YOUR PRODUCE MAN'S
Athens Olympic Recipes

GREEK "VILLAGE" SALAD
Ingredients

4 ea Ripe tomatoes
1 ea Cucumber
1 ea Onion
1 ea Green pepper
1/3 lb Feta cheese
to taste Olives
to taste Capers
1/2 cup Olive oil
to taste Oregano
to taste Salt

Instructions
· Cut the vegetables in slices and mix in a salad bowl. Top with the olives, capers and oregano and cover with "crumbled" feta cheese. Pour the olive oil evenly.

TSATZIKI
Ingredients

2 cups Pressed yogurt
1 ea Cucumber
4 cloves Pressed garlic
2 TBS Olive oil
1 tsp Vinegar
1 TBS Fresh Baby Dill (diced)
to taste Salt & Pepper

Instructions
· Grate the cucumber and strain tightly using a cloth until very dry. Mix in all the other ingredients.

SPANAKOPITA (SPINACH PIE)
Ingredients

2 lbs Spinach
2/3 lb Diced green onions
1 bunch Diced Baby Dill
1 ea Finely chopped leek
2 ea Eggs
1 1/2cup Olive oil
1 lb Filo pastry
to taste Salt & Pepper

Instructions
· Clean and boil the spinach lightly. Strain it well and chop it.
· Brown the green onions and the leek lightly in a pot using half the olive oil. Remove from the heat and add the dill, the eggs, the spinach and salt & pepper.
· Oil a pan and spread half the sheets of filo sheets. Spread the spinach mix on top and then cover with the other sheets. Oil the top and bake in medium oven for about 1 hr.

SKORTHALIA
Ingredients

5 - 6 Cloves Garlic
1/3 lb Boiled Potatoes
1/2 Cup Olive Oil
Sprinkle of Vinegar
To taste Salt

Instructions
· Skin and mash the garlic. Add the potatoes and mash them as well while slowly adding the olive oil. Salt and vinegar to taste.

BRIAM
Ingredients

2 lb Zucchini
2 lb Potatoes
2 lb Eggplants
1 ea Green pepper
3 ea Sliced onions
2 ea Thinly sliced green onions
2 lb Ripe peeled tomatoes
1 bunch Diced parsley
to taste Salt & Pepper

Instructions
· Clean and chop all the vegetables in large pieces. Bake in a deep pan for about 1 1/2 hr (medium oven).

FASOLAKIA
Ingredients

2 lbs Fresh green beans
1 Large chopped onion
4 Potatoes
4 Ripe tomatoes
3 Sliced onions
Some chopped garlic
Chopped parsley
Pinch of sugar
To taste Salt & Pepper

Instructions
· Clean and wash the beans.
· Warm the oil in a pot and simmer the onions and throw in the rest of the ingredients, except for the potatoes, with a little bit of water and leave the beans to slowly cook for 20 minutes.
· Cut the potatoes in 4 wedges and put them in the pot last. If needed put in more water and let the food boil for a while. Serve hot.

ROAST POTATOES
Ingredients
12 Peeled and chopped potatoes
4-5 Lemons
2-3 cups Chicken broth
1/4 cup Shortening
as needed Olive oil
4 clove Garlic
to taste Oregano
to taste Salt & Pepper
Instructions
· Wash the potatoes. Cut into quarters lengthwise, and place in a large and deep enough baking pan. Sprinkle or lightly brush the potatoes with olive oil. Put the chicken broth in the pan, add the juice from 3 lemons. Season the potatoes with salt, pepper, oregano, and finely chopped garlic or garlic powder. Turn the potatoes over and repeat the seasoning.
· Cut 1/4 cup of shortening (or lard) into 1/2 in. by 1/2 in. cubes and distribute evenly amongst the potatoes. Cover the pan and place in the oven at 375 degrees for about 30-40 minutes or until the potatoes are tender inside. Uncover the potatoes and broil for a short while to brown and crips them as desired. Squeeze a lemon or two over them.

Choriatiki Salata (hoe-ree-ah-tee-key sa-lah-tah): Village salad or what we in America call a Greek Salad, except here you usually don't get lettuce. It generally consists of Tomatoes(tho-mah-tes),Cucumbers(an-goo-ree), Onions(crem-ee-thya), Feta, Oil(la-thee), vinigear (ksee-dee) and olives(ill-yes). Sometimes they leave off the feta so you have to ask for it and they charge you extra. When I order I ask for a hoe-ree-ah-tee-key meh feh-tah, a village salad with feta, just to avoid this. If you want it without any of the above items just tell the waitor: hoe-ris (without) and the name of the item. In Sifnos get it with mee-zee-thra which is a soft feta they make on the island.
Sadziki (sahd-zee-key): Yogurt, cucumber and garlic, and salt. Great on fresh Greek bread.
Spanakopita (span-ah-koh-pee-tah) Spinach pie
Patates to Fourno (pa-tah-tes toh for-no): Oven roasted potatoes. My favorite dish.
Briam(bree-am): roast vegetables. Usually contains potatoes, onions, zucchini, eggplant, garlic and tomatoes.

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 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 others. 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 also grew vegetables, especially legumes (lentils, beans, peas, chickpeas). Possibly they ate more fish than most other Mediterranean people. Also, because of their feelings about sacrificing meat, they may have eaten meat less than other people did.

The staple foods of the ancient Greek diet were olives, bread and wine. They didn't have foods that came from the Americas - tomatoes, corn or potatoes - because America hadn't been discovered by the Europeans yet.
Wine is made from grapes, so your restaurant will want to serve a substitute, such as grape juice.

Crusty breadrolls, goat cheese and olives would have been the mainstay at most meals. Greece is surrounded by water, so the ancient Greeks had a variety of fish to eat, such as mackerel and tuna. They also ate octopus, squid, and shellfish, which plays a large part in Greek cooking today. Fish would have been flavored with bay leaves, rosemary and thyme. Other meat was only ever eaten on sacrificial occasions such as religious festivals.

For vegetables, the ancient Greeks ate onions, peas, lentils, cabbage and greens. The ancient Greeks did not have sugar, so they satisfied their sweet tooth with fresh fruit, such as figs, dates and pomegranates and apples. They had no oranges or lemons. As a treat they might make small cakes sweetened with honey. The ancient Greeks would have paid for their meals using small bronze coins called drachmae. Several scientific studies have connected the diet of that region—especially Crete—to heart health. Yannis Papadimitriou, director of the Greek Trade Office in New York, says olive oil was the first product that alerted people to the Greek diet, but then they started to be aware of other facets of that cuisine. Press coverage is making consumers aware of the "Mediterranean Food Pyramid," a graphic guideline for good eating, something like the USDA Food Pyramid. It illustrates Mediterranean eating patterns, which include lots of vegetables and fruits, along with olive oil, fish and wine. No Greek Christmas season would be complete without the supreme herb, Basil. Although it is rich in associations, basil came late to Greece and it was believed to have been brought back by Alexander the Great. At Christmas, most Greek houses take a sprig of basil wrapped around a small wooden cross and suspend it over a bowl of water. Oddly enough, in Greek folklore, the days around Christmas are considered to be very dangerous ones. This is the period when the kallinkatzari, a kind of devilish sprite, can torment humans. The cross and basil are used to sprinkle the rooms of the house with holy water to prevent these attacks. Basil is also associated with St. Basil, or Agios Vassilis, a founder of the Greek Orthodox Church, whose feast day in Greece is January first. It is the name day for anyone called Vassilios or Vassiliki. On St. Basil's day, the Vassilopita is baked. This is a cake which conceals a token. The entire cake is carefully divided up - the Saint gets the first piece, then the eldest member of the household, and so on down through the family, sometimes including those who live far away. A piece may even be set aside for the various kinds of livestock the household raises. St Basil's day is also when all vessels of water in the household are replaced with fresh water. But here the veil of orthodoxy wears a little thin - this is also the day for offerings to the naiads, spirits of local springs, to ensure the continued flow of the waters and to thank them for the previous year.

As any of the latest naval stand offs between Turks and Greeks in the Aegean shows, the Greeks are not much amenable to the idea that their food might be indebted to Turkish cooking. It is commonplace for Greek food writers to introduce Greek cuisine as one “shaped through over 3,000 years of history.”1 The sumptuous feasts described by Homer or Plato and menus from Athenaeus--all this will be described as part of the Greek culinary heritage. Sometimes it can get rather silly, such as the comment of one writer that “When you start your day with rolls and coffee, you are following an ancient Greek custom.”2 One Greek writer went so far as to state that Greek cuisine is twenty-five centuries old and is the ur-cuisine that the Turks, Italians, and other Europeans borrowed from, not the other way around.3 Nicolas Tselementes was a noted Greek food authority who claimed the Greeks influenced western European foods via Rome; he traced the ancestry of such dishes as keftedes, dolmades, moussaka, and yuvarelakia to ancient Greek preparations that subsequently became masked behind Turkish and European names. He also said that bouillabaisse was an offspring of the Greek kakavia.4

The Greek food writers are right about one thing: Greece is the source for an original European cuisine, just as it is the source of Western philosophy. The Hellenist influence on the Mediterranean is no doubt a powerful and important one and should not be underestimated. But whether it is the only font to Mediterranean cuisine is another matter. Greek culinary nationalism has hindered any reasoned debate and research on this question of the degree to which the Greek people preserved and maintained the classical heritage through 2,500 years, including Roman occupation, barbarian invasions, and 500 years of occupation by the Turks, not to mention interference and occupation by Venetians, Genoese, and Catalans. They ignore the fact that the majority population of peninsular Greece in the Middle Ages was Slav.5 They also underemphasize the importance of the Byzantine Empire, the Greek successor state to the Roman Empire in the East.

The Byzantine Empire saw its most glorious period in the sixth century. A new period of splendor also occurred in the ninth and tenth centuries, but after the Turkish victory at Manzikert (Malazgirt) in 1071 the fortunes of Byzantium declined. The empire broke up when the Crusaders captured Constantinople in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade, and continued as a truncated state, ever-shrinking in the face of the Ottoman Turks and vainly begging for aid from the West. Finally, Constantinople fell to Mohammed II in 1453 and the Byzantine Empire was extinguished forever. But this Greek civilization certainly left important culinary artifacts, and these culinary influences from Byzantium are a more likely Greek contribution than that from classical Greece as claimed by so many writers. We know that there were Byzantine mechanical devices such as one for preparing dough using animal power, apparently invented at the end of the tenth century. We can surmise that there was other important culinary transfers as well. Unfortunately, there are no comparative historical studies of Greek and Turkish food by disinterested third-party scholars, although at least one Greek scholar believes his countrymen claim too much ownership.6 In any case, all claims regarding the heritage of Greek food must be taken with a grain of salt for Greek culinary history still awaits its Maxime Rodinson. As the scholar of medieval Hellenism Speros Vryonis Jr. warned: “In matters of cuisine the conquerors undoubtedly absorbed some items from the conquered, but the problem is again obscured by a similarity in Byzantine and Islamic cuisine which probably existed before the appearance of the Turks.”7 Turkmen cuisine was very simple, usually produced from their flocks, with products such as milk, yogurt, butter, and cheese, with grains such as millet, fruit, honey, eggs, and a type of pancake cooked on a hot iron griddle. Vyronis states that the elaborate Turkish cuisine that came later was foreign to the Turkmen nomads and belonged to the native cuisine of the eastern Mediterranean. There is a similarity between the sweets of the Turks and those of the Byzantines, he argues, where one finds dough, sesame, nuts, honey, and fruits, as the Byzantine pastilla shows. The Turkish baklava was known as kopton and Athenaeus gives a recipe. (Athenaeus, XIV, 647-48). Cheese, borëk, and pastirma were all known to the Byzantines, as was the roasting of meat on a spit. The above argument by Vyronis has been convincingly challenged by Charles Perry, who says that Vyronis misread the Greek text of Athenaeus and that the simple food of Turkic nomads may actually have been the mother of invention for more complex preparations, like layered doughs for bread, see Perry 1994: 87-91. For my part, I am convinced of the possibility that contemporary Greek food, when it is not directly taken from the Turks or Italians, has its roots more properly in the Greek Byzantium than it does in the classical era.

The history of Greek food is as complicated as Greek history. Listening today, one would think that the boundary between Greek and Turkish is true and clear--but it isn’t, for although Greece was part of the Ottoman Empire for a long time, the Greeks themselves sometimes benefited from a pax turcica. In the Middle Ages the Greek peasants of Anatolia rose up against the towns where their Greek landlords lived, converted to Islam, and welcomed the Turkish nomads arriving from the East. Remember, too, that the Greeks helped the Turkish expedition against Crete in the seventeenth century because they hated the Venetians. Before the Turks, Greece was under the scourge of the Catalans who took Athens in 1311 and set up their own dynasty, not to mention the Florentines in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. By the mid-fourteenth century, parts of Greece were falling to the Turks and the great Greek capital of Constantinople fell in 1453, a momentous event. Some of the most famous admirals in the Turkish service were Greeks, such as the corsair Khayr al-Din (Barbarossa) and possibly Kemal Re’is, whose fleet defeated the Venetians off Modon in 1500. When the Turks overran Greece, they populated the fertile plains of Thessaly and western Macedonia but were never really able to conquer the mountains. These mountain Greeks, the famous Klephts, often raided the plains, attacking both Greeks and Turks. The Turks sometimes used the institution of the Greek armatoloi (men at arms) to track down the Klephts. There were also Greek tribal communities left completely untouched by the Ottoman forces, such as the Suli of Epirus (Ipiros), the Máni in the Peloponnesus and the Sphakia on Crete. These tribes were semi-autonomous communities left unmolested by the Ottomans in their impregnable mountain confederations. They rarely interacted with the Turks, except occasionally when the Ottomans compelled them to pay tribute if they had sufficient troops in a local area to do so.8

The rivalry between the Houses of Anjou and Aragon over the island of Sicily affected Greek history of the late thirteenth century more than any other cause. Once peace came to Sicily, the Catalan auxiliaries of Aragon sought their mercenary adventure in Greece, wrecking havoc on the Greeks and the Frankish rulers of the Levant. The Catalans ruled Attica and Boetia for seventy-five years until Athens was taken by Nerio Acciaiuoli, a member of a famous Florentine banking and arms manufacturing family in 1388 and the Greeks subjugated. The position of the Greeks during this time is reflected in Catalan, Sicilian, and Florentine documents where, when concerned with Greece, the Greeks remain nameless.9 For a hundred years Greece was dominated by this conflict, only to fall to the Ottoman Turks in short order.10 By the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries there was an upsurge in Greek ethnic awareness that sustained the Greeks as a people through four centuries of Turkish rule. This spirit was fostered and guided by the Greek Orthodox Church. Whatever exists in the way of a unique Greek cuisine more than likely derives from the efforts of the orthodox church in sustaining Greek Byzantine culture, rather than from the classical period, and was influenced by mountain Greeks who were not so easily subjugated by occupying powers.

Unfortunately, we don’t have any information about what culinary traditions or recipes may have been preserved in Greek Orthodox monasteries outside of folkloric apocrypha. The number of fasting days in the Greek Orthodox calender are numerous, and the Greeks are a devout people, so many preparations were created for special religious occasions or for the particular needs of fasting. The most important holiday for the Greeks is Easter, celebrated by Christians as the anniversary of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The following recipes are some examples of foods that might find their way onto a menu for a variety of religious holidays.

“The Greeks' fierce pride in their heritage has kept the basic culture intact. Whether a slave under Roman rule, a captive under Turkish domination, or a newly arrived immigrant, the Greek is always aware that he is the direct descendant of men like Plato, Homer, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Aristophanes. The Greek who begins life in a new land on the bottom step of society as a dishwasher needs only to remember how Aesop left a legacy of poetry while cooking as a slave.”

Food-related evidence from ancient Mediterranean cultures is diversified and vast. Carbonized seeds that date to the 10th millennium B.C.E. reveal hunting-gathering economies. Domestication of plants and animals in the region was followed by herding and settled agriculture. Stone technologies of the Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic gave way to smelting of copper, bronze, and iron. Iron Age settlements ultimately evolved into
sophisticated urban centers exemplified by ancient Athens and Rome.

Great civilizations leave written texts. Throughout the eastern Mediterranean archaeologists and linguists have poured over and deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Phoenician alphabet, and have traced food-related terms from earliest Greek to into Classical and Hellenistic Periods, and earliest Latin to Republican and Empire texts, and ultimately into Byzantine and ecclesiastical Latin expressions. An impressive body of
literature has survived from antiquity that documents agricultural practices, food storage, cooking and dietary patterns.