Glorious Foods Of Greece [Hardcover]

Moussaka, grilled fish, and feta salad with olives--that's it for Greek food, right? Wrong, as abundantly proved by Diane Kochilas's masterful The Glorious Foods of Greece. For over 10 years, Kochilas investigated the vast wealth of Greek cooking, traveling to its islands, cities, mountains, and villages and talking to cooks, bakers, fisherman, farmers, and cheese makers. She listened astutely, and the result is not only hundreds of authentic recipes, but a definitive culinary guide.

Following an introduction in which Kochilas details, among other fascinating information, the nature of each region's cuisine (Rooumali and Epirus are shepherds' domains, she writes, "where the reigning food is pita, as in savory pie, hundreds of them...."), she then offers chapter-by-chapter observations with straightforward recipes. These range from mezze (appetizers) and soups to breads, main dishes, sweets, and drinks. From the olive country of Peloponnesus, for example, readers are offered the likes of Roast Leg of Lamb with Wine, Garlic, Allspice, and Cheese. The Italian-influenced Ionian islands provide Chicken Stewed in Fragrant Tomato Sauce with Thick Pasta, among other dishes. Snd from Macedonia and Thrace come such fare as Roasted Potato Salad with Hot Pepper and Mint, and Leek and Yogurt Pie.

Throughout, Kochilas also provides interesting sidebars (The Sardines of Lesvos, for example, profiles this local treasure known for its sweetness), ingredient sketches, and preparation suggestions. A section that explores cooking techniques and a useful source list concludes the book, which is a tribute to a widely undiscovered cuisine and the author's steady yet exuberant powers of investigation. --Arthur Boehm

With this massive and masterful collection, Kochilas (an American with Greek roots who works in Athens as a food reporter for a Greek newspaper) brings Greek cooking front and center in American kitchens. Region by region (the Ionian Islands, the Cyclades, etc.), she provides over 400 appealing Mediterranean recipes. Fine seafood dishes such as the Fried Mussels of northern Greece and Spiny Lobster Cooked with Spring Onions and Herbs from Lesvos abound, as do interesting meat preparations, including the many lamb and goat dishes of Roumeli and Quinces Stuffed with Ground Lamb from the north, as well as poultry standouts like One-Pot Chicken with Broth-Simmered Noodles and Ground Walnuts (upholding the tradition of cooking noodles in broth because water was scarce). Many dishes use common ingredients in surprising ways, like an earthy Pasta with Yogurt and Caramelized Onions from Kassos and Chard-Stuffed Turkey from Nazos. Kochilas doesn't skimp on savory pies (Fresh Cheese Pie with Fennel from Kalavyrta, Pumpkin and Carrot Pie from Cephalonia), bread (Raisin-Stuffed Lazarus Bread from Lesvos), or desserts (Pancakes with Yogurt and Currants), and she presents numerous appetizing vegetable dishes. The text sections are of uniformly high quality, with indispensable pages on regional cheeses. Kochilas writes lovingly and insightfully about her adopted country, profiling the many Greeks (mostly women) who generously shared recipes with her, and displays a deep grasp of history. (Apr.) Forecast: Kochilas's eight years of research show in the book's thoroughness. A landmark for Greek cooking in the U.S., it's a likely candidate for cookbook awards and can be confidently billed as the definitive source.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Kochilas is the author of The Food and Wine of Greece and an acknowledged authority on Greek food. After traveling extensively throughout the country, she moved there in 1990, partly to begin research on this ambitious work, which is obviously a labor of love. She includes more than 400 recipes from all regions, starting with the Peloponnesus and the Ionian Islands, moving on to Macedonia, the islands of the Aegean, and Crete, and finishing up in the city of Athens. Many of the recipes will be unfamiliar to Americans indeed, some are unknown in Greece outside of their particular provenance. Kochilas also provides extensive historical background, cultural as well as culinary, along with detailed descriptions and explanations of ingredients, from "the last barrel fetas" to Macedonian peppers. While her book does not have quite the charm of Aglaia Kremezi's lovely, more narrowly focused The Foods of the Greek Islands (LJ 10/1/00), its scope and range of recipes make it an essential purchase.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Italy's near neighbor, Greece, has a long culinary tradition now enjoying renewed interest. Both the mainland and the Greek islands have distinctive regional differences in their politics and in their cooking, so Kochilas has organized her comprehensive book, The Glorious Foods of Greece, with those frontiers in mind. The cooking of the Peloponnesian peninsula conforms to what many people who've sampled the food served in America's Greek restaurants think of as Greek cooking. But in the north, where Greece fades into the former Yugoslavia, Macedonian food offers unique dishes based on wheat rather than rice. Kochilas distinguishes the cooking of the Greek islands, dividing them into subgroups to discuss their culinary specialties. Kochilas' recipes are clear, specific, and attractive. Exhaustively detailed and painstakingly researched, this volume belongs in every international cookery collection. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

"This is a splendid achievement--beautifully written, dense with information, and offered with a rare warmth and generosity of spirit." -- -- Nancy Harmon Jenkins, author of The Mediterranean Diet Cookbook

Ms. Kochilas's book resonates with the economy and simplicity of Greece's regional cuisines. There are no airs. Just flavor. -- Amanda Hesser, New York Times

The Glorious Foods of Greece is the magnum opus of Greek cuisine, the first book that takes the reader on a long and fascinating journey beyond the familiar Greece of blue-and-white postcard images and ubiquitous grilled fish and moussaka into the country's many different regions, where local customs and foodways have remaained intact for eons.

The journey is both personal and inviting. Diane Kochilas spent nearly a decade crisscrossing Greece's Pristine mountains, mainland, and islands, visiting cooks, bakers, farmers, shepherds, fishermen, artisan producers of cheeses, charcuterie, olives, olive oil, and more, in order to document the country's formidable culinary traditions. The result is a paean to the hitherto uncharted glories of local Greek cooking and regional lore that takes you from mountain villages to urban tables to seaside tavernas and island gardens.

In beautiful prose and with more than four hundred unusual recipes -- many of them never before recorded --invites us to a Greece few visitors ever get to see. Along the way she serves up feast after feast of food, history, and culture from a land where the three have been intertwined since time immemorial.

In an informed introduction, she sets the historic framework of the cuisine, so that we clearly see the differences among the earthy mountain cookery, the sparse, ingenious island table, and the sophisticated aromaticcooking traditions of the Greeks in diaspora. In each chapter she takes stock of the local pantry and cooking customs. From the olive-laden Peloponnesos, she brings us such unusual dishes as One-Pot Chicken Simmered with Artichokes and served with Tomato-Egg-Lemon Sauce and Vine Leaves Stuffed with Salt Cod. From the Venetian-influenced Ionian islands, she offers up such delights asPastry-Cloaked Pasta from Corfu filled with cheese and charcuterie and delicious Bread Pudding from Ithaca with zabaglione. Her mainland recipes, as well as those that hail from Greece's impenetrable northwestern mountains, offer an enticing array of dozens of delicious savory pies, unusual greens dishes, and succulent meat preparations such as Lamb with Garlic and Cheese Baked in Paper. In Macedonia she documents the complex, perfumed, urbane cuisine that defines that region. In the Aegean islands, she serves up a wonderful repertory of exotic yet simple foods, reminding us how accessible -- and healthful -- is the Greek fegional table.

The result is a cookbook unlike any other that has ever been written on Greek cuisine, one that brims with the author's love and knowledge of her subject, a tribute to the vibrant, multifaceted continuum of Greek cooking, both highly informed and ever inviting. The Glorious Foods of Greece is an important work, one that contributes generously to the culinary literature and is sure to become the definitive book of Greek cuisine and culture for future generations of food lovers -- Greek and non-Greek alike.

Diane Kochilas is the author of The Glorious Foods of Greece, which won the prestigious Jane Grigson Award for Excellence in Scholarship by the IACP in 2001. She has authored two other books on Greek cuisine, The Greek Vegetarian and The Food and Wine of Greece. She is chef-owner of Villa Thanassi, a real country restaurant with a real country garden, which she runs every summer together with her husband, Vassilis Stenos, on their ancestral island, Ikaria. On Ikaria, she also operates The Glorious Greek Kitchen Cooking School and organizes culinary trips and walking tours in Athens and in other parts of the country. Diane was born and raised in New York City. She moved to Greece with her husband in 1992 and now divides her time between New York, Ikaria, and Athens, where she is the city's best-known restaurant critic and food journalist. Her weekly columns appear in Ta Nea, the country's largest newspaper. Her work appears often in American magazines and newspapers.