Traditional Greek Food

Traditional Greek food is the kitchen of the poor. In a way, you can say that Greek food and cooking is based on poverty. Greece was a very poor country for many, many centuries and this is reflected in the traditional Greek food traditions. You cook and eat mainly what you can grow, catch, raise or hunt yourself. Which also means that you only eat what’s in season, as few people could afford to import food or spices.

This simplicity is reflected in today's cooking. In Ankyra, my big fat Greek restaurant we stick to simple, good food, based on good quality ingredients - as far as possible I use vegetables from my own organic vegetable garden and buy all products locally.

Having said that, when the refugees from Asia Minor came to Greece after World War I, many of them who settled here in Eleftheres, Kavala, they also brought with them their recipes, including the spices. Pontiaka food, the food recipe these immigrants carried, are often more spicy than traditional Greek food. Check out my Greek meatball recipe, soutzoukakia smyrnaika, meatballs from Smyrna (today's Turkey).

Even if Greeks today quickly are moving towards the same living standard as most Europeans, the Greek food tradition doesn’t change - at least not here in northern Greece, which I suspect is more conservative than the islands or southern Greece, with all the tourist influence. The years I have lived here three Chinese restaurants have opened and closed in Kavala - people here simply only want Greek food.

Once it was lack of money that meant that the Greeks couldn’t buy imported ingredients. Today he doesn’t really trust anything foreign. Greeks are incredibly skeptical to eat an animal that they didn’t know when it was alive, not to mention vegetables or fruits from abroad. All spring I couldn’t get garlic at the local market, where I use to buy the vegetables I can’t grow myself. "I can only get Chinese or Argentinean garlic," one of the vegetable sellers told me. "And I can’t be bothered as no one will buy it."

There was a great advertisement on Greek TV, for a cooker. It showed a young man who was stopped in the customs entering Britain, his bag filled with silver foil covered small boxes. No, it wasn’t drugs. It was food. And the British custom officers asked surprised: "Why do you bring food to Britain?" The subtitle read: If you’re Greek you know why.

Yes, the Greek knows. He knows that nothing beat the vegetables he grows in his own garden, or the eggs he can get from his aunt’s chickens or the pork from pigs of his second cousin's koumbaros, best man. My friend in Thessaloníki gets eggs sent with the bus from her mother in law’s village 250 kilometers away. When Eleni studied in Athens her mum would send her home made pita and tomatoes from the garden with the bus. And Kostas, who lives in Paris, returns home after summer holiday with bags filled with Greek produced food – olive oil from his uncles, pickled vegetables from his grandma and feta cheese from a friend who has goats and sheep and makes his own cheese. I know a woman who brought spinach from her garden with her to the States so that she could make her son proper Greek spinach pie.

It’s not only that the products have to be familiar, but traditional Greek food also means home made and made from scratch. Take a look in the frozen food department of a Greek supermarket. You won’t find many pre-fabric dishes. If you don’t have the time to cook properly you eat out - and expect the restaurant to serve proper food. When my kids were babies from time to time I’d buy jars with baby food (the supermarket had two varieties – chicken or veal). Judging from the looks and reactions when I fed my baby the ready made stuff I might as well have been beating him!

Copyright© Tove Cecilie Fasting

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