Like most Greek-Americans I have always considered dolmathes a dish that belongs exclusively to Greek culinary traditions. I have vivid memories of watching my dad, the family cook, make them and taste memories of restaurant versions, especially in the down-and-dirty Greek restaurants on Ninth Avenue in New York City where savored many Sunday meals...
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,...
No other ingredient in the Greek larder affords the breadth of possibilities that fava does. Fava, to a Greek, is a bean puree. Its name refers to the end result—the mashed beans—and has nothing to do with what Americans and Italians know as fava, the broad bean. In Greece, most fava is prepared with...
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...
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.
