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The scene was as incongruous as it was endearing: One fine spring day just as we were walking along the outskirts of the old city of Rhodes, a Chinese bride and groom Chinese– dressed in full nuptial regalia and with an entourage of friends and family, were having their pictures taken. In the distance along […]
The Cretan Diet has become synonymous with the Mediterranean Diet, which has gained so much attention as one of the world’s most healthful. Crete was one of the original places observed in the now famous, and still ongoing, Seven-Countries Study begun by Dr. Ancel Keys in the late 1950s to document the rate of heart […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Looking for loukoumades… The French have their beignets, Americans have doughnuts, but Greeks have loukoumades, round dough fritters drizzled with Greek honey and sprinkled with cinnamon. For all my years in the kitchen, loukoumades are the one sweet I have never enjoyed making. The dough is wet and sticks to your hands, which you need […]