Honey, Olives, Octopus

H o n e y , O l i v e s , O c t o p u s Th e publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the General Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation. Honey, Olives, Octopus Adventures at the Greek Table christopher bakken Illustrations by Mollie Katzen university of california press Berkeley Los Angeles London University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu . University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England ©2013 by Th e Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bakken, Christopher. Honey, olives, octopus : adventures at the Greek table / Christopher Bakken. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-520-27509-6 (cloth, alk. paper) 1. Cooking, Greek. 2. Bakken, Christopher. 3. Subject—Social life and customs. I. Title. TX723.5.G8B28 2013 641.59495—dc23 2012026481 Manufactured in the United States of America 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 In keeping with its commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Book, which contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z 39.48-1992 ( R 1997) ( Permanence of Paper ) . F o r m y m o t h e r , Karen Seibel This page intentionally left blank In the afternoon heat I pick olives, Th e leaves the loveliest of greens: I’m light from head to toe. N a z i m H i k m e t This page intentionally left blank contents List of Illustrations xi Acknowledgments xiii Prologue xv 1. Olives: Th e Th roumbes of Th asos 1 2. Bread: Th e Prozymi of Kyria Konstandina 29 3. Fish: Tailing Barbounia 54 4. Cheese: Th e Stinky Cheeses of Naxos 87 5. Meat: Goats in the Ghost Towns of Chios 118 6. Beans: Chasing Chickpeas at Plati Yialós 142 7. Wine: Another Carafe at Prionia 168 8. Honey: Th e Th yme Honey of Aphrodite 193 Epilogue: At the Still in the Hills 221 Sources 231 Index 235 This page intentionally left blank illustrations 1. Olives ready for harvest at Alyki, Th asos 4 2. View from the balcony of Pension Archontissa, Th asos 7 3. Roman-era marble quarry at Alyki, Th asos 9 4. Tasos and Stamatis Kouzis harvesting olives with mechanical tsougrana 12 5. Kyria Konstandina and her Cretan bread 34 6. Dalabelos Estate, stretching north toward the coast near Rethymno, Crete 37 7 . Th e horse-shaped rock at Bámbouras, Th asos 67 8. Stamatis pulls in the Evanthoula 75 9 . Barbounia at the Modiano market, Th essaloniki 76 1 0 . Th e Portara of Naxos 89 11. Naxian cheeses, in various states of ripeness 99 1 2 . Cherisia makaronia at Taverna Makellos, Chios 130 13. Chora, the whitewashed capital of Serifos 151 xi 14. Yannis Protopsaltis and Eleni Petrocheilou, Kythira 198 15. Yannis Protopsaltis inspects his bees 213 1 6 . Th e still in the hills, Th asos 224 17. Tasos emptying the still after dark 226 18. Nikos and Stamatis Kouzis, in song 229 xii Illustrations a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s I owe sincere thanks to those cooks, artisans, restaurateurs, wine folk, agriculturalists, and friends who entertained my questions and invited me to their kitchens and farms: Eva and Stamatis Kouzis, Karolin Giritlioglu, Kyria Konstandina of Dalabelos Estate, Vasilis Petrodaskalakis, Elefthe- ria Pelekanaki, Pelayia Konsolaki, Nikos Bernikos, Yorgos Babounis, George Atsalinos, Aris and Maria Monovasios, Rita and Yorgos Paraskevopoulou, Dimitris Yerondalis, Markus Stoltz, Yannis and Chris Fekos, Maria Mavrianou, Michalis Makellos, Dimitris Triantafi lopoulos, Michalis and Katarina Pro- topsaltis, Yannis, Maria, and Athanasia Protopsaltis, and Eleni Petrocheilou. Special thanks to Dimitris, Christina, Spyros, and Nikolas Panteleimonitis. I am grateful to those who off ered advice, enthusiasm, and research assistance: Titos and Renna Patrikios, John Psaropoulos and A. E. Stallings, Michael and Kay Bash, David Mason, Leon Saltiel, Jeremiah Chamberlin, David Yoder, Aliki Barnstone, Adrianne Kalfopoulou, Christian Nicolaides, Elaina Mercatoris, Allison Wilkins, Herbert Leibowitz, Willard Spiegelman, Tamar Adler, Scott Cairns and Marcia Vanderlip, Carolyn Forché, Pam Hous- ton, Greg Glazner, and the team at Regal Literary, especially Michael Strong and Markus Hoff man. xiii Th e book couldn’t have been written without support for research and travel provided by Allegheny College. Parts of this book have appeared, in somewhat diff erent form, in the following publications: Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Th e Southwest Review , and Odyssey: Th e World of Greece . Roula Konsolaki, Natalie Bakopoulos, and Joanna Eleftheriou off ered helpful comments on the manuscript. For her drawings, I thank Mollie Katzen. For his editorial brilliance and generosity, I am indebted to Ben Downing, il miglior fabbro . Th ank you, Corey Marks and Darrin Pochan, for your appetites (and thank you for not drowning). Oscar, Karen, and Heidi Seibel: thank you for cheering my wanderlust. Th anks to my brother, Aaron Bakken, for picking olives alongside me. Th anks to my Greek brothers, George Kaltsas and Tasos Kouzis. And, fi nally, thanks to my wife, Kerry, and my children, Sophia and Alexander, who sent me off to Greece with their blessings and welcomed me back home with love. xiv Acknowledgments p r o l o g u e I had just arrived in Th essaloniki and was hungry. Th e college promised me a nifty apartment on campus, but it was still being painted. In the meantime, I’d be sleeping in a storage room in the basement of the gymnasium, where a rudimentary cot and a reading table had been installed. Th ere was nothing in the refrigerator. Everyone else had gone to the beach for the weekend, so it was up to George Kassiopides, director of physical education, to orient me. Like Jack LaLanne, the exercise guru who had kangarooed through the television commercials of my childhood, Kassiopides was a wasp-waisted calisthenic addict with an inflated chest. He had a big, round, craggy face, atop which a merry mess of blonde curls was splattered, and he sped around campus on a coughing moped, elbows and knees akimbo, tornadoes of pine needles spinning in his wake. Kassiopides knew everything when it came to action and adventure, and it was he who taught me to hunt for octopus later that fi rst year in Greece. I still fi nd ingenious his trick of diving with an old pair of panty hose (nothing else seems to contain a just-harpooned octopus quite as well). But he didn’t have much to say about where I should eat on a sleepy Sunday afternoon. xv “Take the bus into town and maybe you’ll fi nd something,” he told me. So I wound up in a sorry little taverna across from the bus stop in the suburb of Harilaou. Seated at a corner table, where I thought I’d be less conspicuous, I tried to decipher the menu with my pocket dictionary. Th e Greek language grates “like the anchor chain,” V. S. Naipaul says, and until I learned six or eight phrases on the soccer fi eld (most of them obscene), Greek was indeed a clattering gibberish to me. I couldn’t tell where individual words started and ended. Where did one even place the accents in “Th essaloniki,” this city of a million inhabitants where I’d be teaching literature for the next two years? When the waiter came around, I pointed at three arbitrary items on the menu. It was not a spectacular meal, in hindsight, but it off ered a foretaste of the hundreds of exquisite meals I’d have in Greece over the next two decades. First came chtipiti , a fi ery mash of feta and hot peppers; then pikantiki , a salad of raw cabbage, carrot, parsley, and green onions; and last, a tin platter bearing a leg of octopus, still hissing from the grill. What remained on my plate when I fi nished eating—an acrid puddle of vinegar and oil, a curlicue of charred tentacle, a nubbin of bread, and a morsel of cheese—was evidence that I had made contact with the fl avor of Greece. And I wanted more. I still do, twenty years later. Since that day, almost everything I have learned about Greece I have learned at the table. Th e country’s history is written in the elements of its cuisine: olives, bread, fi sh, and cheese. Meat, beans, wine, and honey. But the future is closing in. McDonalds and Kentucky Fried Chicken have arrived. Th e Greek economy is collapsing. Both “slow food” and “local food” have existed in Greece for thousands of years, but the traditional ways are under threat as air-conditioned malls and “big box” stores replace out- door markets in Greece’s cities. Before it was too late, and before those who remembered were gone, I wanted to explore the foundations of the Greek table. To do that properly, I needed to honor what brings everything else xvi Prologue together: conversation, friendship, and the leisurely ceremony of dining around which Hellenic culture has evolved for the past several thousand years. In her classic Honey from a Weed , Patience Gray remarks that “a book about food can be as fatiguing as sitting through a six course dinner.” Th us, she proposes a “digression” now and then, “off ered like a glass of marc or eau de vie to brace the protagonists.” Following her lead, I confess to a meander- ing method of investigation.

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