Obligatory food blog: Greek horta

Update
This seems to be a very popular post judging by the number of Google searches that land here. I have written more about food and drink and restaurants here. And about life in Greece between 2003 and 2005 here.

Horta
One of my favourite Greek foods is horta usually translated as spinach, or by Bee as “limp green vegetable”. Still not a favourite with children! In fact, the local market (and the local supermarket always have several types. My favourite, called armyra, has just reappeared. Eventually I remembered it as “rock samphire” which I could identify from Richard Mabey’s Food for Free. I remember spotting it on the coast near a campsite on an oyster farm which we stayed at in the early 90s. It seems also to be called sea fennel, and its branches are like thick fennel.

Here is some of the range available in the Friday street market in my neighbourhood.

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Armyra	Italika
Vlita

And some other views:

And how about that for garlic packaging?

Finding out how to cook the different types was not so easy. “Obviously” you boil them and eat them with olive oil and lemon, and they are surprisingly good. But these days, is it any longer necessary to boil all the goodness out of vegetables? So what to do? In the end I decided that perhaps the boiling was necessary to get rid of something (toxic like beans?) and Greeks are very healthy on their diet of boiled horta, so it can’t be so bad for the vitamins after all. You serve it with lots of healthy olive oil and fresh lemon juice.

This is what Rena Salaman has to say about horta in her book Greek Food in my 1984 version. This seems to be out of print but Amazon has lots of other books by her.

It is inevitable in a country like Greece, where vegetables constitute a major part of the national diet, that salads should be taken for granted as they are. They are as much part of the everyday table as knives and forks. They are not just something to nibble at; on the contrary, very often they are the main course coupled with some delicately fried fish, squid or sweetbreads. Their arrival at the table, even at restaurants, is never questioned; it is expected. Always seasonal, they vary from the most ordinary, such as tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuces to the most eccentric and esoteric of hand-picked wild greens (horta as they are collectively described) from nearby hills and fields, or at their most unusual, made of wild plants which grow in the cracks of gigantic rock formations by the sea. These are called kritama in Greek, or rock samphire (Chritmum Maritimum) as it is known commonly in England. It is a short, soft, fleshy, spiked-leaf plant of a cactaceous appearance and grey-green colour.

Rock samphire was best known as a pickle in seventeenth-century England but very popular as a vegetable in the nineteenth century, boiled and strained and served with butter. This is very popular on our island. From March onwards the short leaves are collected in quantities and treated like any other wild greens. They are first boiled and then strained and dressed with olive oil and lemon. Apart from valuing it as a salad the local people believe that it also has medicinal qualities against rheumatism. It has quite a definite bitter, slightly sour taste of aniseed and it takes some time to get used to and become a believer. Since I was introduced to it, quite late in my life, I still haven't become one! In the Pilion villages they pickle it and offer it as a meze with ouzo.

In no other country have I seen such an affinity for wild hand-picked greens as well as their specially cultivated counterparts, as in Greece. `Agria horta tou vounou', wild greens from the mountains or `Imera horta' (strictly translated `tame greens') were street cries that we grew up with.

There is an enormous variety of the wild greens that appear with the first autumnal rains, such as all kinds of dandelions and delicious vrouves in the spring (a kind of mustard with tiny yellow flowers).
There is a wonderful description of vrouves growing in one of the most unlikely places in Athens, none less than the Acropolis, in William Miller's Greek Life in Town and Country (p.194). `The sacred rock of the Acropolis produces a mustard plant from which an excellent salad is made and in February numbers of women may be seen collecting herbs and digging up roots on the Pnyx and near the monument of Philopappos, which they cook and eat...'

I am sure vrouves as well as the other wild varieties of horta are still growing around the foot of the Acropolis and the hill of Philopappos, along with soft carpets of chamomile with the first rays of spring. I am also quite certain that you will not see anyone collecting them, as in the past two years the pollution in Athens has reached such unacceptable standards that it has alarmed even the Greeks, though optimists by nature.

There are also young poppy plants which are collected before they flower and are not only used as a salad like the rest but on the island are also used as a filling to a delicious pie.

Then there are their cultivated counterparts, radikia, a spinach-leafed-like plant, another variety called italika which resemble rhubarb plants on a micro-scale, with their unusually red slender stems (perhaps this is the reason I still cannot get used to eating rhubarb as a dessert in any form), there are curly endives (andithia) which are also used in a lamb fricassee, and the most delicious of all, vlita, which no visitor to Greece should miss an opportunity of trying in the spring and early summer. Vlita has a sweet but also faintly sour taste that one can get addicted to. It seeds itself so easily that on our island it is not even cultivated; it just comes back every spring here and there, in people's gardens or disused fields, and there it really thrives unless it is a particularly dry spring and summer. Then consequently all the crops suffer, since most of them do not rely on irrigation systems but on God's good will!

All these greens are always first boiled, covered in salted water, then strained and dressed with a refreshing olive oil and lemon dressing. There is a great tradition of collecting wild greens in Greece, as the extract from W. Miller so picturesquely reaffirms. Very often in the autumn or the spring, a Sunday family outing from Athens would be a horta-picking expedition to the nearby countryside of Penteli, Marathon, Tatoi, or slightly further on the way to Delphi with the breathtaking mountain views and the wonderful amphitheatre along with the other archaeological treasures waiting at the end. These outings would always be followed by an exquisite lunch in some small, isolated place with huge barrels of wine and a roaring fire.

Sometimes, one could see hillsides dotted by the colourful horta pickers, since whenever a good spot was discovered it would soon attract other cars to stop and join in with singing and joking and laughing echoing and bringing the deserted hillsides to life. Sometimes we would hold competitions among the family of who could collect the largest amount. These were all rituals that brightened our childish lives and gave them a sense of continuity, as all rituals do, and I still get an enormous joy out of similar expeditions.

I remember how proud I was when, while on a school outing for the day, I spent the entire morning gathering horta with my little blunt knife and storing them in my jacket and how proud I was when I presented my grandmother with my trove at the end of the day.

During the German occupation and the terrible famine of the years 1943-4, wild greens saved a lot of lives and if the favourites could not be found, there was always an abundance of nettles, which even the Germans could not stop from growing. Friends a little older than myself can clearly remember eating boiled nettles quite often.

In the villages and, of course, in our village on the island, gathering horta is almost done routinely at the end of a working day in the fields or the olive groves along with the other essentials - that is a pile of firewood for the home hearth and a huge bunch of greenery for the goats' daily meals. One of the goats' favourite bushes is a large evergreen shrub with small glossy leaves called koumaria in Greek, Arbutus Unedo or as it is known commonly in the west, a strawberry tree. This grows wild in abundance in the Greek countryside and on the hillsides of our island. This was also a favourite of our childhood years, not for its shiny leaves but for its brightly red-orange and perfect round berries that achieved magical qualities, to our eyes at least, ripening as they were in the autumn amidst a season of discipline and fading colours, coinciding with the opening of our schools. I remember particularly the familiar smell of our brand new books covered neatly in dark blue paper by our mother, our new stiff dark blue uniforms ready for the `battle' and above all the remote autumnal melancholy that vibrated in the air.

We used to long for the melodic cry of the koumara sellers on Sundays, as they went from neighbourhood to neighbourhood carrying a large basket on their arm and we would gather round them waving our coins. They, in return, would make a tiny paper funnel and fill it with their sweet, crunchy, almost exotic berries.

Later, when cars were not such a distant possibility, we were thrilled to discover the `magical' berries ourselves among the dense, leafy koumaria bushes in areas around Athens, such as Marathon or Penteli.

I can vouch that horta gathering is still in full swing in Greece. If you drive out on Sundays, black clothed grandmas are still seen on the hillsides, often with grandchildren, wandering up and down picking whatever has just grown. Just recently I saw one of my neighbours on Sunday morning, bag in hand, scouring the newly sprouted weeds where we park our cars and successfully filling a bag. I was too shy to ask her what it was.

The only problem with horta is the preparation. Like spinach, the leaves generally boil down to nothing, so for a dinner for several people you need to buy volume: 2 or 3 kg is a usual purchase. And like spinach the leaves need to be washed and picked over. But as you can see from the photos, you get a huge amount for not more than 2 Euros. And with only one of us to eat the horta, it often gets wasted. Even I cannot eat 2 kgs a week.