them I measured near twenty foot long’.25 Leake was more impressed by the cellars at the cave monastery Megaspelio, near Kalavryta, cooled in summer by its thick walls and by the water trickling down the rock, than by the flavourless and diluted red wine that the casks contained.26 Although meat was unavailable on Athos and ruled out for monks elsewhere, some monastery guests were lucky enough to get some. Wheler reported a most hearty and Christian welcome: a lamb was killed for the party, and the meal included rice, chickens, good olives, cheese, bread and wine.27 The two roving Englishwomen, visiting St Basil’s monastery at Meteora, also benefited from the slaughter of a lamb and were encouraged to share the titbits from the head. One of the two, braver (I believe) than Patrick Leigh Fermor on a similar occasion, accepted the most honourable portion of all, an eye. Rice, pickled cabbage, yoghurt and cheese were also on the menu. The abbot took no meat for himself, but did not go as far as to object when others transferred the meat from their overloaded plates on to his.28 It was good, then, to be invited to a meal even by hosts who were prevented by religious rule from being as generous to themselves as they were 225 gifts of the gods Sketch of the xenodochion (inn) and the rival Hotel Olympia, c. 1890, where Edith Payne and Isabel Armstrong first encountered yoghurt (‘very sour clotted cream’); from Armstrong’s Two Roving Englishwomen in Greece (1893). to their guests. Better still, logically and in reality, is to be invited home, and this thought is the starting point for Lawrence Durrell’s nuanced answer to the general question of whether Greek food is good. If the real test is what the Greeks ate at home, then he allows no doubt that they eat well, they choose well, they cook well. Invited to a private house or to some family festivity, one would be astonished at the variety and tastiness of the food. But it takes a lot of preparation, Durrell adds: ‘Always in the background there is the hovering figure of grandma who has been up since four to start cooking for the feast.’ The very tastiest and the most varied foods tend to be encountered at the beginning of a good Greek meal, served briefly, successively, individually in small quantities as mezedes, ‘starters’ so to speak; understandably so, Durrell adds, when the food is likely to be enjoyed outdoors, shaded by a vine.29 In proper Greek dining, main courses gradually follow in the same way and in similar variety, very much in the Chinese fashion, and this is quite different from the sequential meal with long gaps between courses that the French prefer and from the rushed series, over and done with as soon as possible, that the English thrive on. A good Greek meal is shared by a party – larger, ideally, than the three or four or five that Archestratos considered to be an absolute maximum – and takes a long time. Conviviality being a precondition in good Greek dining, the pleasure to be gained from a restaurant meal depends on a complex negotiation: what food there is, what the cook can do with it, what the party brings to the restaurant and what the restaurant gives to the party. The negotiation may be doomed. ‘It is impossible to get a decent boiled egg in the country; 226 food of recent greece no one has the faintest idea what three and a quarter minutes really are,’ Humphrey Kitto averred.30 He may have been right at that, but he would have done better not to worry about it. Durrell similarly lost his sense of humour over food that was not served even reasonably warm; Fielding was fated never to get used to Cretan village cooking, which, he admitted, would be tolerable if the food were served hot, ‘but it never is’;31 while Leigh Fermor tells a story of ordering fried eggs and chips and waiting half an hour while they were cooked and allowed to cool. ‘Hot food is bad,’ the café owner told him. ‘It makes people ill.’32 Since good Greek food depends on the place and the season – and on chance – good restaurants will be inconsistent. ‘Dinner was always a surprise,’ the two roving Englishwomen found, ‘the menu varying from three to six courses.’33 They were lucky. Kitto while in Tsakonia was sometimes satisfied with one: ‘Nothing to be got today. Would you like an omelette?’34 Kostas Prekas’s shop on Syros is famous far beyond the island for its range of traditional products from all over Greece. He sells his own sun-dried tomatoes, salted capers and other conserves. 227 gifts of the gods There is an art to being satisfied, and it is easily learned. Kitto learned it, not long after Tsakonia, on the day when he found ‘a second breakfast . . . a vast dish of fried liver and tomatoes in the restaurant-half of a butcher’s shop’.35 ‘You get over your first vexation rapidly’ (Lawrence Durrell might have been responding to Kitto) ‘and sink into a resigned mood where you accept whatever comes with equanimity – and so much is really good that does come.’36 Durrell at this point names some of the very best: lobster or crayfish on Hydra, sofrito on Corfu (see recipe on page 169), soutzoukakia (spitted entrails) on Rhodes. Accepting what comes with equanimity means being ready to wait for those great dishes until they happen to present themselves, and enjoying the fried liver at the butcher’s meanwhile. This, in a sense, was what the two Englishwomen did on their first evening at Olympia, when ‘dinner turned out much better than we expected’: The soup was strong – we pronounced it excellent – though it cannot be denied that it would have had a very soothing effect on a troubled sea; then came lamb cut about in various curious forms and served à la discretion, followed by cutlets that explained the former dish; a sort of very sour clotted cream and oranges brought the repast to an end. The resinous wine of the country, both red and white, was quite drinkable, dry and exceedingly wholesome.37 This, also, is exactly what Felix Faber did. We return to the fifteenth century and to Candia (Heraklion) on Crete, where he arrived one evening by ship as one of a miscellaneous party of German pilgrims, ‘nobles, priests, and monks’, on their way to the Holy Land: We found no inn save one that I am sorry to say was a brothel, which was kept by a German woman . . . As soon as we entered she cleared her house and put all of its rooms at our service. She was a well-mannered, respectful, and discreet woman, and obtained all that we needed in great quantity, and we had a glorious supper with Cretan wine, which is what we know as malmsey. That day we had ripe grapes, black and white, in great plenty.38 Durrell gives another useful pointer: ‘One must work to find one’s own palatable restaurant in whichever place one is.’39 Four hundred and fifty years after Faber, forty years before Durrell wrote, Fielding worked 228 food of recent greece away at this task in Chania at the western end of Crete, and settled on a nameless harbour tavern: There was no menu; one only had to lift the lids of the copper cauldrons bubbling over charcoal braziers to see, quite literally, what was cooking. The food was sometimes excellent and always unpretentious: young octopus stewed with tomatoes and olives; sucking-pig cooked in the same way; cod-steaks with skordalia, the Cretan equivalent of Provençal aioli; veal-steaks grilled, or grilled red-mullet; sometimes only soup, lentil or chick-pea or bean with . . . my favourite ‘volcanic’ salad.40 The Raw Materials: Fruit and Vegetables Fruits are among the first foods named in Greek poetry and they are the stuff of poetry even now. We have seen that the Odyssey evoked an orchard in Phaiakia, a fictionalized Corfu, stocked with six fruit species.41 In medieval literature, in a speech of welcome to Princess Agnes of France, Archbishop Eustathios described the emperor Manuel, who used marriage alliances as a means to shore up Byzantine defences, as an orchardman bringing young fruit trees from north, south, east and west to plant them in Constantinople. A funeral lament recorded in modern Mani adopts the same image: Death planned to make an orchard. He dug it and prepared the ground to plant trees in it. He plants young maids as lemon-trees, young men as cypresses, He planted little children as rose-trees all around, And put the old men, too, as a hedge around his orchard.42 The orchards of Greece have become ever more varied. Olives, grapes and figs, already being cultivated several thousand years ago, were joined towards the end of the prehistoric period by the apples, pears and pomegranates listed in the Odyssey, along with plums, quinces and walnuts. The classical period added cherries, peaches, apricots, pistachios and citrons. Then came lemons, bitter and sweet oranges and most recently kiwi fruit. They have all found their place in Greek food: lemons, for one, it is now hard to imagine doing without. And yet the wild fruit species known to the earliest human inhabitants of Greece, some of them occasionally grown 229 gifts of the gods Not beautiful, not good to eat, but very aromatic, the citron (Citrus medica) was the first of the citrus fruits to reach the Mediterranean, soon after Alexander the Great’s time. It is grown in Greece now and gives its distinctive flavour to an island liqueur, kitron Naxou. in gardens, some never yet taken into cultivation, are still found in the forests. One such is the strawberry tree (arbutus), noticed by Leake in wild country in the Peloponnese, discussed on Corfu in Durrell’s hearing for a curious property attributed to its fruit: ‘I wonder’, his friend Theodore Stephanides is quoted in Prospero’s Island as saying, ‘if you have remarked that arbutus berries are among the things which can also intoxicate?’43 Biologist, radiologist and poet, Stephanides long afterwards published his personal observations on Greece, its natural history and its food, and gave chapter and verse for that unexpected assertion: In September and October the arbutus, sometimes called strawberry trees, are heavy with their clustered orange-red fruit, each the size of a large cherry, which can be made into a delicious jelly having a delicate strawberry aroma. If eaten raw on an empty stomach, these berries produce a kind of intoxication resembling drunkenness. On the Macedonian front, during the First World War, I once saw a whole working-party of some fifty men reduced to a state of hilarious inebriation from its effects.44 Among cultivated fruits the grape is never forgotten as a source of wine, but it is possible to overlook the pleasure of eating fresh grapes in season. It was to supply table grapes to Athens markets that vines used to be grown at Ambelokipi, ‘vine gardens’, now an inner-city district and a 230 food of recent greece metro station known to those who travel to and from the airport. There Bernard Randolph (quoted more fully on page 178) walked through ‘very pleasant gardens which afford all sort of fruit and saleting, having walks round them covered with vines’.45 It was for the supply of table grapes after the usual season that big shady plane trees once flourished beside the river at Platanias, ‘the plane trees’, west of Chania on Crete. They were admired by Richard Pococke in 1743: They are very high, and make a most beautiful grove; vines are planted at the bottom of them, which twine about the trees, and are left to grow naturally without pruning; and being backward by reason of the shady situation, do not ripen till the vintage is past; they hang on the trees till Christmas, and bring in a very considerable revenue.46 The same trees and the same vines, by now ‘of a size unknown in France or Italy, the thickness of many of their stems being that of an ordinary man’s waist’, were praised by Robert Pashley in 1837 as ‘one of the objects best worth viewing by those who visit Khaniá’. Edward Lear, Pashley’s most assiduous reader, made his way there in 1864 ‘along refreshing nightingale-haunted green lanes’, but he came too late: the vines were dead and the plane trees, now useless, had been felled.47 Arbutus or strawberry tree, Arbutus unedo. The small white flowers, unripe and ripe red fruit are all visible in October. 231 gifts of the gods Naxian and Greek Salads We follow the course of a torrent overhung by plane trees and full of oleanders, and so enter an Arcadian valley with two villages. The larger of these, Melanes, a half-hour east, is our destination. Still following the watercourse, with an occasional pool and abundant planes, we rise over an outcrop of white marble to the village. It is on the south side of the gorge, whereas the far famed peribolia (gardens), which had invited this hot journey, are on the other . . . My guide has deliberately misled me in order to visit his own home at my expense; for the village café, with its pretty hostess Kaliope, seems to be among his family affairs. But one might easily have found a worse place for a hot noon-day: there was cool shade, fresh eggs, good bread, figs to melt in one’s mouth, delicious grapes, and Naxian wine . . . Upon this feast, topped off with good Turkish coffee and a short siesta, I am half ready to forgive the young rascal. So wrote J. Irving Manatt, an American living on Andros but here visiting neighbouring Naxos, in his book Aegean Days (1914). Those ‘far famed peribolia’ are virtually unchanged and still well tended today, a hundred years later, and Melanes is still a good place for lunch. A long, hot and ultimately satisfying walk on Naxos in early November led us from lushly terraced valleys dotted with watermills to a steep donkey track Fruit is occasionally mentioned in Greek narratives of festivity; vegetables almost never. No one boasts of them. Yet their importance is evident, especially in everyday food (meat being always a luxury), especially for poorer people (meat and fish being expensive), especially for poor people living in country districts if they have the space and time to tend a kitchen garden. A poor old woman in an ancient comedy listed the mainstays of her life, including beans, lupin seeds, turnips, blackeyed peas and bolboi.49 Cabbage, lettuce, chicory, turnip and beet were 232 food of recent greece among olive groves, a rocky pass leading to an ancient halffinished kouros statue lying where it broke and was abandoned 2,500 years ago, and to an elusive ancient aqueduct entrance. And then the gardens that Manatt wrote of, steeply terraced on one side of the valley, curling around, and with no easy way down or across the stream. And once crossed, more orchards and kitchen gardens and finally Melanes itself and the taverna O Giorgos. We ate sweet cucumbers, their own, the first of the season – a whole plate of them – peeled and sliced the thickness of a couple of euros; and anthotyro, again their own, fresh white cheese skimmed from the top of the milk – the really creamy milk that is only possible after the early autumn rain has produced fresh green shoots for the goats to graze on – dressed with oil and eaten with bread. The classic ‘Greek salad’ of a thousand menus is tomato, cucumber, onion, green pepper, feta cheese, olives and oregano. But Greek salads are manifold: sensible combinations of good ingredients, dressed with a limp wrist, consumed with a generous amount of country or sourdough bread. John Fowles suggests one: ‘We had lunch, a simple Greek meal of goat’s milk cheese and green pepper salad with eggs, under the colonnade.’48 Tomatoes are the basis of many, but they must be good: from the end of July until October they can be tart, sweet, even reminiscent of strawberries in their remarkable range of flavours. Add at will red onion, cucumber, capers, green peppers, red peppers, white salty cheese like feta or myzithra, soft purslane leaves, oregano, and so on. known to classical Greeks; broad beans, peas, lentils and chickpeas had been familiar for thousands of years. They were even potential staples if wheat and barley fell short, but, if there was bread, the pulses would commonly serve as main dish. In medieval Lakonia, Cyriac of Ancona reported, ‘their meals consist of split beans seasoned generously with oil, and their loaves are made from barley.’50 Even for such basic foods one depended on a peaceful environment and on access to water for irrigation, as observed by Leake, whose travels through Greece took place 233 gifts of the gods Watermelon and Feta Salad For two people: a wide slice of watermelon, perhaps 300 g, rind removed and the flesh cut into large chunks 150 g feta cheese, roughly crumbled over the melon black pepper a little olive oil and a lot of bread Eat, spitting out the seeds. Watermelon goes even better with touloumisio, hard goats’ milk cheese with a honeycomb-like texture, matured in a goat’s stomach, but that is difficult to find. at the beginning of the nineteenth century, in the last few years before Greece gained its independence from the Turks: The summer productions of the garden . . . which depend on irrigation, such as gourds, cucumbers, badinjans [aubergines], water-melons, &c. are too dear for the poor, or rather are not to be had, as gardening, the produce of which is so liable to be plundered, can never flourish in a country where property is so insecure as in Turkey.51 In this brief list Leake includes two species – gourds and watermelons – that were already available in ancient Greece but are scarcely even mentioned in classical literature. Between them he names cucumbers and aubergines, both of which are now known to have been introduced in Byzantine times. He might have added spinach, likewise; and tomatoes, quite a recent arrival, indispensable today; he might have added onions and garlic, and of course leeks, which were so quietly significant in classical times that a vegetable bed was literally called a leek-bed, prasion. They are still significant now, as in another poetic lament from Mani. ‘I was in a garden and among my herbs,’ the mourner weeps. ‘I picked the parsley and pulled up the leeks . . . The parsley is my tears, the leeks are my sorrow.’52 Pulses and some others are likely enough to make a meze or side dish, such as the gigantes of so many restaurant menus; vegetables can be baked in a 234 food of recent greece Peloponnesian Orange Salad Skin a couple of large, thick-skinned oranges – the thickskinned ones are good for eating – by topping and tailing them, then running a sharp knife down the length in curves, between the flesh and the pith. Slice the oranges into rounds and arrange on a plate with as much of their juice as you can catch. Finely chop a couple of spring onions and sprinkle them over the oranges. Crumble over the top some soft, sharp, white goats’ or sheep’s cheese: xinomyzithra, for example. Finish with a few red chilli flakes. Dress with a little oil but no vinegar. Naxos Potato Salad 500 g boiled Naxian potatoes, cut into large bite-sized pieces a couple of plum tomatoes, quartered ½ red onion, sliced ½ tbsp salted capers, drained and soaked olive oil, vinegar to taste, a little salt (capers are already very salty) The potatoes of Naxos, buttery with the perfect combination of flouriness and waxiness, are equally good in salads and as the accompaniment to a roast. The menu of Meze Meze in Naxos town offers ‘potato salad’ and ‘Naxos potato salad’: choose the latter. In Lefkes on Paros (visible from Naxos town), potato salad would be different: potatoes and caper leaves dressed with oil. pie, spinach (spanakopita) and even lettuce (maroulopita); and sappy and juicy fresh vegetables will feature in the ‘Greek salad’ of restaurant lunches, not forgetting those that Xan Fielding preferred in his ‘volcanic salad’: ‘garlic and raw onions, red and green and orange peppers and – as a cooling element – half a dozen little pear-shaped winter tomatoes’.53 Also belonging to the vegetable kingdom are aromatic herbs and spices, those that the Byzantines and the Turks who followed them used 235 gifts of the gods in food for their health and pleasure, in the tradition that the Asia Minor Greeks retained and the independent Greeks almost forgot, and would have forgotten if Nikolaos Tselementes had had his way. It was not to be: Greek food now makes good use of aromatics, and Artemis Leontis neatly tabulates the ones that often seem to go together: ‘lemon and dill, lemon and olive oil, vinegar and olive oil, vinegar and honey, vinegar and garlic, garlic and oregano, garlic and mint, tomatoes and cinnamon, tomatoes and capers, anise (or ouzo) and pepper, orange and fennel, allspice and cloves, pine nuts and currants, mahlepi and mastiha.’54 Later arrivals from east and west brought the cloves, lemon, orange, tomatoes and allspice, but some of those combinations are already familiar from ancient cookery. The Raw Materials: Fish and Meat For those living near the sea, shellfish and other invertebrate seafood is important in spring for exactly the same reason as the wild greens. For those who keep to the traditional rules, fish as well as meat is forbidden during fasts but ‘fish without blood’ is permitted. Hence the great effort put into seafood cuisine at medieval Constantinople; hence the comprehensive interest in modern Greece in the unfishy things that come out of the sea, cuttlefish and squid, crab and lobster and crayfish and shrimp. And the octopus: ‘The octopus is to be beaten with twice seven blows,’ according to the Greek proverb, because it will be very hard to eat unless thus tenderized.55 And the sea urchin, which Xan Fielding learned to enjoy at his favourite taverna in Chania, in taste ‘a mixture of grit, slime and iodine: the very essence of the sea’: hedgehog-like on the outside, hence its name, but very different on the inside. He would watch the purple spines still moving even when the body was bisected and the deep orange ‘contents’ – the ovaries – were scooped out on to a crust of bread. Fielding wanted to drink white wine with this luxurious meze, but his host insisted on ouzo.56 And the sea-squirt, the only ‘fish without blood’ mentioned in the Iliad, carefully described by Aristotle because no other living thing is quite like it (it is not so much an animal as a microcosm) and recommended by Archestratos for purchase at Kalchedon opposite Byzantion. Sea-squirt, modern Greek fouska, ancient tethyon, is to be cut in half and the soft yellow interior (‘like scrambled egg’, says Alan Davidson) eaten raw.57 Let it be seasoned with lemon juice; or else with the aromas recommended by the ancient seafood writer Xenokrates, but necessarily using asafoetida in place of the vanished silphion: ‘Sea-squirt. 236 food of recent greece It is cut and rinsed and seasoned with silphion from Kyrene and rue and brine and vinegar, or with fresh mint in vinegar and sweet wine.’58 Ever since the people of Franchthi cave went hunting for tunny, the Aegean has been famous for its fish. And ever since the invention of coinage, Greeks have been ready to pay good money for good fish. These riches have extended along the Dardanelles (Hellespont), into the Sea of Marmara (Propontis), and to the very shores of Constantinople. The Propontis has been no less productive in seafood than any region of good pasture is in animals, Pierre Belon observed, adding that ‘the whole population of Turkey and Greece favours fish over meat as food.’59 With a very long coastline, a high proportion of inhabitants living close to the sea, and some excellent city markets, Greece is unique in its special focus on marine gastronomy. ‘They fish with a little light in their boat, which the fishes seeing follow, which the fisherman perceiving presently strikes the fish with a trident,’ wrote Wheler in 1682.60 Much Aegean fishing is on a very small scale, but stocks are declining and the industry is under deadly threat as governments encourage unsustainable methods with one foot and stamp out local traditions with the other.61 Whether sold at the harbourside or at a market, when it reaches a kitchen the fish is likely to be cooked as simply as Archestratos recommended, and perhaps using exactly the same recipe. The perfect way to deal with each species, once devised, has no need to change. Faced with a fish he did not know, Fielding was taught the three lines of verse that define the appropriate punning recipe Σκάροι στη σχάρα (skaroi sti schara, wrasse on the grill): My name is skaros, cook me on the grill And dish me up in oil and vinegar: Then you can eat me up, my guts and all.62 That was a fish for which ancient Romans paid high prices, but their poet Martial was a choosy eater: ‘Its guts are good: the rest tastes cheap.’63 If you order fresh fish in a restaurant (frozen fish must not be sold as fresh), you will point to the fish you fancy and pay for it by weight, remembering, if you wish, the many discussions on the ancient Athenian stage concerning the high price of fish. The fresh fish will probably not be enumerated on the menu: how could it be? No one can know what will arrive each day. It depends on the fishermen and also on the fish. As a mere hint of the potential variation, Diane Kochilas provides a brief fish 237 gifts of the gods calendar for northwestern Greece: ‘Bream (tsipoures) are at their peak in September. The small ones, known as ligdes, are preserved lightly in salt and olive oil.’64 Meat is the luxury that humans hardly deserve. What excuses the people of prehistoric Greece made for killing their farm animals we cannot fully know, but we do know that some feasted at sanctuaries, thus bringing gods into it. This is certainly what classical Greeks did: an animal was sacrificed – in all senses of that word – and nearly all its meat was shared among the human participants in the ritual, leaving very little for the gods to whom it was offered. This is the background to the Byzantine and modern Greek approach to meat: common enough now on restaurant menus, but not always available when expected; much commoner in modern life than it was in the past, but eaten by most Greeks in much smaller quantities than by northern Europeans, because meat (especially Wall painting of the Last Supper, Vatopedi monastery, Mount Athos, c. 1312. 238 food of recent greece Miran, the most popular charcuterie in the Monastiraki district of Athens and a longestablished landmark. Soutsouks and pastourma are hanging from the ceiling. lamb) is still the sacrificial food, even though the god has changed and the philosophy of religion too. Killing an animal produces a lot of food, from the muscle meat, which may well be roasted, to the head, which will provide special delicacies, to the innards, which are converted into all kind of picturesque and tasty products. Once the animal has been killed all except the muscle meat will eventually be eaten without any celebration or ritual. But roast meat makes a celebration, whether it is the dinner offered to guests in the ancient Iliad and Odyssey, or the Easter lamb or wedding feast of modern Greece, or a more modest celebratory meal. At major events it may still be the men who do the roasting, as it was in the epics, but not always. ‘There’s a marvellous leg of lamb in here,’ Patrick Leigh Fermor’s temporary companion told him, patting his rucksack. It was from a three-month-old spring lamb, and to be roasted by his landlady, ‘all wrapped up in grease-paper . . . she pokes whole garlic cloves right down between the meat and the bone.’ Duly roasted and unwrapped, the golden-brown leg of lamb would be ‘blistering and bubbling with juice and surrounded by a brood of spitting potatoes’, all redolent of garlic, thyme and rosemary.65 239 gifts of the gods Minced meat may go into economical dishes such as soutzoukakia or keftedes, or it may be extended further into pies, for meat, too, is among the potential fillings of the pies produced with local variants in every part of Greece. Or into sausages. Many butchers in Greece make their own, mainly from pork, but also beef and lamb, or a mix of meats, and the recipes vary from region to region and butcher to butcher. People can travel a long distance to a favoured sausage-maker. Varying natural resources and a long history of population exchange result in sausages from the northernmost regions differing substantially from the south. In Thrace and Greek Macedonia the aromatics are similar or identical to those used in the neighbouring Balkan countries of Bulgaria and former Yugoslav Macedonia. Hot red chilli peppers (known as boukouvo), whether fresh, dried and flaked, are used liberally, together with ground cumin, allspice and black pepper. At Kozani in central Macedonia sausages are coloured a deep orange with the saffron stamens that take their name from the area, krokos Kozanis; around the Naoussa region east of Thessaloniki, where there is still a semi-nomadic Vlach minority, they are made with a mix of a little pork meat and fat and the goat meat so readily available in shepherd communities. The sausages of Trikkala in Thessaly are sweetened with leeks. Further south, and in the Peloponnese, winter savory and orange peel are preferred aromatics, as they are in the Maniot singlino (discussed shortly); the nearby Lakonian plain is famous for its orange crop, the largest in the Peloponnese. Island sausages are variously aromatic with local herbs: garlic is added on Syros together with fennel seeds, as also on Tinos; aniseed on Paros and on Andros, where the sausages are then preserved in lard and used to make a type of frittata, fourtalia. Winter savory and thyme scent Mykonos sausages. In western Crete oregano, thyme and cumin are mixed with the mince, which is then soaked in red wine for up to a week before encasing. Sausages in Cyprus often contain coriander seed, common in Cypriot cuisine but virtually unused in the rest of Greece, and they are again soaked in red wine for several days before being encased. On Corfu, in the Ionian islands as well as on Crete and in parts of the Peloponnese, a version of the Venetian boldon or blood sausage is found, spiced with garlic, cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg. The bourdouni, brought by Venetians to Corfu, is made with calf ’s blood and pig’s fat. It may well be traceable to ancient Greek blood sausages, in which case, via the Roman and then the Venetian kitchen, it has returned to its motherland. Mariana Kavroulaki points out that although blood in food is outside the culinary 240 food of recent greece mainstream, many such dishes of medieval or older origin are still found across Greece; but replacing blood with lung and spleen is common.66 These sausages, for the most part, are lightly air-dried or smoked and consumed ‘fresh’ – within a few weeks of production. Alongside them there is a strong tradition of preserved and cured meats: in a peasant or semi-nomadic community, before refrigeration, there had to be means of preserving meat for long periods after the slaughter of an animal. If there is one item of charcuterie repeated throughout Greece, it is salted and smoked pork, usually tenderloin. Traditionally, after the family pig was slaughtered at Christmas and the perishable delicacies such as the liver, heart and spleen had been consumed, the leftover meat would be preserved for the remaining winter months and beyond. Tenderloin is an ideal cut for smoking and serving thinly sliced as a meze for ouzo or tsipouro. The name and the flavourings vary but the method endures. On Tinos and Andros it is commonly found flavoured with fennel seeds, black pepper and allspice; on Syros spiced with pepper, allspice, cinnamon and cloves; and on all three islands it is marinated in red wine. On Santorini and Crete the Byzantine name apokti survives for a variant in which the pork loin is unsmoked and marinated in vinegar. It is trimmed, salted for a day, steeped in vinegar for three days, then patted dry, rubbed with cinnamon and left thus for about six hours so that the spice adheres to the meat: ‘Then it is rubbed with ground black pepper, dried savory and more cinnamon and hung to dry for several weeks.’67 Out of this grew the Cretan apaki: the tenderloin is again soaked in vinegar but then smoked for several days and flavoured with ground cumin and herbs such as sage, thyme and savory.68 The Corfiot nouboulo is smoked over an aromatic fire of sage, bay, myrtle, oregano and almond husks, and in the Mani region of the Peloponnese the now very fashionable singlino is smoked over sage or cypress branches. Here the predominant flavouring – as with the sausages of that region – is orange peel, and the loins are salted and pressed with mountain sage branches before smoking. These days, as traditional methods and regional specialities heve regained popularity, many of these once obscure preparations can be bought in supermarkets, vacuum-packed, sliced and ready for the tsipouro meze. The north of Greece differs in the methods of preservation and in the main ingredient, preferring fried beef or goat (although pig is commoner than it once was) stored in lard or oil. The kavourmas or kaparnas of Thrace is usually beef, which is salted, cooked in oil with herbs for six hours or so 241 gifts of the gods The best-known Greek cheese is surely feta. The best Greek feta is barrel-matured. Myzithra is one of the widespread class of whey cheeses, traditionally a means of making the fullest possible use of the food value of the milk. Yiayia, ‘granny’, stirs the whey as it coagulates. food of recent greece Cretan graviera. The name is borrowed from Gruyère, but in its regional Greek incarnations the product has become very different: a small wheel of typically very hard sheep’s-milk cheese. until the fat is rendered out, rolled into thick sausage shapes and stored much like a French confit. Soutzouk, the dense, salami-like sausages found all over the Balkan region, take their name from the Turkish word for sausage – which is what they are, although pressed and dried for preservation. Throughout the north, from Macedonia eastwards, is found pastourma, the dried and cured beef known all over the Eastern Mediterranean in former Ottoman countries. It is beef or occasionally camel, which some say makes the best pastourma of all and which can be found in the centre of Athens in specialist delicatessens. As a complete contrast, an Italian-style salami – fatty pork with plenty of seasoning and garlic – was introduced by immigrants from Burano in the Venetian gulf to Leukas in the eighteenth century, and is now also made in Crete, Thasos and Eurytania. The Raw Materials: Bread and Cheese In farming terms meat, the death of the animal, weighs against milk, a recurrent food source if it can be conserved. Leake took a close interest in the farming economy and gives an outline of the milk business. ‘A good ewe’, he begins, ‘gives at every milking a pound of milk, of which are made butter, cheese, misithra, and yaourt.’ He then explains the making of the first three, one leading to the next. For butter the milk was left for twenty-four hours to become sour and then churned in a narrow cask with a stick to produce butter. The remaining liquid (buttermilk) was mixed with an equal quantity of milk: this mixture (tyrogalo), warmed, 243 gifts of the gods with salted rennet added, would produce cheese, whose making he then describes. The remaining liquid this time (nerogalo, ‘milk-water’) had a further use: To make misithra. The nerogalo . . . is placed upon the fire: about a tenth of milk is added to it, and after a short boiling the misithra is collected on the surface. Goat’s milk makes the best misithra, even though the butter has been extracted from it.69 Myzithra is thus a whey cheese and a Greek version of ricotta, as the Dutch travellers Egmont and Heyman noticed on their visit to Kythera, then a Venetian possession where Italian was spoken: ‘Its most remarkable commodity is a kind of cheese, called ricotta: it is made of goats’ milk boiled.’70 French travellers similarly equate myzithra with recuite, a product once typical of Savoy. Yoghurt is described with puzzlement even in the writings of recent travellers: it is hard to remember now how unfamiliar it used to be. Many were faced with it for the first time in Greece, such as the two roving Englishwomen of 1893, who spoke of ‘a sort of very sour clotted cream,’71 and Lawrence Durrell in 1945, whose glossary includes the line ‘Yaourti: a sort of junket of curdled milk sprinkled with cinnamon.’72 The cheese of Greece is more varied, and often better, than any but very recent visitors have been able to see: the best cheeses too rarely reach the most discriminating consumers. Some are unusual indeed, such as the sea-washed melipasto of Lemnos. Some are both good and well-known, none more so than brined and barrel-aged feta, a traditional Middle Eastern style of cheese which in Greece is made from sheep’s milk or with up to 30 per cent goats’ milk. Imitation being the best form of praise, Greek feta is imitated elsewhere in the world, and until recently the imitations could legally be called feta. In the European Union, since a legal battle with Denmark was settled in 2002, only the Greek product can have this name. Many other Greek cheeses now have appellations of origin, but none of those others is as famous ouside its own region as Greece’s best-known cheesemaker, the Sphakiot (of southwestern Crete) Barba Pantzelios, known not for his cheese but for the epic poem he composed in 1786, the Song of Daskalogiannis, celebrating the bravery and death of a rebel who fought the Turks. Bread has been baked in Greece for at least seven thousand years, and the bread ovens of classical Athens were famous in their time; it was surely 244 food of recent greece the first city in the world where money could be used to buy bread. Good Greek bread now, raised bread, is the body of many a simple meal and the accompaniment to nearly every restaurant meal. But there are others too – the hard paximadia that have played such a part in history, and the ring-shaped koulouria that are bought in such quantity in city streets as a quick breakfast. As with meat, beliefs and rituals surround bread, and special breads are often baked for special occasions: Christmas and Easter, engagements and weddings and the birth of a child. Bread in the morning, cakes in the afternoon, but Greek cakes are very different from bread, in a tradition that is easily assumed to be Turkish (most of the names are Turkish, kadaifi, baklava) but has pervasive similarities with what we know of classical and Byzantine patisserie. Certainly this tradition is very different from that of northern Europe, most obviously, perhaps, because the cakes – most cakes – come soaked in honey. So, it appears, they always did. ‘Eat the best honey fresh. It is not only pleasant to eat, but prolongs life,’ the Byzantine farming manual Geoponika wisely advises, adding that the ancient philosopher Demokritos, asked how men could ensure health and long life, replied: ‘By treating their outsides with oil and their insides with honey.’73 As to the olive oil, it is used less to treat the outside these days – soap has replaced it for that purpose – but it remains the staple of the Greek kitchen and, today, of the Mediterranean diet. Table olives are sold at markets in many varieties and styles and in great quantities. And market sales are only a partial reflection of the significance of olives and olive oil, because many country people have their own olive trees, from which they supply family and friends as well as their own households. The Accompaniments ‘Water is best,’ the classical poet Pindar famously wrote.74 Water has always been important in Greece. George Manwaring, who was in Zakynthos around 1598, asked his host’s servant for a cup of water. ‘The merchant, hearing me, told me I should drink wine so much as I would, for his water was dearer unto him than his wine.’75 Ancient Greeks were careful to evaluate the quality of the water from different springs, using criteria that are obscure to us. A long catalogue of springs is found in the Deipnosophists, including one ‘very drinkable and with a wine-like flavour: local people are said to go to it for their drinking parties . . . I weighed the water from the Corinthian spring Peirene,’ a speaker adds, ‘and found that it was lighter than any other in Greece.’76 This 245 gifts of the gods special expertise was retained into recent times. Water of Lake Kastoria in Macedonia (covered with a green surface, hot, turbid and by no means tasteless, according to Leake) was preferred by local people in the nineteenth century to that of local springs, which they considered heavy.77 Even in the 1930s ‘the Greek countryman is a connoisseur of waters as some Westerners are of wines,’ writes Kitto. ‘Your guide will tell you not to drink at this spring: the water is poor and thin . . . better wait half an hour when you will reach a spring whose water is much lighter.’78 Tea and chocolate have never made much impression in Greece – ‘tea’ will sometimes be understood as meaning not the Chinese camellia leaf (called ‘European tea’) but a local herbal infusion. Coffee is different. As was demonstrated by Antoine Galland, the first European expert on the history of coffee, it began its world conquest from the southern shores of the Red Sea around the tenth century, is catalogued from that date onwards by Arabic medical authors, but took a long time to catch on as a hot drink. It became known in Greece during the seventeenth century. Greece retains the customary Turkish or Greek or Middle Eastern style. ‘Coffee they drink any time but at meal, and is the usual entertainment when any come to visit them,’ George Wheler wrote briefly in 1682.79 In 1894 the first English edition of Baedeker’s Greece gave excellent practical advice, still valid: The coffee is generally good, but it is invariably served in the Oriental manner, i.e. in small cups with the grounds. As a rule it is already sweetened (gliko), but the visitor may order metrio with little sugar or scheto with no sugar . . . It should be allowed to cool and ‘settle’ and then drunk carefully so as not to disturb the sediment at the bottom. Served with a glass of cold water, Greek coffee is a breakfast drink, a drink offered at home to guests and a staple of the old-fashioned kafenia. Baedeker describes these too: ‘Cafés (kafenia) of all kinds abound in Greece, from the wretched wooden shed of the country-village up to the Athenian establishments handsomely fitted up in the Italian style.’80 Those Athenian establishments, where politicians once crossed the paths of poets, are now disappearing fast, supplanted by modern international coffee shops, where the fashionable coffees are frappé and freddo.81 The country kafenia remain, not all of them quite as wretched as Baedeker thought, places where old men gossip endlessly, women generally having better things to do. 246 The traditional salepi seller, as described by Theodore Stephanides and immortalized in Xxxxxx street in Thessaloniki . . . . . . and his modern replacement among the evening crowds on Aristotle Square. gifts of the gods These newfangled stimulants have failed to drive salepi off the market. As Durrell’s friend Theodore Stephanides explains, this is the dried, ground bulb of the lax-flowered orchid (Orchis laxiflora) and other species, making a glutinous opalescent liquid, sweet and insipid but fortifying when taken very hot with a flavouring of ginger or cinnamon. Until the early nineteenth century it was sold in London under the name ‘saloop’. Much more recently the salepijis was a familiar figure in Thessaloniki, ‘with his ornate brass urn slung to his back, the long curved spout jutting over his right shoulder . . . he would take a glass from one of the compartments of his broad leather belt and fill it with a dextrous bend of his torso at the waist,’ thus offering his client a courtly bow as well as an invigorating drink. Still widely consumed in Turkey and still popular in Thessaloniki, salepi is now sold from a wagon in which the beverage is kept hot. The use of salepi was first noted, in a discussion of sexual stimulants, by Theophrastos around 310 bc.82 The seventeenth-century trade in Constantinople is described by Evliya Çelebi: The salep is commonly called ‘fox’s testicle’, and grows on high mountains such as the Olympus of Bursa . . . It grows like an onion, and when dried is ground to a powder, cooked with sugar like a jelly, and sold in cans heated by fire. They cry, ‘Take salep, seasoned with rosewater: rest for the soul, health for the body!’ It is a fortifying and invigorating beverage, and sharpens the eyesight.83 Alcohol touches the Greek palate in three forms above all: beer, spirits, wine. The invasion of beer was discussed above (page 179). Except in the strictest fasts of the strictest believers, wine, not water, is the drink that accompanies a meal, and so it has been since prehistoric times. Classical Greeks were closely interested in the making of their wine and choosy as to its origin and quality. The procedure is hinted at briefly in Odysseus’ exploration of Phaiakia: And there his fruitful vineyard is planted, Where a drying platform on an open ground Is baked by the sun, and where they are gathering and treading.84 These lines, like Hesiod’s already quoted (page 188), already suggest the making of wine from semi-dried grapes, liasto in modern terms, slow 248 food of recent greece to ferment and with residual sweetness, good for its keeping qualities. As to the treading, Leake talks of vineyards with ‘a square vat of masonry built in the field for treading the grapes, after which operation the juice, in skins, is carried into the villages’.85 As to fermenting and maturation, a change took place in medieval times quite slowly and irregularly from earthenware dolia half-buried to wooden casks. William Lithgow found dolia still used in Cyprus in the seventeenth century: They have no barrels, but great jarres made of earth wherein their wine is put . . . These jarres are all inclosed within the ground save onely their mouthes, which stand alwayes open . . . whose insides are all interlarded with pitch to preserve the earthen vessells unbroke a sunder, in regard of the forcible wine, yet making the taste thereof unpleasant to liquorous lips.86 Yet, as we have seen, visitors to monasteries much earlier than this had found huge old casks in their cellars, filled with monastery wine. Modern Greek wines are struggling to recover the good name they had in the Roman and medieval West, although the vineyards that declined in the last Ottoman centuries have in many cases revived, and modern bottling and modern transport allow their products to travel over long distances. For the first time Greek dry reds and whites, which formerly would never have been exported further than Italy, cross the world. The appellations spread across Greece from Kephallenia to Lemnos and Rhodes and Sitia of Crete; from Naoussa in Macedonia to Mantinea in the Peloponnese, which, even according to one of the more fastidious Corfiots in Durrell’s Prospero’s Cell, is ‘not a very bad wine as wines go’.87 Local grape varieties have never lost their eminence; they really suit the landscapes and microclimates of Greece, and few do well elsewhere (muscat, monemvasia and liatiko being the exceptions to this rule). Some good wine is even made on the eastern shores of the Aegean, though it has only a limited market in its native Turkey. Wine is made by many Greeks on a small-to-medium scale. Much of it is not bottled and never enters commerce: it is for households, extended households and restaurants run by the extended household. Some of the worst, the strangest and the best wine that you will drink in Greece is served in a carafe, costs you very little, and was made in the family. A larger such operation, verging on the commercial, is described by Durrell on a large family estate in central Corfu, where careful attention was paid each 249 gifts of the gods Moustalevria – Grape Must Pudding As Lawrence Durrell describes it, moustalevria is ‘that delicious Ionian sweet or jelly which is made by boiling fresh must to half its bulk with semolina and a little spice. The paste is left to cool on plates and stuck with almonds; and the whole either eaten fresh or cut up in slices and put away in the great store cupboard.’88 It was normally made after the grape harvest in the autumn as a good way of using leftover grape must. In the days before cheap chocolate and sweets it was a children’s favourite. It is now not so easy to find a bakery that makes it: creamy, sugary cakes and tarts are too popular. 5 water glasses grape must (about 800 ml) 1 water glass cornflour (200 ml) 1 branch citronella a couple of handfuls skinned, whole almonds (75 g) sesame seeds and ground cinnamon Mix together one glass of must and the cornflour. In a large saucepan bring the remaining must and the citronella to the boil before pouring in the must-cornflour mixture. Simmer, stirring frequently, until the mixture thickens and becomes creamy in texture. Cool slightly before stirring in the almonds (they can be omitted for a smooth texture). Pour into serving glasses (such as whisky glasses) or bowls and sprinkle with sesame seeds and cinnamon. Serve at room temperature. year to the harvesting and vinification of the robola, one of the classic and historic grapes of the Ionian islands – and, once the wine was safely on its way, to the making of moustalevria. Spirits and M e z e d e s Setting aside the occasional fashion for liqueurs, the spirits Greeks drink are the unflavoured tsipouro (or raki, or in Crete tsikoudia) and 250 food of recent greece Selection of Greek ouzos. Visible to the eye of love are at least three brands from Lesbos (Mini, Arvanitis and Varvagiannis) and even the Psihis mastiha ouzo from Chios. Sans Rival, once a prize-winning brand, too sweet for modern tastes, still sells to tourists but is not visible at this market stall. the anise-flavoured ouzo. Joseph Pitton de Tournefort’s description of Crete, published in 1717, includes what may be the first mention of raki by name: The eau-de-vie, raki, which is drunk on Crete and all over the Levant is detestable. To make this liquor one adds water to grape marc: after fifteen to twenty days’ steeping it is pressed with heavy stones. The first half of the resulting piquette is distilled, the remainder discarded. They would do better to discard the lot.89 Recent travellers, such as Xan Fielding, are less inclined to complain, whether they find tsikoudia served as a breakfast or offered to visitors alongside dessert – ‘mountains of walnuts, cascades of pomegranates, chains of dried figs’.90 Raki under its various names is often home-distilled. Ouzo, by contrast, is made all over Greece by small commercial distillers, who have a faithful local market. Under better-known names it is marketed nationwide. It is a very similar drink to the pastis of France and to some other Mediterranean spirits, all originally popular not just because anise 251 gifts of the gods tastes good but because it has real benefits as a digestive. Like those other spirits, owing to the chemical properties of anethole, ouzo turns milky when water is added, but no one will protest if you drink it without water, which is not the case with pastis. Ouzo, the typical Greek aperitif, is often drunk alongside mezedes, as are tsikoudia and other spirits. While the leg of lamb is roasting Patrick Leigh Fermor’s host opens a bottle of ouzo, a now old-fashioned favourite brand, Sans Rival from Tyrnavos; he slices sausage, cheese, spring onions and botargo and sprinkles salt over radishes and ‘giant olives’ in a saucer as mezedes to accompany the ouzo.91 Alongside cafés and restaurants, which happily serve it, there are establishments whose sole purpose is to offer ouzo and its accompaniments, ouzeria (a name that emphasizes the ouzo) and mezedopoleia (emphasizing the mezedes). The word meze is in its immediate origin Persian: in that language it means ‘taste’ or ‘a titbit’, which already foreshadows its development in Turkish into the name for a collection of foods, snacks as one might call them in English, that precede a meal and typically accompany spirits. The meze habit, spreading from Thessaloniki and the north, has reached every corner of modern Greece. They are varied, strong-flavoured and savoury, ‘refined yet elementary’ in Aglaia Kremezi’s words, the ingredients varying from everyday and basic to unexpected and a little rare.92 Spoon Sweets The history of Greek spoon sweets has hardly been traced, but somewhere in their prehistory lie the kydonata, ‘quince conserve or marmalade’, and the karydaton, ‘walnut conserve’, of the Byzantine Empire. It is clear from George Wheler’s descriptions, which are among the very earliest, that sugar syrup, honey and grape syrup, petimezi, were alternatives in the making of early spoon sweets: ‘They preserve fruits with new wine boiled to syrup, honey, and sometimes sugar.’ Wheler returns to the subject when describing Chalkis: Here also they make sweetmeats of all sorts of fruits, quinces, pears, plums, nuts, walnuts and almonds. For sugar they use wine boiled to a syrup, and make them grateful enough to the taste; yet I believe they would hardly please some of our nice ladies, unless, perhaps, because they were far fetched.93 252 food of recent greece About this same period Evliya Çelebi lists the sugar-workers of Chios (an island famous today for its spoon sweets) among the trade guilds of Constantinople, so it is no surprise that Egmont and Heyman, in the 1750s, were welcomed to Chios with ‘sweetmeats, coffee, sherbet, rosewater, and perfumes’.94 From the beginning of the nineteenth century the ritual as described becomes recognizable: ‘On entering a house you first are presented with a pipe, then coffee, and sometimes a spoon full of citron and a bowl of water,’ writes the American financier Nicholas Biddle. Citron peel is indeed one of the traditional ingredients for a spoon sweet. Far to the east, at Konya in central Anatolia, Leake was welcomed with coffee, sweetmeats, sherbet and perfumes.95 In the 1890s the two roving Englishwomen at Andritsena were presented with a tray on which were two kinds of preserve in glass jars, tumblers of water and tiny cups of coffee: ‘The light coloured jam that we tasted was something like pear marmalade, and strongly to be recommended.’96 In Corfu in the 1930s Durrell encounters the ‘submarine’, which is the particular application of the same general ritual to a sweet paste flavoured with mastic. He makes the whole thing clear: The waiter darts across to them from the tavern with the ‘submarine’ – which consists of a spoonful of white mastic in a glass of water. Nothing more or less. The procedure is simple. You eat the mastic and drink the water to take the sweetness out of your mouth.97 The submarine or ypovrikio was fairly new in Durrell’s time, but it was already a favourite among children lucky enough to get it. It still is, but has now reached the status of a traditional and endangered pleasure. Those who pay the bill now need to be reassured that the teaspoonful of mastic or vanilla or fruity spoon sweet, in its glass of water, is not so wickedly sugary that it must be forbidden.98 Winter Sustenance Food is not available unchangingly through the year. If supermarkets try to make it appear otherwise, they will eventually fail. In Greece most foods are in some way seasonal. The vegetables that Byzantine Greeks were advised to eat for health’s sake in January are the cabbage, turnips and carrots they had stored for winter, and the recommended fruits 253 gifts of the gods were dried fruits, nuts, pomegranates (because they store well) and pears (because some varieties do not ripen till early winter). Of course they were to look out for ‘green olives in brine’ in March, because early olives cured over the winter would be ready for eating in March. Naturally they were to inhale the scent of aromatic flowers in April, eat red cherries in June and pick sweet apples in September.99 Beyond this pure seasonality, the Christian calendar is studded with festivals throughout the year, enthusiastically celebrated with rituals whose roots go back to a period before Christianity existed. These rituals (some popular almost everywhere, others purely local) appear to have specific purposes that also are independent of Christianity: whatever the current religion, such rituals ensure suitable weather and a regular seasonal cycle, and those things in turn ensure that there will be food next year. Naturally, then, Greek festivals, especially during winter and spring, are closely tied to food. Panagia Polysporitissa is celebrated on 21 November. In Christian terms it is the feast of the presentation to the Jewish Temple of the Virgin Mary, the Panagia or ‘all-holy’. Cereal grains and pulses of many kinds from the recent harvest are boiled together and blessed in church, and then eaten by those who are now planting seeds for next year, in hope of a good crop. The word polysporitissa, ‘to whom many seeds are offered’, now attached to the Virgin Mary, hints at pre-Christian origins: classical Greeks also cooked multiple seeds together each year to offer them to Demeter, the goddess of the cereal harvest.100 Although there is meat at the centre of modern Christmas meals, no single animal is embedded in tradition as the one to be killed: instead the traditional focus of Christmas and New Year food is on special bread and elaborate cakes. In Greece this focus begins with kourabiedes, little shortbread cakes of flour, butter and sugar, often flavoured with almonds, sometimes with orange water and even with brandy, that helped many to get through the pre-Christmas fast days. Kourabiedes have a long and largely non-Christian history, traceable to the ghraiba and qurabiya of Arab, Persian and Turkish cuisine, and possibly beyond.101 Christopsoma, ‘Christ’s breads’, are baked for Christmas itself and appear to continue the pagan custom of offering bread and cakes to the gods. Often spiced, they are shaped as or decorated with religious symbols (sometimes a cross or a figure of the baby Jesus), snakes and other images of fertility and prosperity; they may have walnuts or eggs embedded in them, and symbolism is attributed to those as well. Christopsoma and 254 food of recent greece Vasilopita, the indispensable New Year’s cake, always decorated, sometimes iced. other traditional Christmas foods are made for giving and sharing, with strangers, with beggars, with neighbouring households, with children. The Cappadocian Greeks boiled beef and rice, or made cherse with meat, cracked wheat, onions and butter, or sweet ashure soup with walnuts, and distributed these on Christmas morning to neighbours or to the poor. But yoghurt, after many days of fasting, was as welcome as any bread or meat.102 Everywhere in Greece vasilopita is eaten at New Year. It aims to confirm fertility and good fortune for the coming year. Traditional recipes are surprisingly varied, savoury as well as sweet, but a sweet cake is becoming the new tradition (see recipe on page 258). Winter, as it draws to its end, leads into the period of Apokries, ‘carnival’, that immediately precedes Lent. Food may be offered to the dead, who are said to wander among the living at carnival time. Doubtless they enjoy as much as others the smell of roast meat and fat that is redolent of tsiknopempti, ‘Smoky Thursday’, when so much roast beef is consumed that the whole week seems to be named after it: Kreatini, ‘Meat Week’. It is followed by Tyrofagou, ‘cheese-eating’, when meat is forbidden in 255 gifts of the gods Lenten Tahini Cake Containing no eggs, oil or butter, tahini cake is one of the most popular Lenten pleasures, to be enjoyed any time from Clean Monday until Big Friday. 150 g tahini, shaken well if the oil has separated 170 g water 200 g soft brown sugar 250 g plain flour ½ tsp baking powder ¼ tsp ground cloves sesame seeds Preheat the oven to 170°C. Line the base of a 20-cm-square cake tin and oil the base and sides. With a stiff whisk or metal spoon, in a large bowl mix the tahini, water and sugar together. Sift in the flour and baking powder and mix till combined. Pour the mixture into the prepared cake tin, smoothing down the top. Sprinkle all over with sesame seeds and bake for 45–50 minutes. If the cake starts to brown too much, cover it loosely with foil. Test with a skewer or knife, which should come out clean. The cake will have a softly dense and moist texture. Leave to cool in the tin before cutting into squares. preparation for Lent but cheese is still allowed, Then, eleven days after Smoky Thursday, comes kathara deftera, ‘Clean Monday’, the first day on which the full Lenten restrictions apply: no meat, no fish, no oil, no eggs or milk products. Much can be made of shellfish and crustacea, however, as the medieval abbots already knew. Lagana, an unleavened bread whose name already occurs in classical texts, is eaten on Clean Monday.103 At Tyrnavos in Thessaly an unusually liberated festival is held on Clean Monday, which surely helps to relieve Lenten gloom and probably contributes to the town’s fertility. The food basis of the festival is (correctly for the season) spinach soup prepared and served without oil. There are phallic 256 food of recent greece Easter: Feast and Fast A whole lamb or kid, to be eaten on Easter Sunday, is jointed and roasted in the oven overnight or cooked over a special barbecue pit, large enough for this purpose and therefore used only on this one annual occasion. Smaller, but still large, skewers and individual steaks and cutlets can be cooked over one charcoal grill, as here by the grill master of a restaurant. The meat is cut off the skewers to order. Maundy Thursday is the day for painting hard-boiled eggs – almost always red, though some like multi-coloured. They first appear on the table after midnight in the night of Saturday/ Sunday to precede the fast-breaking feast of mageiritsa (a thick soup of lamb or kid intestines and herbs). The eggs are bashed one against another: if your eggshell doesn’t break, you win. Easter in modern Greece: meat sizzling ... . . . and red-painted eggs. 257 gifts of the gods Vasilopita Vasilopita is the traditional New Year’s cake, and every taverna will offer a slice to customers after midnight or on New Year’s Day. Now often cake-like, vasilopita used to be more like an enriched bread, resembling tsoureki or brioche. This recipe, based on one by Stelios Parliaros (see page 217), will suit a smaller family with a twenty-first-century cranberry obsession. 75 g each dried cranberries and stoned prunes, chopped 100 ml brandy, Cognac or Metaxa 125 g butter, at room temperature, plus extra for greasing 125 g sifted icing sugar, plus extra for dusting 125 g ground almonds 3 large eggs, lightly beaten 125 g plain flour sifted with ½ tsp baking powder a coin or token, flouri, to drop into the mix Soak the chopped cranberries and prunes in the brandy for several hours, or overnight. Then purée the mix in a blender. Cream the butter with the sifted icing sugar and the ground almonds. Gradually incorporate the fruit purée, then the eggs, beating well after each addition. Fold in the flour and baking powder with a metal spoon and pour the mix into a 20-cm-diameter round cake tin which has been buttered and lined. Drop in the flouri and press it under the surface. Bake for 45 minutes at 170°C. processions, sexual horseplay, obscene and suggestive songs and jokes, and a great deal of drinking of tsipouro. The spinach soup, bourani, has a history of its own unconnected with Christian fasts. It is certainly the descendant of Arabic buraniya (which is also known in Andalusia as alboronia), a dish that is said in medieval sources to be named after and to have been invented by Buran, wife of the ninth-century caliph al-Ma’mun.104 258 food of recent greece Greek Easter most often falls in early April. The great forty-day fast of Lent, which immediately precedes it, accounts for March, which explains why the Byzantine dietician Hierophilos recommended no meat in March. If he had, his readers would rarely have been able to eat it. In the early nineteenth century Leake was crossing the southern Peloponnese in early spring; his guide at that moment was an old man who ‘walks so fast that my horse can hardly keep pace with him [and] has lived for the last month, being Lent, upon scarcely any thing but bread and onions’.105 As Leake explains elsewhere, the search for ‘esculent wild herbs’ was especially necessary in Lent because so many other foods were ruled out.106 For the same reason, Dodwell confirms, the discovery of a plant that Greek country people did not previously know to be edible and health-giving would be important to them. He claimed to have contributed to the repertoire himself. At the Kastalian spring at Delphi he found watercress growing along the banks and picked some for his dinner. ‘The poor people’ asked him if this plant was medicinal, and he replied that it was good to eat: ‘The next morning, I met a party of the villagers returning from the spring, each with a provision of the newly-discovered vegetable. They . . . told me they should for the future give them the name phrankochorton, or the Frank’s Herb.’107 Normally, however, the strictness of Lent is relieved by at least one great festival of the Christian church, that of the Annunciation, celebrated unvaryingly on 25 March. On this day, even if it falls in Lent as it usually does, observant modern Greeks allow themselves fish cooked with and served with olive oil. Medieval monks did so too: the rules of Byzantine monasteries are definite and detailed as to what may and may not be eaten on this one occasion, permitting fish (unless the Annunciation coincides with Holy Week), allowing a larger helping of wine, and even encouraging the leftovers to be eaten, with more oil, next day. Easter preparations begin on Holy Thursday, when eggs are painted red and sweet Easter bread is baked. Lampropsomo, ‘bright’ or ‘Easter bread’, also tsoureki (an Arabic and Turkish name), is rich in eggs and butter, unlike any Lenten food, and is decorated with shapes of spring flowers, leaves, crosses and snakes – but there are many other traditional forms. On Easter Saturday the breads and the eggs are blessed, and children give some to their godparents. On that day too, older Greeks may remember lamb intestines being washed at the communal water tap before being plaited into a broad, slippery braid, which, flavoured with oregano, plenty of salt and pepper, would be roasted in the baker’s oven; but more often nowadays the intestines go 259 gifts of the gods Kokoretsi, the entrails and offal of the Easter lamb, cooked on a spit. A family Greek Easter celebration in Dallas, Texas. into kokoretsi. Lamb or goat kidneys, liver, heart, lungs and a good amount of residual fat and caul fat are skewered on a long metal spit and wrapped in the intestines as if one were winding an elongated ball of wool. This is cooked over coals for hours, perhaps over a specially made barbecue pit, alongside the whole lamb or kid, also on a spit. Slow cooking, regular basting with a herb-sprig brush and constant rotating of the spit result in an unforgettable fast-breaking feast. But, to be precise, the long fast is traditionally broken in three steps: first, after midnight on Easter Sunday, with magiritsa (the name is Greek, ‘the cooked dish’), a soup made from the kidneys and other offal and thickened with rice; then around midday kokoretsi (the name is apparently Albanian) as a first course while the lamb or kid is still roasting; then, finally, the roast meat. In medieval Constantinople there was disagreement in monastic rules as to when the Lenten fast should be broken, and some considered that a midnight meal would weigh too heavily on monkish minds and stomachs. Others allowed a full meal, but with mulled wine spiced with cumin to 260 food of recent greece reduce flatulence.108 On Easter Sunday, so a Muslim hostage remarked, not water but sweet spiced wine flowed from the fountain on the route of the solemn procession from the Great Palace to Agia Sophia: On the festival day this tank is filled with ten thousand jars of wine and a thousand jars of white honey, and the whole is spiced with a camel’s load of nard, cloves and cinnamon . . . When the Emperor leaves the Palace and enters the church he sees the statues and the spiced wine that flows from their mouths and their ears, gathering in the basin below until it is full. Each person in the procession . . . gets a brimming cup of this wine.109 Immediately after Easter the dead may once again be invited to join the festivity. At the village of Olympos on Karpathos on White Tuesday (two days after Easter Sunday), women place dishes of food beside the graves in the village cemetery, such as kollyba (one more mixture of multiple seeds, nuts and fruit), cakes, wine, orange juice, cheese, sweets and fruit, and the priest says a prayer over each grave.110 261