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The traditional
Greek Village Salad |
 WHERE’S THE
LETTUCE? (Monday, August 9): Most Greek Salads did not include
lettuce. That’s because when beautiful Adonis tried to steal
Hera, Zeus’s wife, the angry father of the gods turned the
would-be lover boy into a wilted head of lettuce. Nobody wants
to be…a wilted lover. Now, of course we do thank the Greeks
for giving us a very important lettuce. It was originally grown
on the Greek Island of Cos. Therefore, it was called Cos lettuce.
In fact, to many old timers in the produce industry, it is still
Cos. However, one day, one Greek said, “Heh, Joe.” Are
there any Greeks named Joe? Oh well. “Heh Joe. Look at that
Cos lettuce over there. See the cupped leaves? Doesn’t that
look just like the cupped wooden table spoon used by the Roman
Emperor?” “Why, yes it does, Frank,” Joe replies.
Are there any Greeks named Frank? Oh well. “Let’s call
that lettuce Roman lettuce.” So they did. We call that lettuce
today, Romaine. The dish that brought Greek cuisine fame worldwide
is, no doubt, a salad. Greeks call it horiatiki; the rest of the
world knows it as Greek village salad. It appears on the menus
of Greek and Mediterranean restaurants, from Athens to Adelaide.
It's simple -a mixture of tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, green peppers,
olives, oregano, olive oil, salt and, more often than not, it's
crowned by a wedge of feta cheese. What determines its quality
though is the taste and flavor of the ingredients that comprise
it. Greek sun-and-vine-ripened tomatoes, crisp cucumbers, aromatic
peppers and oregano, intensely flavored Greek olive oil are the
standard bearers for this dish; without them, the salad is flat
and tasteless. The key to all Greek salads is the freshness of
ingredients, and to this day cooks respect the seasons when it
comes to composing a good salad. Any self-respecting Greek cook,
in other words, would never make a horiatiki salad in January.
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| If the Greek food brings happiness
and a warm smile, than your Greek host
has been successful |
(Tuesday, August 10): Socrates,
Plato, and Aristotle were to Greek philosophy as Wheat, Wine
and Olive
Oil are to Greek food. Food, for the Greeks, had all sorts of
religious and philosophical meaning. The Greeks,
to begin with, never ate meat unless it had been sacrificed to
a god, or had
been hunted in the wild. They believed that it was wrong to kill
and eat a tame, domesticated animal without first sacrificing
it to the gods. Even with vegetables, many Greeks believed that
particular foods were cleaner or dirtier, or that certain gods
liked certain foods better than other foods. The Pythagoreans,
for example, would not eat beans. But even if you were not a
Pythagorean, the Greeks tended to think of the god Dionysos whenever
they drank wine (which was often), and to think of Demeter and
Persephone whenever they ate bread. The Greeks ate mainly the
Mediterranean triad, wheat (or barley or millet), wine, and olive
oil. They didn't have foods that came from the Americas - tomatoes,
corn or potatoes - because America hadn't been discovered by
the Europeans yet. They grew vegetables, especially legumes (lentils,
beans, peas, chickpeas), but also onions, cabbage and greens.
The ancient Greeks did not have sugar, so they satisfied their
sweet tooth with fresh fruit, such as figs, dates, pomegranates
and apples. Every inhabitant of Athens, Greece, including Plato,
was a “philosykos.” Literally translated, “a
friend of the fig.” As a token of honor, the early Olympic
athletes used figs as a training food, and figs were also presented
as laurels to the winners as the first Olympic “medal.” The
foods Greeks dream of are not elaborate and complicated, but
based on the humble but delicious regional produce: Seasonal
vegetables, leafy greens, grains, mainly in the form of homemade
bread, fruity olive oil, home cured olives, beans and other legumes,
local cheeses, yogurt, occasionally fresh or cured fish, and
sometimes meat. Bread used to be the basic staple food, as it
was in ancient and Byzantine times. Although now people can afford
a great variety of foods, Greeks still consume enormous quantities
of bread. Every meal ends with seasonal fruits, while sweets
are part of the festive table, which almost always involves meat,
lamb in most occasions. Common dishes like the green bean, eggplant,
potato or zucchini stew, cooked in lemon or tomato sauce are
called ladera (i.e. cooked in olive oil). Greek food may be simple,
down to earth and forgiving, but Greek food is never plain. It
is tied to the natural produce of each region making the most
of it and changes with the seasons. In the homes, people still
don't make stuffed tomatoes or melitzanosalata (eggplant dip)
during the winter months, although one now finds these vegetables
all year round. Every day, the ingenious Greek cook manages to
create a new, interesting and delicious dish from the same few,
humble ingredients. Let’s take horta –the wild or
cultivated greens— as an example: Horta are steamed or
blanched and made into salad, simply dressed with lemon juice
and olive oil; they are sautéed with onions or garlic
and supplemented with homemade pasta or cheese to make a more
substantial meal. Greens are also added to a flour-based soup
or porridge to feed the family, or mixed into batter and fried
to make patties. When meat or poultry are available, the greens
can be added to it and finished with avgolemono, the delicious
egg and lemon sauce, to create a Sunday meal. And, of course,
the various greens are the base of many pies, large or small,
baked or fried. And let’s not forget the Olives. Greece
is the only European country that gives time off to its civil
servants so that they can travel back to their villages to pick
the Olives during harvest season. The food ancient Greeks ate
varied a good deal from time to time and from place to place.
So you'll need to read about each time and place separately.
There are some things all these times and places had in common,
though. First, there was no refrigeration or freezers. It was
very hard to keep food from going bad. People did a lot of different
things to preserve food. They dried fruit to make raisins, prunes,
dried peas, and dried apples. They pickled vegetables, meat,
and fish in
brine (salty water) to make pickles and garum, a fermented fish
sauce. They fermented grape juice and apple juice
and barley to turn them into wine and
cider and beer.
They made
yogurt
and cheese. They smoked meat from pigs to
make ham and bacon. Honey also acts as a good preservative. Second,
because
it was so hard to carry things from one place to another without
canals or trains or trucks, people usually could only eat what
was available in their area at that time of year. If there was
a shortage of food because of bad
weather or crop diseases, people
starved. Even in a good year, it was impossible to get fresh
vegetables in the wintertime! Third, before Christopher Columbus
came to America in 1492 , and even for some time after that,
many of the foods we eat today were not known in Europe, Africa,
or Western
Asia. They had no potatoes, no tomatoes, no corn-on-the-cob
(maize). Europeans also had not yet gotten rice or citrus fruits
(lemons and oranges) from China. Indian spices like cinnamon
and pepper were available in Europe, but they were very expensive.
And they didn't know how to make noodles. Try cooking some food
in the style of different places and times. You could make yogurt,
or dry fruit (if the weather is nice and there is plenty of sunshine
where you are), or salt pork. You might have a cider-pressing
party. You could pickle some cucumbers in brine. They had no
sugar, so try eating food without sugar. Use only figs and dried
fruit to sweeten your food. Or to really get into the Olympics,
have a Kabob party, a Gyro party or a Pita Sandwich Buffet.
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| Cucumber Tzatziki |
CUCUMBER AND FENNEL (Wednesday, August
11): In today’s segment, Your Produce Man shows the ingredients
for a very popular dish, Tzatziki. In this recipe, he also adds
some Fennel, which is not uncommon to Greek food.
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| Red Bell Pepper Soup can be
served hot or cold |
RED BELL PEPPER SOUP (Thursday,
August 12): In today’s segment, Your Produce Man shows
the ingredients to Red Bell Peppers Soup, another popular
dish in Greece.
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| Baba Ghanoush starts
out
with Eggplant. |
EGGPLANT (Friday, August
13): Get out the Pita bread. “Eggplant Caviar” (baba ghanoush)
is a popular Greek spread. The largest serving of baba ghanoush
was prepared in on June 28, 2001. The recipe began: “Take
5,500 pounds of Eggplant…” Eggplant grows in the
same regions of the world where a lot of olives are grown. There
is a practicality to that. You see, Eggplants soak up a lot of
oil in cooking, so you better have a lot of olive oil on hand.
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