Around the World in 26 Meals: No. 5 - Greece
Intro
Finally we’re going east! We’re coming to the end of what is unambiguously Europe, at least until we eventually circumnavigate the globe and loop round again. There’s a couple of transcontinental countries coming up within the next couple of months (as a clue: neither are Kazakhstan) but, nevertheless, after this post we’re onto Asia - in my view by far the best and most important continent for savoury food.
But today we’re still on the edge of Europe, in Greece. Truth be told I don’t think I need to justify this decision - Greek food is a very strong contender for being the best in Europe. It also is at the western edge of a continuum of food culture that stretches all the way from Greece to Burma/Myanmar, with the food at either end being very different but with strong commonalities between neighbours all along this path from west to east, as pilaf slowly morphs into pilau.
The book
I do actually have multiple cookbooks that cover the food of Greece, Falling Cloudberries from the Nordic post being an example, Greece and Cyprus have a chapter each in that book. However there is one book I have that attempts to be the comprehensive guide to Greek food so, really, I have to use it for this post. This is Vefa’s Kitchen, recently renamed to the disappointingly bland Greece: The Cookbook, by Vefa Alexiadou. The publisher of the book has this to say about Vefa:
“A bestselling author of thirteen cookbooks in Greece, she also has her own television series and regularly writes articles for magazines and gives lectures and demonstrations on Greek recipes. She has served on the board of the Centre for the Preservation of Traditional Greek Gastronomy.”
So I’m guessing she knows what she’s talking about. It’s a book I’ve had for a while but not really used as much as I’d like so I’m keen to use it here.
What I cooked (and adjustments)
This time I decided to omit any attempt at dessert - there wasn’t much middle ground in the recipes provided between too simple and too complex (baklava comes to mind) and if I was wanting a Greek dessert there’s actually a Greek bakery nearby.
Firstly I decided to have pork, as the next country planned for this project is majority Muslim and so are two of the next three. After that is India which, Goa and Kerala aside, doesn’t tend to do pork. So pork’s probably not going to organically come up for a while. My partner liked the look of the stuffed roast pork recipe most so that’s the order of the day.
As a side to the roast the recipe recommends roast potatoes and sautéed vegetables - all fine, and I do love a roastie, but I thought that’s risking coming out a bit close to a standard British roast (particularly as the stuffing for the pork involved apple), so for a side I decided to cook the potato and bell pepper casserole - though I’d call it more of a bake than a casserole.
Also intended as a side was a cashew pilaf. I like pilaf and the pork stuffing involved cashew, which I otherwise didn’t have much of a use for so this all dove-tailed nicely.
Finally it seemed a shame to not do anything with fish while doing a big Greek meal but I fancied something a bit different and opted for fish-stuffed lettuce leaves. I quite like the Greek name of this one - “maroulodolmades psariou” both for the apt analogy to dolmades and because it’s really easy to work out what the constituent parts of the Greek name mean, which is neat.
As for what I adjusted for the pork recipe:
I forgot to purchase a rolled shoulder of pork so I had to do a bit of knifework to be able to stuff my joint.
I ended up with less pan juice than I expected (possibly because some stuffing escaped from the meat and absorbed some) so, although I did make the sauce suggested in the recipe, I didn’t make much or take any photos of it.
Also, despite what I’d been lead to believe about British vs continental tastes this recipe does have crackling - the pork got a bit more high heat at the start than the recipe suggested as the crackling really wasn’t turning out right when following the recipe rigidly. It could still have been better in the end, to be honest, but I think this helped.
With the potato bake I didn’t have a dish deep enough for the recipe and had to improvise a bit (to the dish’s detriment in my view) but otherwise followed the recipe to the letter.
With the cashew pilaf the recipe calls for both wild rice and long grain rice to be used but, for whatever reason, I could only find wild rice pre-mixed with basmati so I used that instead - this was probably a slightly negative change but needs must.
Finally with the fish parcels:
The recipe suggested cutting up lettuce leaves to make more, smaller parcels - as it was difficult to roll up all but the larger leaves I opted not to do this. I also reduced the amount of fish mixture I was stuffing into the leaves as it seemed improbably large.
I also ended up heating the assembled parcels on a baking tray lined with paper. This was purely because I ran out of saucepans and panicked, it was not a well-reasoned decision. Even in those circumstances I should have used a stockpot, wok or even a big frying pan instead of a tray and I do think the end product suffered due to this bad decision.
Finally some bulgur wheat was soaked in tomato juice - the recipe says at some point I should have drained the juice from the wheat but ultimately all the juice was absorbed and there was nothing to drain.
Cooking
Starting with the fish parcels - the parcels themselves are romaine lettuce, the filling consists of the vegetables shown here, the fish, which are just cod and salmon, and bulgur wheat soaked in tomato juice.
So naturally at this point the tomato juice and bulgur wheat are combined. At the same time preparations to cook the fish are underway and a water and wine mixture is brought to the boil.
The fish is poached for a few minutes, the liquid is retained to cook vegetables in later and the fish is removed, skinned and broken up. These fillets are pre-scaled and mostly deboned which speeds this up a lot!
While the fish is poaching some veggies are cut - the leek and courgette mix in the front is due for cooking as soon as the fish is dealt with but the glass behind, which is filled with parsley, olive oil, grated onion and lemon zest is for a later step in cooking.
The leeks and grated courgettes are now cooked until most of the liquid has evaporated before being seasoned - you can also see that I’ve very optimistically set up my steamer in the background, this will be there for a while and I probably could have set it up the better part of an hour later, as it took a long while for the liquid in the vegetable pan to evaporate.
The bulgur wheat has also soaked enough and is ready to be added to the veggies, even if the veggies aren’t ready for it yet.
The pork also requires clarified butter so, as this part of the recipe takes a while, said butter is being clarified. Riveting stuff.
I also had a picture of this with some washed lettuce but decided that butter is marginally more interesting to look at versus a collander full of lettuce.
In fact a lot of pork stuffing prep goes on while these veggies are reducing. Some cashews are chopped and an onion grated, though from here on out my patience wears a little thin and I start to chop the ends of the onions after grating about three-quarters of each one. In the background you can also see some muslin that’s going to be used (off camera) to strain the clarified butter.
The onion/cashew mixture is then cooked in the clarified butter but as that’s really visually uninteresting here’s a picture of chopped apple and celery instead. Not that it’s much more interesting.
This fruit and veg mix is then mixed with breadcrumbs and parsley and added to the onion and nut mix, with some lemon juice added at the end of cooking.
Moving back to the fish mixture at this point the bulgur wheat as well as the glass of parsley, onion, olive oil and lemon zest go in and are heated for a few minutes.
Then the fish is added to the vegetable and wheat mix, generating far too much filling for the amount of lettuce we have (the excess is baked later). The lettuce is also steamed but there’s no action shot of that as it’s all done rather quickly.
Also apparently I heat up some butter for the pilaf at this stage.
The lettuce leaves are stuffed with the fish mix - the lighting on this photo isn’t great and, as said before, I should have found something more pot-like to cook them in. But hey, I like to present what I cook warts and all, at least to a degree.
These are sprinkled with a little sugar and quite a bit of lemon juice and then heated for twenty minutes in a water and olive oil mix. After serving up the parcels any left-over liquid is combined with yoghurt to make a sauce for the parcels, again this was done off-camera.
Some of these parcels tore when picking them up so they’re quite ugly. However most of these parcels tasted reasonably nice but I was expecting more from them given the ingredients that went in. By my own fault, some of the parcels got a bit burned on the bottom, which did them no favours, and these ones did not taste very nice!
Overall I found the results of this recipe mildly disappointing but it’s hard to tell how much of that was my own fluffing it and how much is the recipe itself - so I expect I might repeat these (probably not on the blog) to see if I can do them better.
Back to the pork. Back in time really as this next photo, of the stuffing being spread onto the meat, has the uncooked fish parcels in the background.
After the stuffing was spread out the shoulder was tied up again and roasted, initially at a high heat (with some oil on the skin) to make some decent but unremarkable crackling, and then slower for a long time to cook the meat without drying it out.
Aside from the aforementioned crackling being mediocre and some stuffing leaking and getting burned the pork turned out well - thoroughly decent and with some fairly minor improvements this could be a good roast pork recipe. The pan juices were also made into a sauce, which complemented the roast, although it wasn’t possible to make that much of it.
Back in time again to look at the potato bake. Firstly a fairly unremarkable looking white sauce prepared in a slightly odd way - a grated onion is softened in a pan, flour is added and combined into the onion and then milk is added at once, rather than gradually. This does work but it feels very strange compared to the usual way of making a white sauce, even elsewhere in this book.
Potatoes are cut, layered into a dish and seasoned.
Also, slightly out of sequence, here’s what some chopped parsley and a grated block of pecorino cheese looks like.
White sauce never looks particularly nice while it’s cooking, at least in a close up, but this is the end result of this unorthodox sauce recipe.
This sauce goes over the potato.
And some chopped peppers go on top of this, clearly demonstrating why a deeper dish would have been preferable.
Another layer of potatoes and sauce goes on top but there’s not quite enough sauce for the top layer and it ends up a bit sparse before going into the oven.
While this has been going on I parboil my wild rice and basmati rice mix.
And also chop toasted cashews, carrots and parsley, while grating and chopping onion and making stock.
Onions and carrots are cooked in melted butter, no need for clarifying this time. Rice and stock are added and the mix heated until the stock is absorbed, then the cashews are stirred in.
And there we are - a finished potato bake and some finished pilaf in the background.
I let the bake catch a little bit but I think had I taken it out a few minutes before it’d have looked reasonably nice. There’s a reason I don’t do this on Instagram. Taste-wise it was pleasant but there was a surprising amount of liquid left in the dish after taking out portions of the bake, which was a little unnerving even if it didn’t negatively impact anything.
The pilaf was lovely both in taste and presentation and my only regret is not noticing the photo I took of it was blurred until I’d eaten it all. Ah well.
What I’d do differently
Beyond reading more carefully and getting a properly rolled shoulder of pork, attempting the potato dish in an appropriately deep dish and trying to cook the parcels in something appropriate, even if have run out of saucepans, there are still some adjustments to be made.
With the fish parcels the recipe produced far too much mixture for the amount of lettuce provided so I would probably at least double the amount of romaine used. Possibly even triple it so I could pick nice big leaves and use the little ones for something else.
I’d also give the lettuce more steaming time to make them easier to roll - the recipe suggested 1-2 minutes but a one minute steam is too short, leading the leaves to snap, a two minute steam should be the minimum. Beyond that it’s hard to tell what flaws in the parcels were due to my mistakes and what are due to the recipe.
With the potato bake I’d scale up the white sauce and scale down the red pepper - the excess liquid in the dish wasn’t ideal and I think this may be a combination of the white sauce bubbling over the edge of the dish and the peppers releasing too much water.
With the pork a little closer attention to prevent the stuffing leaking and perhaps more applications of oil to the skin to get better crackling would be obvious improvements, but otherwise the recipe seems to have worked as intended.
With the pilaf I might make a slightly stronger stock and attempt to track down wild rice by itself to be more faithful to the recipe but otherwise there’s nothing I’d change.
My view on the book
The book starts off with several nice but unremarkable photos spread out over several pages to set the scene but thereafter is quite quick at getting down to business. The first real content of the book is a brief double page introduction followed by several pages on the food regions of Greece - curiously only covering regions in current day Greece despite the recipes section containing some recipes from places that were once Greek but are no longer, like Constantinople/Istanbul or Pontus. Still, it’s good content.
This section has a few large photos used sparingly to break up the text but there’s no overindulgence in the photography and the recipes start only 44 pages into a book that’s over 700 pages long.
From here on the vast bulk of the text is dedicated to the recipes themselves - although there are some photos (mostly of food) and introductory segments most pages consist of two recipes and nothing more. Given the sheer amount of content here this book’s claims to be the authoritative resource for Greek cooking in the English language is probably a reasonable one.
As demonstrated in the cooking section I don’t think every recipe works perfectly but, frankly, when a book covers so many of them I can overlook that to some extent - if anything it’s a miracle most of them don’t need more tweaking than they do. And I also have to give great credit to the localisation - most words that differ between US and British English are written in both dialects (“casserole” and “bell pepper” being the only exceptions I could find) and volumes, weights and temperatures are all given in both metric and US customary measurements. If only more publishers localised their cookbooks this thoroughly!
I also quite like the nice touch of every recipe having an English name, the name in Greek and a transliterated Greek name. I personally don’t need the last one (due to childhood interests I learned to read the Greek alphabet even without knowing the language) but I think it looks really aesthetically pleasing.
A typical page of Vefa’s Kitchen - isn’t it weird how my phone camera blurred so much of this copyrighted text?
A downside of such a text heavy cookbook is, of course, the lack of reference for what the recipes should look like. However the rare pages that aren’t mostly text tend to be dedicated to photos of the cooked food. This, granted, only covers about 20% of the recipes at most but it’s still a welcome attempt to offset some of the flaws of the “massive tome” of cookbook design.
As should be pretty clear by now, I think this is a damned good cookbook. If you go in for cookbooks then definitely buy a copy, unless you’re not keen on Greek food (in which case well done for reading a long blog post about it!) or simply can’t make the time to cook.