Crete: memories of a Cookbook Writer

Chania

I'd been to Crete often as a tourist. I had driven from east
coast to west and up and down its mountains. Along the way I'd stopped to sunbathe on its beaches, investigate Minoan ruins, trace the ramparts of its walled Venetian cities, listen to mournful lyra players and sip raki under a mulberry tree with moustachioed old-timers wearing floppy breeches and shiny black boots. But it wasn't until I started researching a cookbook and seeking out little known recipes that I realized I barely knew the place. Crete, the Mediterranean's fifth largest island, is roughly the same size as New York's Long Island, where I grew up. But with four lofty mountain ranges and more than
4,000 years of history, it boasts a continent's worth of diversity. Over the long centuries, foreign invaders like the Romans, Arabs, Byzantines, Venetians, and Turks rarely penetrated beyond the north coast. Today's tourists, following their example, mostly cling to the resorts and hotels that line the shore in an almost unbroken chain of development from Kastelli in the west to Agios Nikolaos in the east. They rarely suspect that behind this façade of modernity lurks a wealth of customs and traditions barely touched by the 20th century.

Irakleio

My first glimmer of this other world came when an acquaintance in Heraklio sent me to her godmother in Arkalohori, a village hidden among olive groves and vineyards about an hour's drive to the south. Well into her eighties but more energetic than the average teenager, this paragon of healthy living filled my ears with unconventional cooking techniques: “To make tomato paste, you'll have to strain the pulp through an old pillowcase.” Eftyhia also inducted me into the secrets of successful trahana—xinohondro to the Cretans—rustic pasta made from crushed wheat and buttermilk, which is a staple in the Balkans, Turkey, and Armenia. “Add the wheat and stir with a pastry rolling pole until the pole stands upright by itself. The next day spread handfuls of the thick porridge on sheets to dry in the hot July sun. It lasts forever, softens up in soups and gives them a wonderful, tangy taste.” When I took my leave, Eftyhia gave me a jar of tomato paste and a sack full of xinohondro, each piece about the size of her small fist.

After that my quest pulled me further and further off the beaten path to villages that rarely merited a line in a guidebook and could often be found on only the most detailed of maps. My travels followed no predictable pattern, but resembled more a treasure hunt built on a few introductions to friends of friends, chance conversations, and a string of coincidences.

I discovered that asking questions about food seemed to open all doors and that sitting in kitchens could elicit hours of stories, not to mention delicious and surprising impromptu meals.
In the course of my month-long visits to the island, conducted over three years, I must have eaten my weight in flour. This is because a Cretan housewife, rather than offering guests a spoonful of sweet preserves and a cup of Greek coffee like her mainland counterpart, prefers to show off her pie-making skills. Time and again, my hostess would sit me down in the kitchen while she reached into the freezer and in minutes produced a frying pan full of tiny pies hardly larger than ravioli. She would ladle them onto my plate and watch eagerly as I bit through the crisp, paper- thin wrapping into a luscious cheese or delicate spinach filling and smacked my lips approvingly. But Cretan pies come in almost as many shapes, types, and flavors as there are Cretan cooks and one evening, in the village of Piskokefalo near Siteia, my tasting capacity was sorely tested.

sarikopittes 

There, as a consequence of watching Georgia Vassilaki prepare piroshki, sarikopittes (coiled like a sultan's turban), pancake-like nerates, baked cheese packets called kaltsounia, and another phyllo classic layered with greens, plus walnut cake, I waddled away like a fattened goose. It was hardly a balanced meal, but as she cooked, she told me about growing up with a thousand sheep but no shoes and about her father, who slept outdoors with his flock for 40 years and died at 100 without ever having seen a doctor. Even today, Georgia and her husband Iosif live off the land, producing their own olive oil, raisins, wine, and vegetables, while acquiring cheese from a shepherd who rents their pastures. At the other end of Crete, in the mountain district of Sfakia, I met another pie-maker with stories. Sifis Karkanis has a roadside taverna in Askyfou, halfway between Hora Sfakion and Vrysses. Most of the traffic consists of busloads of trekkers exhausted from hiking down the Samaria Gorge. They have no inkling that this smattering of houses in the high plateau conceals a few bakeries famed among cognoscenti for the best paximadia or rusks on the island. While rusks are to be found all over Greece, they reach the summit of flavor and variety in Crete. In fact, many Cretans prefer them to fresh bread. Here in Askyfou, you can sample rusks kneaded with every conceivable type of flour from white “luxury” to barley laced with coarse strands of bran. Sweet rusks, on the other hand, come in dozens of tastes, from aniseed and coriander to orange juice and mastic.

But back to Sifis, who keeps a ready supply of Sfakian pies in his freezer. Hellishly difficult to reproduce, they resemble very thin, almost crepe-like flat breads into which cheese has been folded. The dough is soft and malleable. The pastries are fried like a pancake in a dry pan, and drizzled with honey. While we gobbled them up, the former shepherd told of his early experiments with cooking: of roasting a piece of meat between two hot stones, of simmering a stew in a German soldier's helmet for want of a pot, and of “kouzina ananghis” — the cuisine of necessity—when the only ingredients were potatoes, rice, and a dollop of cream saved from the milking.

Rethymno

To this day, the cuisine of necessity crops up all over Crete. In Margarites, one of the Rethymno area's most charming villages, it presented itself in the form of pumpkin savoro or pumpkin fried and seasoned with vinegar, rosemary, and black currants in a manner usually reserved for leftover fish. With its mingling of sweet and sour, the original recipe harks back to Byzantine times or even earlier and also exists in Venice (as saor). Many of Crete's small villages would never merit a postcard. As if not daring to compete with the island's stunning landscapes, they are often collections of architecturally plain buildings, their only redeeming features the fiery geraniums and amaryllis trumpets that blaze from rusty oil tins set on a cement balcony. But Margarites has doors and windows that glow like sapphires and emeralds framed by gentle stone arches and lintels, partly camouflaged by thick greenery. It also boasts a venerable pottery tradition, kept alive by two men who still use a foot-propelled potter's wheel and bring clay on donkey back from the riverbed.

You never can tell what you might find in these villages. Near Skotino, inland from the beach resort at Gournes not far from Heraklio, I tunnelled 230 steep meters below the earth into a cave where Minoans worshipped the Mother Goddess long before Zeus was a gleam in Cronos' eye. But in October this bland hamlet swims in a Dionysian haze. This is raki-making season and all over Crete villagers with the coveted permits clean out their basements, polish their stills and cauldrons, and stoke the fires to distil the potent eau de vie from the pips and skins left from pressing September's grapes into wine. “Cauldroning” as it is called usually turns into a party with classic dishes such as roasted whole potatoes drizzled with sea salt and olive oil and pork chops roasted in embers, both hearty enough fare to mitigate the effects of imbibing phenomenal amounts of fire water.

Mochlos is the exception to the rule that an unspoiled village must be inland. Yellow fishing nets mounded on the rocks, small fishing boats bobbing off a simple jetty, a few tavernas jostling for customers — Mochlos lies at the bottom of a narrow road that hurtles down the cliffside between Agios Nikolaos and Siteia. For years it has sheltered teams of archaeologists excavating a Minoan cemetery on Louse islet offshore, and for years Marika Petraki has been feeding them at the taverna named after her daughter, Sophia. One day she shared her recipes for stuffed vegetables using the typically eastern Cretan seasonings of mint and cumin and the special omelette she bakes for the archaeologists with 25 eggs and a kilo of zucchini, potatoes, and tomatoes.


But it was in Zakros that I had my fullest introduction to the inner life of a Cretan village. I'd spent the evening at Kato Zakros, a crescent of tavernas and rooms on the black pebbled beach near the ruins of the easternmost Minoan palace. Hearing of my search for recipes, one of the taverna owners told me to speak to his mother, Mary Daskalaki, in the upper village the next day.
Mary, a slim woman with a fund of knowledge, obligingly rattled off recipes and tales of life before the 1960s when the arrival of electricity and automobiles disrupted the close-knit community. But then she showed me that it still existed by taking me to a shed at the edge of town. There a half dozen men and women were preparing a feast for a christening party that evening. In the community kitchen, a feature of many Cretan villages, friends and relatives help wedding and baptism hosts by cooking for as many as 2,000 guests. The men were standing over a vast cauldron in which three yearling sheep were becoming stock for the piece de resistance, creamy, succulent plates full of either macaroni if you are in Eastern Crete or rice in the West. The rich, stock-infused pasta or rice pilaffs are served at all Cretan festivities. The women, on the other hand, were making salads, pies, dolmades (stuffed vine leaves) and omathies — a nubbly pork liver sausage filled with rice, raisins, walnuts, orange peel, cinnamon, and sugar that has its origins in the Byzantine era.

Mary had to join them but sent me several houses away to where her sister's family was baking bread in an outdoor oven. I peeked into the courtyard and was greeted like a long-lost friend. Unfortunately, the 40 loaves had just gone into the soot-blackened oven; kneading 30 kilos of flour into that much dough sounded like a Herculean feat. But Alexandra and her son's in-laws invited me to wait with them until they were done. They baked this quantity every month, but most of the loaves would be broken into thick slices and returned to the cooling oven for 24 hours until they became rock-hard rusks, paximadia, that are among the island's most traditional foods.


We talked and joked for more than an hour before Irini, a 70-something dynamo, split the loaves with her strong hands and Alexandra and Irini's husband, Yannis, shovelled them back into the oven's dark mouth. I tried to say goodbye, but Alexandra grasped my arm and walked me to their house for lunch. Over fresh bread, roast chicken, salads, plenty of homemade wine, and much laughter, Yannis and Irini started to reminisce — about the war, walking to Siteia with loaded mules, and about the time he kidnapped her. Bride stealing is still a common practice in Crete, usually a conspiracy of the willing whose eagerness to marry may thwart their parents' plans. Too poor to abduct her on horseback, Yannis had carried Irini piggyback across a river to a cave where they spent the night. “We came back the very next morning but by then there was nothing to argue about.”

It was evening before the party ended and I departed, showered with kisses and gifts of bread, raki, and raisins. Glowing from a surfeit of well-being, I thought how deceptive these Cretan villages are. As long as I was intent on mere sight- seeing, I'd passed through them with barely a second glance. But by welcoming me into their kitchens, the men and women who lived in them continually added unexpected dimensions to the notion of hospitality. They also reminded me that sitting around a table sharing food and experiences is one of the blessings life has to bestow.

by By Diana Farr Louis
source: kerasma