A brilliant English invention, this tart, lemony cream is truly irresistible!
Our trees are brimming with fragrant lemons and I made lots of marmalade with and without Seville oranges; I also made lemon liqueur, and this year I took the time and candied some peels (see recipe). I was inspired by the exquisite “tasty, bite size, fruit candy” my friend June Taylor–the marmalade-maker par excellence–makes! (more…)
I substituted my garden’s fava pods for the elegant green asparagus in David Tanis’ brilliant Spanish Asparagus Revuelto; the result is a humble, yet deliciously satisfying dish of scrambled eggs with fava and garlic.
Inventive Mediterranean cooks use any seasonal vegetable, herb or green, and combine them with eggs to make frittata or froutalia —the Greek version. I am thrilled to discover revueltos, the simple Spanish stir-fry of vegetables and eggs, similar to what we call strapatsada in Greece –from the Italian uova strapazzate(scrambled eggs). (more…)
On Saturday before the Holy Week, in many parts of Greece women used to bake anthropomorphic breads called ‘lazarakia’ to celebrate St Lazarus’ resurrection.
According to the old customs groups of girls called lazarines used to go around the village from home to home carrying baskets decorated with spring flowers and aromatic herbs, singing Lazarus’s carols and announcing the coming Easter feast:
“…Wake up Lazarus today is your day of joy {…}
Tomorrow is Palm Sunday and we’ll eat mackerel
but next Sunday we will feast on Easter lamb!” (more…)
Based on my mother’s recipe my version of the ubiquitous dish is more like a gratin as it was probably in the old days.
In the late ‘80ies, when I first started to research the origin of various popular Greek dishes, I was convinced that the current version of béchamel-topped mousaka was invented during the golden years of the Ottoman Empire, probably in the spectacular kitchens of Topkapi Palace, in Istanbul. Maybe a creative French-educated cook enriched the traditional Middle Eastern dish with the classic French sauce, I thought. But further investigation revealed that before the early twentieth century there was no mousaka as we know it today.
It is not surprising that the most popular Greek dishes throughout the world are not the chickpea or bean soup, the yellow split peas or the stewed mixed seasonal vegetables and greens that most Greeks ate regularly up until the late 1960ies. Those dishes only recently started to be part of the menu of upscale Greek restaurants, after the health benefits of the Mediterranean Diet were publicized. Mousaka, pasticcio, Greek salad, and maybe youvetsi (baked lamb with orzo in tomato sauce) are the dishes most non-Greeks consider to be the epitome of Greek cooking. Yet, most of those dishes have very little to do with traditional foods. They were developed, or drastically revised, by professional cooks and restaurant owners who were particularly interested to please the Athenian upper class of the early 20th century. The cosmopolitan Greeks of Smyrna (Izmir today) and Alexandria, in Egypt, were brought up eating mainly French-inspired foods in these prosperous cities of the Mediterranean, thus favored tamed, sweet and creamy combinations of traditional oriental favorites –like the eggplant casserole; dishes that also pleased the palates of European and American visitors. (more…)
