From Crete to Komotini and from Corfu to Lesvos, Diana Farr Louis takes us on a whirlwind gastronomy tour of Greek regional cuisine –which is as varied as the landscape.
For me Greek food has always been soul food. In the 1960s–when I was just a regular summer visitor–that meant the sublime dishes of my sister-in-law’s cook. Eleni prepared everything with love, and you could taste it in her strapatzada (scrambled eggs with tomatoes), her lemony fish soup, her yet-to-be-rivaled zucchini fritters. Back in New York, whenever my Greek husband and I needed a fix, we’d head for a “taverna” on 49th and 9th. There, the taramosalata, dolmades, and kalamari rings would float us back to our favorite spot on the island, even though the cooking didn’t measure up to Eleni’s.
Strangely though, even after I became a permanent resident in 1972, I was slow to discover the rich variations in Greek culinary traditions. As a New Yorker, I’d long known the difference between Szechuan and Cantonese restaurants. A year in Italy had taught me that you couldn’t even find Spaghetti alla Napoletana on the Riviera, much less Pesto alla Genovese down south. As for French cuisine, who would dare lump the cream and butter sauces of Normandy with the tomatoes, garlic and olive oil of Provence?
Strangely, too, I don’t think I was alone in my ignorance. In all of Athens, back then, the only eateries that offered a real departure from what we might call generic Greek cooking were those run by refugees from Asia Minor–from Constantinople, Smyrna or other parts of Turkey. We loved them, although it was a long drive to their neighborhoods–Nea Smyrni, Faliro, Kallithea–or their seaside restaurants in Kavouri. Some were kebab houses with Anatolian skewered meats or casseroles seasoned with chili peppers and cumin; others specialized in deep fried mussels–a common sidewalk snack in Istanbul–dipped into skordalia, creamy, pungent garlic sauce.
Until 1990, I divided Greek food into categories like summer and winter, or coastal and mountain. Or in other words, tomato salads vs cabbage and lettuce salads; grilled fish and grilled octopus vs grilled baby lamb chops and braided, spitted or stewed innards. Exploring the country had made me aware of some memorable local treats: cheese and greens pies the size of a centurion’s shield in the Zagorohoria (Epirus), more mussels in Thessaloniki, Santorini’s tomato keftedes (fritters), not to mention the amazing tsipouradika of Volos, where you were forced to choose from as many as a hundred mezedes to keep from passing out on tsipouro.
Ironically, it took an English woman to initiate me into the real world of Greek regional cooking. June Marinos had married a man from Zakynthos after the second world war and over the years had compiled dozens of recipes and even more stories about “her” Ionian island and Kefallonia. She convinced me that we should write an Ionian cookbook.
The research for Prospero’s Kitchen took us from Corfu to Kythera, islands that had never experienced Ottoman occupation but instead were ruled by Venetians and British for almost five centuries. There dishes have Italian-sounding names like Saltsa, Bianco, Pastitsada, Sofrito, and Venetzianiko Pastitsio, a wondrous macaroni pie that merits several paragraphs in Lampedusa’s The Leopard. At the same time, English puddings and Western-style cakes are far more common than fyllo pastries laced with honey, for the baklava family of desserts all hail from Turkey and the Middle East. But while Ionian foods may sound Italian, they have their own identity and are typically redolent of fresh herbs and garlic or lemon and tomato (sometimes together). Each island has its own characteristic deep-dish meat pie; the Zakynthians like to add cubed cheese to their stews; and the Corfiots sprinkle hot paprika liberally, though the origin of that practice is uncertain.
My discovery of Ionian cooking coincided with the opening in Athens of a restaurant dedicated to promoting Greek regional cuisines. Every month Timos Petridis at Kallisti would feature a different part of the country; his menus were lessons in gastronomy for the untutored or nostalgia trips for those in “exile”. Many Athenians can thank him for introducing us to such novelties as caramelized onions from the Dodecanese, Macedonian sarmades (stuffed cabbage), or the manti (ravioli) of the Pontic Greeks in Thrace.
Soon afterwards, the Cretan Diet began making headlines internationally. Studies acclaimed the benefits of a regimen based on plentiful olive oil, wild greens, pulses, snails and walnuts, sheep and goat’s cheeses over cow’s, and a glass of wine rather than milk. Before you could say “Zorba”, Cretan restaurants were popping up all over Athens, serving dakos (chopped tomatoes and fresh cheese atop a thick barley rusk), bite-sized pies filled with cheese or greens or both, snails sautéed with vinegar and rosemary, to name just a few favorites. In 1997, I went to Crete to see for myself and spent the next four years, on and off, tasting and scribbling recipes in hospitable kitchens all over the island.
What makes Cretan cooking different? Superb raw materials like the oil and vegetables, the extraordinary wealth of greens and cheeses, to be sure, but also a penchant for unusual combinations. Grouper with artichokes or okra, octopus with green olives and fennel, cuttlefish with string beans are just a few. Crete possesses an extremely diverse topography: high mountains, a long indented coast, fertile plains, all of which influence the cuisine. Some dishes like the pancake-like pies of Sfakia and a clotted cream called staka are not found in the east, which has a near monopoly on raisin and nut pastries.
Besides geography, history has also left its imprint on the island’s gastronomy. Besides Venetian echoes in some pasta names, there are Jewish dishes from Hania and curious rice and meat recipes left over from Byzantine days. Surprisingly, practically no traces of three centuries of Ottoman rule exist in the food–was that a form of passive resistance?–but Anatolian flavors are widespread. In the population exchange of the 1920s, some 13,000 Greek Orthodox “Turks” arrived to replace the 30,000 Muslim Cretans who were deported to Turkey. They brought with them little but their music and their recipes for dishes we think of now as quintessentially Greek: pilafs embellished with pine nuts and raisins, rice or ground meat or both wrapped in leaves or stuffed into hollowed vegetables, egg-lemon sauces, semolina puddings–halva–in a rainbow of flavors, and all the delicate oriental desserts. The locals adopted the newcomers’ love of cumin, so that now in eastern Crete cooks season with alato-kymino (salt and cumin) instead of salt and pepper.
Sophisticated Anatolian spices and techniques are found even more frequently in the northern regions of Macedonia and Thrace, which received the largest numbers of refugees. Here, the very idea of an homogenous Greek cuisine loses its meaning. In addition to restaurants dedicated to the gastronomy of Constantinople and the Turkish coast, there are others that serve Pontic stuffed pastas, bulgur pilafs, and piroshki from the Black Sea area. Seafood emporia fill the coasts and cities like Thessaloniki, Kavala, and Alexandroupoli, while in the Muslim districts of Komotini and Xanthi, cooks beguile the hungry with desserts like kazan dipi, a kind of baked, caramelized custard, and a slew of dishes whose names end in “oglu”.
What’s more, butter not olive oil reigns in the north, where the trees would not survive the harsh winters. And the inland tavernas of central and western Macedonia boast many Balkan specialties, such as pickled cabbage, stews spiced with paprika or sweetened with fruit (most southern Greeks abhor the combination of sweet and savory), peppers of all ilks, lake fish . Some products are famous throughout Greece, like Florina peppers, Kozani saffron, Prespes beans, and Drama cured meats.
To the south and east, the great plain of Thessaly and the mountains of Epirus fostered a pastoral tradition still evident in their cuisine. From here come the foods so closely associated with Greece: roast lamb on the spit, feta and its countless uses, trahana (an ancient pasta made with dairy), meat baked with yogurt, and pies, pies, pies–like everywhere else in Greece, which must have as many variations on the theme as there are cooks.
Speaking of variations, this is where the Aegean islands come in. Each of the Cyclades, for example, has its own specialties. Though they are united by a general theme of oil, fish, cheese, preserved meats and sausages, I’m always struck by local differences. Santorini is a case in point. The volcanic island has few resources, practically no earth, water, or trees. And yet, its cooks have raised the lowly yellow split pea (fava) to gourmet heights; its “waterless” tomatoes and sweet white eggplant are unsurpassed; and pungent capers season both cooked foods and salads.
Gentle Syros loves the caper, too, but also produces excellent cheeses, as do most of the Cyclades. Look for chickpea soups and casseroles on Sifnos, froutalia (a rich omelette) on Andros, wild fennel fritters on Tinos, sausages on Mykonos, and fried potatoes on Naxos so delicious we’d have a second helping for dessert.
The larger Aegean islands have distinct cultures and affinities with the nearby Turkish coast. Lesvos is famous for its sardines, olive oil, and ouzo; Chios mastic flavors its breads and biscuits, but also main dishes; Limnos produces durum wheat and glorious seafood; Samos, best known for wine, also does wonderful things with beans. Even tiny Samothraki has a specialty: an unlimited supply of wild goats and scores of recipes for cooking them.
Much more can be said about every corner of Greece, but the good news is that local dishes are far easier to find than they were in the past. Regional specialty shops and restaurants have opened all over Athens and other cities, while kitchen-sized factories and women’s cooperatives are salvaging recipes that were in danger of vanishing, and even marketing them online. Each represents a specific concatenation of history, geography and the imaginations of generations of cooks who did their best to feed their families in more times of famine than of feast.
Isn’t that what soul food is?