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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.

Socialism is not yet dead in Greece

The Communist Party in Greece has not yet reached the Eurocommunist stage that its fellow parties in Western Europe reached in the 1970s and 80s. This did not do the parties a lot of good in the long run, but it ensured that their leaders found places in left leaning parties of the centre when the end of communism finally arrived and they have managed to continue their careers, just like the ex-communists of Eastern Europe. The role of a communist party in Western Europe as a niche in the political defence of principle in politics is a hard one to explain in post communist politics especially in Eastern Europe where the lack of principle in the Communist Party was apparent for all to see. A Greek colleague has described the party as continuing to market a product for which the factory had long since closed.

However in Greece it is still done in the old way. In a column this week in Athens News , Mark Dragoumis suggests that the Communists have no solutions to the 21st century problems of Greece but “mass struggle”. Their party seems not even to debate the problems, but oppose everything as a matter of course, expecting in the 21st century “the renaissance of communism” that not even pensioners in Russia expect. The only other visible plank of policy is opposing the EU on any and all grounds.

Their influence also helps to prolong in Greece the expectation of a job in the government for life, even if it is a low-paid job where no real work gets done. This “social right to work” seems to be one of the hardest beliefs to shift, in an age of “life long learning”.

But even the Government is still involved in the market in ways that are very hard to understand. Somewhere in the last couple of days, I saw that the Government was still involved in fixing the price of bread, water and even sandwiches. Of course there are no ways to enforce this!

Another petty irritation is the restriction on pharmacy locations and opening times. All pharmacies are small family run affairs which seem to open and shut to suit the family. Although there are lots of them, they are never open at weekends when I do my shopping. There are no big international firms running chains of well-stocked big shops, presumably because of the restrictions on opening any new ones when there are already enough within a prescribed area. The newspapers have to run lists of open pharmacies, so you can find one that is actually open, though whether it will have what you want is another matter. We usually give up and drive straight to the airport (30 mins and a toll motorway) if we need something as that is the biggest pharmacy we know. Other people must do that too, as it seems to be one of the biggest shops in the airport, and the people are always kind and helpful.

Whatever happened to the EU internal market and TV programmes?

It seems every country has its own residence requirement so before you can buy a TV card you must produce a local address.

This has developed into a farce with Sky in Britain where there are now services for expats to provide addresses and equipment so they can have TV wherever they are (satellite receiver reception permitting).

In the end we decided we were not so keen on Sky but would settle for BBC Prime. In Greece we were offered a simple legal card, or for an extra cost we could have BBC Prime and some other channels which the card would unblock. This seemed a better bet, as that was what we were used in Lithuania where such were the distribution channels for legal stuff, that illegal was the only option.

So gradually surfing through the channels we ended up with, we got hooked on Dutch TV, which amused us with the advertising and provided us with Dutch subtitles to some new and old American soaps: Will and Grace, Friends, Gilmore Girls, (our favourite) and Ali McBeale. We were enjoying learning Dutch advertising slogans and comparing the cost of internet connections in Greece with Holland.

So when our special channel suddenly blanked out and our TV man told us it was now blocked and he couldn’t hack it any more, we were shocked! OK, maybe in summer it is not necessary to watch so much TV. But what shall we do when we move back to England?

Why can’t we watch Dutch TV in the UK if we want to? It’s not like the cards are so expensive that we wouldn’t buy one: even at £200 per year it’s less than 50p per day. Don’t they want the money?

Can someone tell me why the market is still restricted to national level? And can anyone tell me where to buy a pirate copy of the Gilmore Girls DVD? If you get shut out too often it turns you into a subversive.

Greek politics and the Media Law

A blog from Greece can’t go by without a comment on the current scrap (one of many) with the EU over the Media Bill this time. It reminds me of the discussions in Ukraine 10 years ago. We would discuss a problem in the construction industry. I would propose the usual western solution. The people I worked with would explain how this would actually work in Ukraine under the prevailing conditions. Then we would come to the conclusion that the western solution would probably achieve the exact opposite effect to that intended, and a completely different solution was needed in Ukraine at least for the short term. Of course, this was all part of “you don’t understand Ukrainian conditions” and “we want to manipulate things in the way we understand, not with any of your fancy foreign ways, which we don’t understand” which prevailed at the time.

But back to Greece in the 21st century with decades of EU membership. The problem is that media owners have been regularly manipulating government tenders for construction contracts to their advantage. Don’t just consider the Olympic bonanza, but all the new transport infrastructure projects just announced by the government. So what would the government like to do? Ban all media companies for tendering from public construction contracts.

Leaving aside all the EU legislation that this contradicts, just imagine applying this to Italy and Berlusconi. Or in Britain where the press used to be controlled by the Conservative Party.

Luckily the EU is having none of it, pointing out that the real problem with media influence in the awarding of government contracts is the corrupt politicians influencing tender commissions. If politicians kept their noses out, and tender commissions operated objectively, then media companies would have no influence. So the media companies (and even their distant relations excluded through the famous “entangled interests” clauses) must be laughing up their sleeves.

So the government will have to rewrite the Law, despite claiming that the Greek Constitution over-ruled EU legislation. Greece, where have you been since you joined the EU? And just to make sure there is no mistake about the seriousness of the EU intentions, the EU says that payments from the Structural and Cohesion Funds will be delayed (ie lost) until the situation is brought into line with EU requirements. Yet another way in which Greece shoots itself in the foot in receiving aid, from which it can only lose again in competition with the new Member States.

And I must say something about the British election

Though I don’t have much to say. I went to the trouble of getting a postal vote, though the Greek postal service did not deliver it in time. At least I assume so, as the Greek Easter and my heavy cold after arriving back from England, meant that I didn’t get to the office in time to pick up the papers.

Also I was shocked that electoral fraud is now an issue in Britain as a result of making it easier to get a postal vote. I shall tease the people in my office about whether they were tempted to vote for me, if indeed the papers did arrive.

One of the problems with postal votes for expats is that you can’t choose where you vote. I can see why that makes sense, as no doubt people could gang up and vote in marginal seats, or at least parties could campaign that way. However for me to vote in a rural constituency in the South West doesn’t make a lot of sense. The normal urban Tory/Labour standoff isn’t played out there, since there isn’t a large industrial work force to vote Labour, and traditionally the South West “establishment” tends to vote Liberal like in Scotland. Monmouth was always a place from which rebellions were launched, although these days it is thoroughly Tory. When I last lived there (1997) it was clear that tactical voting to keep the Tories out was what mattered so I voted Liberal.

When we lived in Brecon, the boundary was gerrymandered several times so it became a very marginal seat. There too I voted Liberal since the incumbent Liberal MP was working hard and was very visible, even appearing at the village agricultural show, though there must have been several every weekend he had to get round in the summer. When we first bought our house, the constituency was a Tory stronghold, which seemed strange given it was so close to the coal-mining Valleys. I remember being visibly shocked when before election time, the candidate’s wife arrived in the local pub and bought everyone a beer. And they all drank it and there was almost an invisible forelock being tugged in thanks. I was only marginally reassured when Gwyn MM (because he had seen the world, winning the Military Medal somewhere in the African desert and therefore was a bit more outspoken than the rest) gave her a V sign of the wrong sort as she left, indicating that the beer was accepted without any obligation. But it gave the impression of what might have happened in the 30s when the local mine owner might have done the rounds to get the vote out in his favour.

But apart from 1997 (and everyone still remembers Portillo’s face on his defeat) elections have had little excitement now that the result is known so quickly. Only the fanciness of the computer graphics advancing in proportion to Peter Snow’s age and Antony Howard’s pomposity vary from one election to the next. It’s a long way from student days in London in the 60s when even then, the result was known by midnight in Trafalgar Square and you could all go home and drown you sorrows.

I suppose these days party affiliations are no longer so tribal, in that they followed the way your family had always voted. My mother introduced me to the all night waiting up to hear the results over the radio, carefully taking out the Guardian supplement with the constituency lists which could be crossed off one by one as they came in. In time the strange names of constituencies (Liverpool Toxteth, South Fylde) became familiar to me in the same way as football team names from the football results on the Saturday radio (Hamilton Academicals, Arsenal) and the strange list of places round the British coast which were relayed on the Shipping Forecast (Dogger Bight, Finistere…).

My father would retire to bed, ready to sneer in the morning no matter who got in. He would have only voted for a Gaullist candidate and had no faith at all in Labour, having lost all his socialist beliefs by the 50s. In any case, he didn’t have a vote. However, his long explanations of French politics, including an early hatred of Mitterrand (which always produced a sneer and a curl of the lips) meant I had a similar long list of French politicians in my head long before it was necessary to understand EU (and hence French and German) politics. I suspect he had a sneaking respect for Margaret Thatcher as a strong leader though I don’t remember hearing him say anything about her politics. He was Gaullist in his approach to immigrants, seeing French colonial struggles in North Africa as the correct attitude towards the increasing numbers of Pakistanis coming to work in Preston at the time. Though I didn’t know any Pakistanis myself, his racist remarks were unpleasant.

My mother was an active member of the Labour Party (they sent someone to her funeral!) in a Tory stronghold. She enjoyed putting up posters in the local Church Hall advertising “You have heard Goliath, now come and hear David”. At a Tory meeting she complained they were using the Union Jack for a table cloth and shamed them into removing it. I remember being taken to hear Harold Wilson speak in Preston, in 1964, when both seats were marginal. He was heckled because the government had just cancelled the TSR2 aeroplane (a defence contract at English Electric, now part of BAC) causing huge job losses. However the workers were counterheckled by all those who had lost their jobs already when the cotton mills had closed in the 50s and at British Leyland in the 60s as part of the downward spiral of the British car industry. So no one really had much sympathy locally for these highly skilled (I suppose also highly paid) workers who were now out of a job. I remember having to calm my mother down as she was shouting at someone who was actually agreeing with her.

This was all a different world from the grammar school debates which were allowed to happen just before the election. There I was the only Labour voter, and the debates were conducted without any serious preparation or discussion of what elections were for. Needless to say, the tribal voting meant the Tories got in whatever the country voted for. This only reinforced my sense of isolation.

I think my mother always hoped I would go into politics. I suppose there is still time.

Tracing your past

In the mood for more dredging up the past I logged on to Friends Reunited which I had spotted somewhere.

I was amazed to find both my schools listed with people I actually remembered. I could even picture some of them. Following that I even found a website for the village where I grew up with a pen portrait of growing up in the 60s. Must persuade G to post photos and write something. She will love it.

Even found the girl who lived next door.

Also tracked down first university and work places but could not find Birmingham and Surrey Universities so cannot seem as clever as I really am :). Amazing how you can still put faces to names after all this time.

From the same site I also went to GenesReunited, which allows you to search for relatives and produces a family tree. It will be one-sided in our case, as it didn't do much outside the UK.

Too mean to subscribe at the moment but no doubt G will be interested to join to get messages from the past. Still 10 quid is not a lot for each of them.

Not really sure I want to contact people though, especially at the moment when "who I am" is so unclear. Must write something about Status Anxiety.

God has other plans for me

Finally bit the bullet and added this category. Spent 15 minutes moaning and then pressed the back button without saving it. I had made a list of all the current options, which seem to be increasing. Today's options stand as:

negotiating training in Turkey (sounds promising but short)
public information in Serbia on public health laboratories (fairly speculative as have no real experience on public health)
J's colleague rumoured to have work for an oil company in Turkey (very speculative as never worked for an oil company)
J's engineering firm with work in Russia in places I have never been
Water resources PR in Armenia

And a final surprise: a job reorganising Scottish municipalities is not dead as I thought but I might get an interview according to an email. Presumably they don't write if they aren't still interested.

So eat your heart out Interim Director. As Bee said, God has other plans for me.

More misery

Just heard I didn't get the Kosovo job. At least, first someone rang my mobile to say they really wanted me to get it, and the tender was going to be cancelled so we could submit the name of the IT person.

This seemed unlikely and a bit suspicious to me. And so it was. The French firm I was tendering with rang up to check and found they had lost the job.

Ah well, it was never a very sensible job. But now there is nothing to keep the wolf from the door. J is being bricklike to find other opportunities, but looks like I shall end up back in England starting from scratch.

New Books

Trip to Oxford (more later) produced some new books at least.

From Sloph's bookcase I exchanged my second copy of Pushkin's poems for a book on Kosovo written in 2001 but could be as interesting as the one on Serbia I got the same way.

Resisted buying A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian and Chernobyl Strawberries (good reviews in Economist) as only available in hardback in Oxford. But in Heathrow found that Tractor Factory was available in two for £18 so grabbed that and the latest Louis de Bernieres Birds without wings especially as it was about Turkish Greek population exchange in the 20s. Disappointed to find they would have been cheaper on Amazon but not with the post to Greece.

Bee just got a DVD of Politiki Kouzina (A Taste of Spice) from the local mini-market. This is a Greek film about food and Constantinople about the same period, which was previously only available in Greek so we couldn't watch it at the cinema. Now it has English subtitles when they spoke Greek but later in the film the Turkish dialogue is rendered in English without subtitles. It's a sad story about exile but vivid about life and food in Constantinople.