Communal cooking and eating is something we don’t do very often in this busy modern world. In fact, I can’t think of many times when I have done it. As a child, cooking was always something done by a parent, unless I was learning how to bake a cake or being forced to learn how to roast a chicken because “your husband will expect you to be able to cook it” (I was vegetarian at the time).
But sharing the cooking duties, communal taste testing and sitting down together to eat the spoils, is a feature of Elisavet Sotiriadou’s Greek Cookery classes where you learn to cook and eat as the Greeks do.
On a Wednesday night in east London I not only learned how to make Gemista – which according to Elisavet, means “stuffed something” but the Greeks use the word to refer to stuffed peppers and tomatoes; Halvas Makedonikos – a dessert of halva, sesame seeds and melted chocolate, aubergine rolls with feta and smoked bacon, Horiatiki – Greek salad,and Tzatziki – a yoghurt and cucumber dip, I also learned about my fellow attendees lives, education, work, opinions, life history – you name it. This was a Greek evening – a social occasion set around food.
The making of Tzatziki inspired a discussion of the regional variations of Greek food. Tzatziki it seems can be made with or without dill and sometimes with mint. Mint, it was agreed is more usually found in Cypriot cuisine. As Elisavet is from the north of Greece, she makes it with dill but in other parts of the country it is often made just with Greek yoghurt (the preferred brand being Fage’s Total), cucumber, salt, olive oil, garlic and lemon.
My classmates and I may have invented yet another way of making Tzatziki when we added the juice of half a lemon instead of a few drops because we were too busy chatting and not paying attention. However, after we each did a taste test, we agreed that we liked it and as lemon is an essential ingredient of Greek food, it was still very Greek. As one of my fellow participants said: “Lemon is God’s gift to the Earth.”
It was a surprise to me to discover that lemons were so important in Greek cooking. As a typical Brit, my knowledge of Greek food started with a local Greek restaurant, moved on to buying Dolmades (stuffed vine leaves) in a tin! from my local supermarket and then to a summer holiday on a Greek island. All of that cooking and produce is, of course, geared towards foreign tastes and expectations. Consequently I expected to start every meal with pitta bread and Houmous, to have rice and something on a skewer with perhaps more bread or something in a sauce as a main course. I also expected Greek salad to consist mainly of large slices of onion, chunks of cucumber and tasteless tomatoes, a few pitted black olives and you had to play “hunt the few tiny pieces of Feta” with the salad bowl.
Unsurprisingly, I had never liked Greek salad but when we prepared Horiatiki to Elisavet’s instruction, I found to my delight, that for six or seven people you should only use half a red onion and slice it very finely. Elisavet also only uses good quality Greek ingredients, much of it organic, and specified Dodoni feta cheese. There was plenty of it and I didn’t have to hunt for it as it was placed on top of the salad. Elisavet’s recipe also included five vine tomatoes chopped into wedges, removing the hard middle bit and eight cherry tomatoes, halved. The cucumber is peeled in strips and then cut into slices. She also adds a light green pepper, Kalamata olives, fresh parsley, extra virgin olive oil, red wine vinegar and oregano.
I shall not be accepting anything less in future. As a convert to Greek home cooking, I can’t imagine eating in many Greek restaurants in Britain and on future holidays to Greece I will be an exacting customer. And if any more proof were needed of my conversion to Greek home cooking, on a visit to the supermarket a few days ago, I picked up a tin of Dolomades and put it back on the shelf!
Elisavet Sotiriadou runs her own Greek Cookery classes in London, and also teaches at Leith’s and Divertimenti. She has appeared in Red Magazine and on Britain’s Best Dish on ITV1. Classes can be booked via:
