It was a driving trek of heroic proportions up the dirt road from Rethymnon, the historic seaside fort city on the northern coast, to the tiny village of Potamous, on one of those dusty Greek-island dirt roads that are less daunting than they seem but nonetheless make every passenger but the driver look like they […]
If there were a king of the garden, an everything to everybody sort of fruit, that would be the apple. From time immemorial, it has been a symbol of good and evil, of magic, of love, more important in religion, superstition, folklore, history and medicine than any other fruit. To the Pythagoreans and to many others after them, the […]
No other ingredient in the Greek larder affords the breadth of possibilities that fava does. Fava, to a Greek, is a bean puree. Its name refers to the end result—the mashed beans—and has nothing to do with what Americans and Italians know as fava, the broad bean. In Greece, most fava is prepared with yellow […]
In this nation of bread eaters, the subject of regional pasta is, ironically, vast. There are, indeed, dozens, if not more, different traditional Greek pastas, and certainly dozens of ways to cook them. Some are truly unusual. A Little History Pasta has always been part and parcel of the Greek larder. Common belief has it […]
Grape must is the vine’s utilitarian child. Obviously as old as the vine itself, the unfermented juice of the grape has found a place in the annals of gastronomy from earliest times, in ways which have changed surprisingly little over the centuries. The tart juice of unripe grapes, for example, was used by the ancient […]
Every neighborhood in every city of Greece has its bastion of male comradery, the local cafeneion or coffee shop. Unfortunately, most of the grand cafeneia of old have been razed and supplanted by fast food chain outlets. The neighborhood places, with few exceptions, tend to be rather colorless store fronts where retired (or inexplixcably idle) […]
A tour of the Peloponnese reveals one thing above all else: the ubiquitous presence of Greece’s most important tree, the olive tree, which seems to grow just about everywhere here, from craggy mountain slopes deep in the Mani to the great plain of Messinia, to the region’s northern reaches, along the coast of the Corinth […]
Unlike small, meatball-size chick pea fritters elsewhere in Greece and certainly a distant cry from the Egyptian falafel, the Rhodian version turns calls for big, plump filling patties. They are found, in various renditions, all over the island. Pitaroudia with chick peas are by far the national dish of Rhodes.
When I set out to search the foodlore of the Dodecanese, I thought I would find unique and wholly separate customs from island to island. But all the Aegean islands share a terse, pared down cuisine that long ago became the norm of poor sea-bound people in this part of the world. There was always […]
Rusks are an ancient food in Greece. Basically they are the twice-baked breads, in various shapes. A dearth of fuel, i.e. wood, made daily, or even weekly, baking almost extravagant in the Greek countryside. These rusks are slowly dehydrated during the second baking, which happens overnight in a wood-burning oven that is not fired up […]