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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Visit us on the Blue Zone island Ikaria, where people have the longest life spans in the world, for a week of glorious Greek cooking classes in an ancient Greek-island village.
