Verjuice, the juice that is made if we squeeze immature, green grapes, added a great depth of flavor and a titillating kick to foods, until lemons and various vinegars became more accessible. Verjuice, called aggourida (=immature), was used extensively…
TOMATO PASTE
In the late 19th century the tomatoes were only available during summer and refrigerators were almost unkown, thus wise and cost-consious women from big cities and tomato producing areas made their own tomato paste for the winter. Keep in mind…
BASIL DOLMADES (ΒΑΣΙΛΙΚΟΝΤΟΛΜΑΔΕΣ)
Basil, Theophrastus‘ and Dioskorides‘ ocimom (ώκιμον), lat. ocimum basilicum. The word basil comes from the Greek word vasileus (βασιλεύς)= king because it was believed to have grown above the spot where Constantine the Great and his mother Helen discovered the…
PURSLANE SALAD
Purslane (Portulaca oleracea, gr. glistrida, antrakla, adrahni) is a plant with fleshly leaves, growing wild all over Greece and also cultivated for use in horiatiki salad or eaten by its own with olive oil and vinegar. Archaeobotanical researches have retrieved…
The last stuffed vegetables of summer
Maria Iordanidou, Loxandra ‘Add a lot of onion in the yialantzi dolma, so it will be tasty, but also add mint, to make it easy to digest.’ Basically, most foods are suitably for stuffing. Bread, meat, innards, fish, oysters, eggs,…