The Cookbook of the Jews of Greece

"I was wondering that myself today when I was looking at it again! Of course, there are the ritual foods, but many of the dishes are clearly indistinguishable from the average Christian Greek food. Then there are still others that have an enormous amount of non-Greek spices. One of my favourites is chicken with okra, which has ginger, turmeric, coriander, bay leaves and lemon, as well as tomatoes, cinnamon and cloves. It’s so good that I lifted it out and put it in my Cretan cookbook. But you don’t have to cook to love this book. First of all Stavroulakis is such a scholar. He curated the Jewish Museums of Athens and Thessaloniki and restored an old synagogue in Chania, Crete, and he is an artist. So besides being a fantastic cook and a writer he also did the pen and ink illustrations for the book. There are drawings of Jews in finery and everyday costumes making bread, dancing, haggling in the market, cooking. It really is a beautiful book. Not any more. There was a large population which went back as far as Roman times. There were two types of Jews – Romaniotes and Sephardic Jews. The latter came from Spain when Ferdinand and Isabella kicked them out in 1492. Corfu and Zakynthos both had Jewish communities and in time Thessaloniki came to be called “Mother of Israel”. But during World War II, when Greece was occupied by the Nazis, that all changed. There is an excellent book by Mark Mazower called Salonica: City of Ghosts , which is very good on their stories."