The Glorious Foods of Greece

"When I first came to Italy I took my three small daughters to the seaside. It wasn’t the sea we wanted to enjoy. In Italy, you have the expensive umbrellas, the sun loungers and all the rest of it. People come with enough equipment for three months. You’ve got to stay in the position you reserve. It just wasn’t for us. So every summer I piled the children into the car, drove down to Brindisi and got the ferry to Igoumenitsa. We would drive around the Greek mainland, stay in little tavernas and eat very simple Greek food – the sort of food that everyone thinks of as Greek food. And we did this every year. As we knew a bit more and had a bit more money, we started renting places in Greece. So then, of course, you start cooking. I looked around for Greek cookbooks. But every Greek cookbook I found – they had to be English-language cookbooks because I couldn’t read Greek – seemed to repeat the same limited recipes. Things were fairly undeveloped at that point in the 1970s. At the tavernas, they would march you into the back kitchen and show you all this lukewarm food in oil. But my approach to Greek food changed when I was deputy head of St George’s English School in Rome. We organised social events for the parents; the students decorated the refectory and the parents cooked. We had a lot of Greek evenings in the summer: the Greek fathers would dig a trench and roast a whole lamb on a spit. And I learned from all of them, quickly realising that Greek family cooking was incredibly interesting and not really what you eat by the seaside in holiday tavernas. I became more adventurous. I now do a cooking school on the island of Siphnos. I’ve probably got all of the Greek cookbooks in English. But the most friendly and authentic one – the one that doesn’t make you throw your hands up in the air – is by Diane Kochilas. I suppose it has a lot of the qualities of Turkish food but without the spices. The same recipes exist in both places but you wouldn’t dare point this out in either country. Greek food it almost an emotional thing: it makes you think of the landscape and the turquoise sea. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter One of my favourite Greek dishes, which I put in my Mediterranean cookbook, is a lamb dish cooked in an earthenware container. Traditionally it would be sealed with flour and water paste so that the freedom fighters could take it with them when they were fighting the Turks in the War of Independence. Up in the hills, they didn’t want the smell of the food to give away their position. I think the Cretan guerrillas in the Second World War used this technique during the German occupation. It’s simple, good food. And a lot of it can be prepared in advance and cooked slowly. Another thing to consider is the oil you use: I always buy some Greek olive oil to take home with me. I also buy Spanish olive oil when I’m in London. And, of course, here in Italy you can only buy Italian oil. As soon as you smell a particular region’s oil, you begin to want the food of that particular Mediterranean country."