1. See Sutton 2001, chap. 3. The phrase “hear the smell” is familiar in other areas of Greece, such as Crete (Eleana Yalouri, personal communication with author).
2. Cruikshank 2005, 256; see also Perley 2013 on the struggle between decontextualized approaches to knowledge that seek to “preserve” Navajo language versus those that try to keep it alive and relevant in new and changing contexts.
3. Roosth 2013: 8. Hervé This describes his approach as “note by note” cuisine and suggests that it must overcome the tendency of humans toward neophobia (the fear of the new), so that “traditional” cooking is preserved “even when the ‘virtues’ of traditional foodstuffs are not demonstrated” (This 2013, 3).
4. Cited in Roosth 2013, 8. Roosth discusses some of the gendered aspects of molecular gastronomy in this article, which seems to me to parallel much of so-called “modernized” knowledge, in which traditional female practices are abstracted and standardized by men.
5. See Hernandez and Sutton 2003; Sutton and Hernandez 2007.
6. Greenfield 2004; Maynard, Greenfield, and Childs 1999.
7. Tim Ingold argues for a focus on “materials” as opposed to the “materiality” favored by Daniel Miller. Ingold argues, for example, that materials “do not present themselves as tokens of some common essence—materiality—that endows every worldly object with its inherent ‘thingliness’; rather, they partake in the very processes of the world’s ongoing generation and regeneration, of which things such as manuscripts or house fronts are impermanent by-products” (2007, 9).
8. The notion of affordance in relation to tool use has been developed by Tim Ingold, and is discussed below.
9. Marx cited in Graeber 2001, 268. Also see Shove et al. (2007, 35), who discuss specifically the way that kitchen equipment should not be seen “as entirely passive tools with which individuals realize aspects of their identity. Instead, the point is that new demands, injunctions and forms of practice arise as social and technical systems co-evolve.”
10. See Hoskins 1998; Weiner 1992.
11. Carsten 1995; Weismantel 1995.
12. See Seremetakis 1994; Sutton 2011.
13. That appellation is disputed by some, however (see Pink 2010).
14. Downey 2005; Hahn 2007; Geurts 2003; Howes 2008; Feld 2003; Parr 2010.
15. The notion of terroir, “the taste of place,” also can be seen as capturing a notion of gustemology, that is, taste as a crucial way through which we know places (Trubek 2008).
16. See also Keller 2001; Keller and Dixon Keller 1999.
17. Wrangham’s book is a synthesis of his work and that of other biological anthropologists. For a fuller review of Catching Fire, see Sutton 2013.
18. There are many reviews of the literature on food in anthropology, but a good starting place is Mintz and Du Bois 2002.
19. See Yanagisako and Delaney (1995, 16), who note that “superficial assessments of similarities in the roles and sentiments of women in different societies can lead to the naïve conclusion—rampant in U.S. white feminist scholarship in the 1970s—that all women can readily comprehend each other’s suffering, sorrows, and joys.” This scholarly lacuna has by and large remained unfilled until recently. In her study on female Mexican cooks, Christie notes, “It is truly amazing that scholars—feminists among them—can continue to exclude women’s contributions to ‘the archives of knowledge.’ Many respected books presenting recipes and other cultural aspects of la cucina Mexicana rarely mention the gendered nature of food preparation spaces or the women who accumulate and transmit cultural and technical knowledge from generation to generation” (2008, 264). See also Short’s discussion (2006, 53ff.).
20. See, e.g., Adapon 2008; Allison 1991; Counihan 2010; DeVault 1997; Murcott 1983; Williams 1984.
21. Avakian 1997; Abarca 2006; and see also two special issues from 2006 of Gender, Place and Culture devoted to kitchens (vol. 13, nos. 2 and 6).
22. See Inness 2001; McFeely 2001; Shapiro 1986, 2004, 2007; Hayden 1982.
23. See Kaufmann 2010 for an ethnographic elaboration of these issues.
24. See, e.g., Harper and Faccioli 2010.
25. Kirsh 1995; de Léon 2003a, 2003b.
26. See also Clarke 2001 on Tupperware and domesticity. A number of scholars, including Miller 1988, Parr 1999, and Freeman 2004, provide ethnographic explorations of the design of kitchen technologies and kitchen spaces. Scholars of housework have noted that the vaunted “labor-saving technologies” have often simply rearranged family divisions of labor (children no longer being sent to the store to pick up things for Mom) and displaced female labor into different low-valued activities (driving the kids to soccer): Cowan 1983; Strasser 1982.
27. See Hernandez and Sutton 2003 and Sutton 2006 for elaborations of these points.
28. See also Meah and Jackson 2013.
29. Counihan 2004, 2010; Finn 2004; Hauck-Lawson 1998; Abarca 2006.
30. Grasseni 2004, 12; see also Herzfeld 2003; Pink 2005; Relieu et al. 2007.
31. See Sutton 1998, chap. 6; 2001, chap. 3.
1. It differed on Kalymnos because of the addition of dried bread rings, moistened with water, called kouloures.
2. Estimating population on an island of seasonal and longer-term migration is notoriously difficult. If I asked how many lived on Kalymnos, people would respond, “In what month?” Government figures on population have been unreliable and, since the financial crisis, nonexistent.
3. Thanks to Russ Bernard for this observation. See Galaní-Moutáfi 1993 for a comparative discussion of this phenomenon.
4. Extensive studies have not been done, but see Vernier 1987 for a comparison of inheritance practices on different Dodecanese islands.
5. For more details of this practice and its ramifications, see Sutton 1998, chap. 5.
6. See Sutton 2001, 105ff. for a fuller description of meal and snack patterns.
7. UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, application for “The Mediterranean Diet,” nomination file no. 00394. For a vivid anthropological account of daily life in an outdoor food market in Turin, Italy, see Black 2012.
8. The fruit merchant’s family had bought property from the buyer’s family, a small piece of land for a prefab summer home, which meant that they were neighbors both in their regular homes and in their summer getaways.
9. See Sutton 2001, 23ff. On gender and grocery shopping, see also Miller 1998.
10. On the ambiguous ideas about meat, masculinity, and tradition, see Sutton 1997.
11. See Sutton 1998, chap. 7. As noted, Angeliki’s stress on generosity does not mean that she doesn’t perceive slights and acts of ingratitude. For more, see my discussion in chapter 6.
12. I am reminded here of E. P. Thompson’s description of the “moral economy” of English society, in which profit-making on bread or grain, the staple food, was long seen as inherently antisocial. Thompson writes, for example, that in much of England at least through the eighteenth century, “There is a deeply-felt conviction that prices ought, in times of dearth, to be regulated, and that the profiteer put himself outside of society” (1971, 112; emphasis in original).
13. In the context of arguing that people “know” nutritional advice but don’t follow it, Kaufmann writes, “Ideas come from outside and are stored in a separate mental stratum that may be either active or dormant and which is divorced from our actual practices. They have no immediate effect on the underlying mechanisms that govern our practices which reshape the things that make individuals what they are day by day” (2010, 23).
14. Found at www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?lg=en&pg=00335#6.41 “Consent of Coron Community, Greece,” accessed August 15, 2001, but the page has been subsequently taken down. Visit www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?lg=en&pg=00011&RL=00884 for the current status of this application.
15. See Yiakoumaki 2006a, 2006b; Ball 2003.
16. See Sutton 2001, 59ff., for a discussion.
17. See www.aegeancuisine.net/portal.
18. I filmed Evdokia and Aleka on several occasions between 2008 and 2012. I incorporate only one of these videos into this study, however, because of my focus on home cooking here. I will consider the relationship between restaurant cooking on Kalymnos and “Mediterranean cuisine” in a future publication.
19. See Sutton 2001, chaps. 3 and 4, for discussion and examples.
1. Hernandez and Sutton 2003; Sutton and Hernandez 2007.
2. Kaloriziko, more literally translated as “may you [and it, i.e., the appliance] have a fortunate destiny.”
3. See Cockburn and Ormrod 1993; Parr 1999; Silva 2000.
4. All the videos are available at www.ucpress.edu/go/greekkitchen, and at www.youtube.com/channel/UCZhvwUWSdxHSHM0Frx3J17Q/videos.
5. For the dynamite throwing, see Sutton 1998, chap. 3.
6. “Einai loksa, den me volevoun.” Both of these phrases in Greek suggest a relational and contextual character to human-tool interaction that will be discussed further in the section below on can openers.
7. Cf. Meah and Jackson’s suggestive description of gendered conflict over the design of kitchen counters, cupboards, and stoves in their U.K.-based study (2013, 591).
8. See Shapiro 1986; Hayden 1982.
9. Maynard, Greenfield, and Childs 1999; see also Janeja 2010, 54, on the class-based practice of squatting while cooking in Bengal.
10. Mann et al. 2011, 233. This quote is from Priya Satalkar. She also notes in a personal correspondence that when she learned cooking in India, chopping was done in a kneeling position and with a special chopping tool, a board with a blade attached to it by a hinge. As she further notes, “at home [in India] we always cooked together, either with my mom, brother or father,” whereas cutting vegetables in her current home in the Netherlands is a time “when I can block almost all stimuli from outside and turn inwards” (2012, personal communication with author).
11. Kopeckhi are sweets made in honor of the king of Denmark (Kopeckhi = Copenhagen).
12. Ingold’s reflections on Lefebvre’s notion of “rhythmicity” seem relevant here. As Ingold notes, rhythmicity “implies not just repetition but differences within repetition. Or to put it another way, fluent performance is rhythmic only because imperfections in the system call for continual correction. . . . Inexperienced practitioners, by contrast, could not maintain a rhythm” (2011, 60, emphasis in original).
13. Her mother came from the village of Monastiraki in the district of Dorida (Fokida Prefecture).
14. The importance of balance, stance, and use of hands is explored in detail by Patel in her thesis on the work of bakers (2008). She notes, for example, “The haptic or the tactile-kinesthetic touching with the hands and indeed with the body is central to cooking. It is through active touch . . . what I refer to as ‘analytic touch’ with the hands that a baker knows the quality of the dough and how to work with it” (137).
15. Georgia Vourneli, from Thessaloniki, gave a different recipe for sfoliata, but agreed that the point of this technique is to make the phyllo lighter and crunchier (tragana).
16. Yogurt is not a typical ingredient in phyllo dough, but it was part of a number of acceptable variations typically associated with the dish boureki (as I noted above, Polykseni claimed to have multiple phyllo dough recipes that she used).
17. Interestingly, I learned from Nina Papamihail that when her family moved back from the United States to Kalymnos in the early 1970s, before making pies had become popular on the island, Nina’s father, a chef by profession (see chapter 3), had found a carpenter to cut and sand a broomstick handle for him so he could have a proper rolling pin.
18. This description is drawn from Hernandez and Sutton 2003, in which we also describe the entire process of making a leek pie.
19. Cf. Patel’s description of several bakers making cannolini shells using thin sticks (2008, 123). As she notes of one, “He appears to be exerting a gentle pressure, letting the dough do the work. His fingers and the stick move in tandem appearing to be an integrated working unit.”
20. I found a YouTube video of this process, using a thinner rolling pin, at the following link: www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvNzAi9w6TU&feature=youtube_gdata_player.
21. For a description of the sofra, and its significance as an inalienable possession, see Sutton and Hernandez 2007.
22. I was staying with Katerina and her family at the time that I shot the video discussed in this section, and so had complete daily access to their kitchen activities.
23. Cited in Sutton 2001, 129. For further discussion, see 129ff.
24. In Greek, the exchange went as follows:
Katerina: Της Κατίνας το άνοιγμα θα δείς τώρα. αφού έχουμε το εργαλείο πιάσε τώρα να μην ρημάξουν τα χέρια: Α πα πα νεύρο. Για να μην καθυστερήσω τώρα . . . εγω το ανοίγω . . . σωστά. μάλιστα, τι να κάνουμε, τα είπαμε, είναι δικιά μας ο,τι και να την κάνουμε, δεν γίνεται αλλιώς. να φας τα χέρια σου είναι το πράμα; Μπορεί να κόψεις τα χέρια σου. ένα λεπτό με τη ανοιχτήρι,
David: δεν παίρνεις από το καινούργιο?
Katerina: έχω, μου έδωσε η Bαγγελιά έχω, αλλά δεν το μπορώ, δεν το επιδεξεύομαι, δεν το βολεύω πως το λένε . . . εγώ είμαι παραδοσιακιά . . . παραδοσιακιά. Τι να κάνουμε.
25. The interesting phrasing “eat your hands” will be considered in the conclusion.
26. Jean-Pierre Warnier provides a similar anecdote about Marcel Mauss puzzling over how a Kabyle man can run downhill in slippers. Warnier suggests that it is because slippers “are incorporated into his motor habits by apprenticeship. . . . He is a man-with-slippers” (Warnier 2001, 7). In this case, Katerina is a woman-with-can-opener. Thanks to Eleana Yalouri for pointing me to this.
27. Bourdieu 1990, 73. See also Warnier’s argument for “a kind of synthesis between subject and object in motion, to such an extent that the subject identifies with his embodied objects” (2009, 467). Technological action, according to Warnier, should be seen as efficacious action directed toward both objects and subjects.
28. See, e.g., Downey 2010 for a discussion and critique of Bourdieu’s formulation of the habitus.
29. Many of the older pots are made of aluminum, and Kalymnians are aware that these may pose health hazards, but many kitchens on Kalymnos still contain these pots, and I often saw them still in use.
30. Indeed, outdoor ovens became a desired feature not just on Kalymnos during this period, but throughout Greece. One might compare this with the renewed popularity of fireplaces on Rethymnos, Crete, as described by Herzfeld (1991, 230–32). But while Herzfeld sees contemporary fireplaces as having a largely symbolic motivation (represented by their placement in the more public living room rather than in the kitchen), outdoor ovens clearly are much more than primarily decorative.
31. Freeman 2004; Shove et al. 2007.
32. While the Saturday before Easter is still a fasting day, many Kalymnians don’t observe the fast on this day. Men in particular are known to eat meat and consume alcohol during the afternoon. On Easter dynamite throwing, see Sutton 1998, chap. 3.
33. Cf. Fajans’s comment on Kayapo ovens, in which “the house and oven are a unit and are called ki kre (‘the space of the oven’) and represent the social living space of the family” (2012, 54).
34. See the discussion in Portisch 2010, 68ff.
35. Contrast this orientation to a typical specification of kitchen tools from the classic textbook Household Equipment: “Every utensil should be judged on construction, efficiency, and care required. It must be well made and of a material fitted to the purpose for which it is to be used. It should be durable, simple in design, and suitable in size and shape. The material and design should contribute to ease of cleaning. It should be designed to accomplish the task for which it was made efficiently, without undue expenditure of effort” (Peet 1975, 51).
36. On sponge diving and risk, see Bernard 1976. On dynamite throwing, see Sutton 1998, chap. 3.
1. Nina pronounces her name with a hard ī rather than an ē sound. Her last name is given in the typical “formal” transliterated version, rather than the more informal Papamichali. She told me that as her husband had spent considerable time as a seasonal migrant in the United States, on legal documents there he used the spelling “Papamaechel,” as that is what “an illiterate friend” told him to use.
2. This is also part of Nina’s frugality. She often talks about how she keeps everything, every plastic bottle as well as all the beautiful hundred-year-old china. On one visit to her summer house in 2009, she showed me and my wife some of the stuff she has scavenged from family and neighbors who were throwing them away—pretty pottery, a mallet that she thought her aunt might have used for tenderizing meat, old furniture. She recounted how Manolis used to bring her back shoes and clothes from the States but doesn’t anymore because he could never pick out the right thing. But he fills his duffel bag with stuff he collects from the apartments that he refinishes after the people move out (from an ongoing job in West Point, New York)—plastic wall hangings that say “home, sweet home,” even nails used to hang pictures and spare door hinges. Nina refers to these things with a smile as “the crap that Manolis brings back for me,” but she keeps them all. She has a storeroom for furniture, keeps old stuff in her dresser, and hangs up everything she can on the walls: “country” plaques, a wooden spoon with an elephant on the handle. She often asks if I think it’s good that she keeps these things; do my wife and I do the same? At one point, she wondered to me whether she keeps all this stuff because she doesn’t have children. But she’s also extremely pleased when she finds uses for things she has saved: an old plastic milk bottle that she uses to give me a gift of olive oil to take back to the States.
3. Manolis has two grown daughters from a previous marriage who live in the United States.
4. Baked foods like pastitsio and moussaka were the province of the rich in this time period.
5. When they moved to the States in the late 1940s, Nina’s father had left money with his father-in-law to renovate the house and to switch the living room and the kitchen (the living room was originally a larger space than the kitchen). When they moved back to Kalymnos in 1971, they moved the traditional kitchen storage closet (doulapi) into the outdoor kitchen and had cabinets installed on an American plan. They also brought their large refrigerator with them from the United States, making their fully outfitted kitchen a rarity for early 1970s Kalymnos. As time went on they used the living room less and less for formal occasions, instead serving guests around the large table in the kitchen).
6. This was one of the few aspects of Nina’s father’s professional cooking that became part of their home-cooking repertoire. As Nina noted, her mother was always interested in cooking, so she was pleased to master the art of making pies and pie crusts.
7. For example, Nina’s uncle weighed the pros and cons of keeping the water from boiling the octopus, which would be full of sea salt, or throwing it out and adding table salt to the dish.
8. I consider the relationship of cooking, control, and death at greater length in Sutton 2001, 154–55.
9. A spoon sweet is a Greek sweet made from various fruits or nuts preserved in sugar water; it is typically served with coffee. Note that meat with quince is not uncommon in parts of northern Greece but was not typically known in Kalymnian cooking.
10. See Salamone and Stanton 1986 for a rich discussion of the meaning of nikokyra.
11. The process involves slicing cherry tomatoes from the garden and the vergakia (Roma-type tomatoes from Vathi), putting them on a tray with a paper towel underneath and a touli (a kind of nylon cloth with holes in it) on top, and putting them in the sun. You bring them in at night so they don’t get wet. The whole process takes about a week. Then you put them in a jar with oil and spices.
12. Manolis also cooked spaghetti with shrimp on January 31 when they had his niece over for supper. Nina noted that Manolis is better at dealing with shrimp than she, since she has always found them to be fussy to peel and clean. Manolis seems to follow a pattern of cooking the occasional evening meal, as during the day he would be more likely to be occupied working in the garden. For more on Manolis’s cooking, see chapter 6.
1. This story was reported on the Association for the Study of Food and Society (ASFS) members-only listserv, July 18, 2008.
2. Crick 1982; Barth 1987; Tuzin 1997.
3. It is notable that much of this anthropological work focuses on male knowledge, in largely ritual contexts. Seremetakis 1991 provides an interesting exception in her ethnography of female control of mourning practices. She provides explicit consideration of questions of transmission through practices such as antiphony, yet, as with Lindstrom, learning is of explicit discursive material; and while embodiment is certainly part of Seremetakis’s concerns, questions of skill transmission are only examined schematically, as in her discussion of visits to “grandmother’s house” (Seremetakis 1994).
4. While interested in questions of “reproduction” of knowledge, such studies rarely address actual processes of learning, assuming that the intensity and heightened awareness provided by ritual ensures transmission. Some exceptions are Whitehouse 1992 and Rowlands 1994, which offer explicit discussions of processes of memory in relation to ritual knowledge and transmission. Barth does consider questions of the appropriateness of particular ritual imagery to carry knowledge. Much of this is seen in terms of questions of consistency, that is, in relation to a larger tradition of knowledge that each ritual element belongs to (Barth 1987, 34ff.).
5. Although indeed there has been a rise of cooking schools in Greece in recent times, these cooking schools tend to focus either on non-Greek recipes or on “traditional with a twist” recipes, not on learning classic dishes like moussaka. They would also insist on typical Western practices such as cutting using a board and a chef’s knife (I owe these insights to Nafsika Papacharalampous).
6. Early functionalist ethnographies such as Audrey Richards’s classic Land, Labour and Diet in Northern Rhodesia (1939) discuss the female transmission of cooking knowledge in the context of broader enculturation and learning of gender roles. Richards, for example, notes the stress placed on observation and the construction of “play frames” for young Bemba girls. Interestingly, she observes that most direct teaching is done not by mothers but by siblings, and in some cases grandmothers. She does not discuss competition between mothers and daughters over cooking, but does suggest that such competition exists between cowives, noting that cooking is a key source of power: “The Bemba woman’s prestige largely rests on her power to provide porridge and relish for her male relatives and to serve it nicely” (129; see also Gelfand 1971). Written as it is in functionalist generalizations, however, it is hard to assess the process of learning with any specificity.
7. Argenti 2002; Dilley 1999; Herzfeld 2003.
8. Some ethnographies of apprenticeship that look specifically at sensory-based learning are less about making things and more focused on bodily transformation through various disciplines. See, e.g., Hahn 2007 on Japanese dance and Downey 2005 on the martial art capoeira.
9. Indeed, they suggest that “kneeling” is a recognized stage in a child’s development akin to crawling or walking in Western societies.
10. A red sauce includes onions, garlic, and tomatoes.
11. Cf. Sutton 2001, chap. 3, for a discussion.
12. Steinberg 1998; see discussion in Sutton 2006.
13. I realize this naming pattern may be a bit confusing for non-Greek readers. Little Katerina is named after her grandmother, but often referred to with a diminutive attached to her name. The name Katina is not a derivative of Katerina, but a shortened version of the Kalymnian name Kalotina. For an extended discussion of Kalymnian naming patterns, see Sutton 1998, chap. 8.
14. Cf. Sutton 2001, 29–30.
15. She used the word sinenoisi, which suggests an understanding that has come after discussion rather than arising spontaneously (katanoisi).
16. Along these lines, Little Katerina asked her mother at the beginning of this video why the dish is called “zucchini mincemeat,” since there is no “meat” in the dish. Katina explained that mince didn’t refer to meat, but rather to the fact that the zucchini is cut up small, i.e., “minced.”
17. Cf. Leynse’s study (2008) on the agency of children in learning cooking.
18. Indeed, she tried cutting some of the pieces using a sharper knife against the pan while they were still frying, in effect improvising a response to the task as it demanded one. This is a nice reminder again that no recipe can be completely specified in advance, and everyday improvisation is always part of adjusting to the circumstances presented by cooking. Cf. Hallam and Ingold’s discussion of the significance of improvisation: “Because no system of codes, rules and norms can anticipate every possible circumstance . . . the gap between these non-specific guidelines and the specific conditions of a world that is never the same from one moment to the next not only opens up a space for improvisation, but also demands it.” (2007, 2ff.).
19. Once again, note the “risk” involved in cooking that I discussed in chapter 2, which Kalymnians learn from the beginning to manage rather than to minimize through technology and “proper” procedure.
20. As this video was shot near Eastertime, you can hear dynamite exploding in the background, part of Kalymnian Easter celebrations.
21. Parei yevsi, rather than yinei nostimo—which would literally mean “become tastier”—is a phrase suggestive of the salad becoming what it is, and something that we, through our senses, can understand.
22. I was reminded of the skill that goes into coffee-making by Angeliki Roditi when I stayed at her house for several weeks. When she would go on early-morning errands, she insisted that it was okay for me to prepare my own freshly squeezed orange juice [using her electric juicer], but that I should wait till she returned to have my coffee because “you don’t know how to make it.”
23. Kalymnos shares an Aegean island cultural pattern that tends toward matrilocal residence and a stress on matrilineal or dual inheritance, though with distinct variations among islands as well. This is in contrast to the patrilocal and patrilineal stress of many areas of mainland Greece. For discussion of these differences, see Dimitriou-Kotsoni 1993; Sutton 1998, chap. 5; Vernier 1987.
24. See also Meah and Watson’s suggestive study (2011), which questions linear transmission and notes the “diversity of sources through which culinary competence is constituted.”
25. I take this lovely phrase from Paul Auster (2008, 38). But see related ideas in Keane 1997; see also Bennett 2010 on the agency of food and Bogost’s discussion of the ways food escapes human intentionality as portrayed on TV shows such as Ace of Cakes (2012, 116ff.).
Leo Vournelis did research in Thessaloniki during approximately the same period as I was examining these issues on Kalymnos. For a discussion of methodological issues, see Sutton and Vournelis 2009.
1. This ongoing, collaborative project with my student Leo Vournelis was originally published as Sutton and Vournelis 2009. Vefa is Vefa Alexiadou of the television show Vefa’s Kitchen; Mamalakis is Elias Mamalakis of Forgiveness with Every Bite.
2. Mintz 1996. See Sutton 2001, chap. 4, for a more detailed discussion on this point.
3. Compare with Martine Perrot, who notes the role of freezers in preserving “traditional” foods in France: “In effect, far from having eliminated traditional forms of conservation, the freezer proposes an additional one. It participates in domestic production and makes possible, in both rural and urban areas, a rediscovery of the rhythm of the seasons by encouraging the conservation of fruits, vegetables and poultry” (1993, 367).
4. I discuss the first appearance of soy sauce on Kalymnos with Julia Koullia, an American woman married to a Kalymnian, in the video “Nina Making Octopus Stew” (video example 7).
5. In the past, birthdays were not celebrated, but rather “name days” (Hirschon 2010).
6. Very occasionally, Vefa traveled to different parts of Greece to highlight local and regional recipes.
7. All of these quotations are translations from my fieldnotes, recorded while watching the show in April 2006.
8. Thanks to Vassiliki Yiakoumaki for these observations.
9. The show did occasionally work with professional chefs, but typically this was when Mamalakis was showing the cuisine of non-Greek countries.
10. For an excellent account of intercommunal relations in Asia Minor, see Doumanis 2012.
11. Eleftherios Venizelos was prime minister of Greece for several terms in the early twentieth century.
12. She admitted that you could learn a little from Master Chef since at least they provided recipes. She contrasted this with the show Something’s Cooking (Kati Psinetai), a competition in which five contestants gather at one another’s houses and rate one another on their cooking, which was “all irony and criticism and nothing to learn about cooking,” according to Katina.
13. This is different from rice pudding, which is also popular on Kalymnos, but which involves using cooked rice rather than rice flour.
14. Admittedly, cooking was not the focus of my research during the late 1990s, so my notes are less systematic.
15. Kaufmann 2010, 201. Kaufmann does qualify this stark contrast; see pp. 203–4.
16. For a critical discussion, see my review of Kaufmann (Sutton 2013).
1. I discuss this topic in Sutton 1998, chap. 6. See also Brown and Theodossopoulos 2000 for a more general discussion of Greek views of international politics.
2. Indeed, I would have problems with Miller’s claims about people making up their own moral or aesthetic orders “rather than just inheriting [them] as tradition or custom” (2008, 293). His dismissal of class and gender as analytic categories is problematic as well.
3. Other aspects of Elia’s portrait that are familiar themes in the anthropology of Greece include issues of debt and betrayal (Miller 2008, 38) and the central place of cemeteries and ongoing relationships with the dead (40ff.).
4. The number of recording sessions ranged from one to roughly a dozen in different cases.
5. See Sutton 1998, 2008.
6. She said particularly their livers, though I’m not sure what the genesis of this claim was.
7. On the way that notions of World War II suffering and famine infuse understandings of the present day, see also Knight 2012.
8. See some of Yiannis’s pictures in Sutton 1998, 49; Sutton 2001, 44, 160.
9. For an account of the famine in Athens, see Hionidou 2006.
10. James and Kalisperis’s study of the nearby island of Chios (1999) suggests that this layout is unusual. They note that the Chiots “prefer to have a formal area, separated from the family living area by walls and doors, in which to entertain guests and strangers.” They also note that bedrooms on Chios are “very private,” seen by most nonfamily members only on the ceremonial occasion of “dressing the bed.”
11. Roland Haas, referring to his book Enter the Past Tense: My Life as a CIA Assassin (2007) on BookTV (C-Span), September 1, 2007.
12. On Greek regional cookbooks, see Ball 2003 and Yiakoumaki 2006a. On Kalymnians’ view of the relation of food, seasons, and holy days, see Sutton 2001, chap. 2.
13. See Argyrou 1996; Gefou-Madianou 1999; and Stewart 1989.
14. This could be compared with debates about the “traditionality” of dynamite throwing; see Sutton 1998, chap. 3.
15. Kaufmann (2010) generalizes across class, ethnicity, and locale to an ideal-typical French middle-class urban experience.
16. de Léon (2003a) also examines the temporal dimensions of cooking, but from a strictly cognitive perspective focused on timing and task organization.
17. See also de Léon 2003a, 2003b; Kirsh 1995.
18. Indeed, while they lived in Athens, her mother was in a similar position to Popi’s of not having female relatives nearby for sharing domestic labor.
19. Popi’s statement reflects the relation between naming children and the rebirth of the person for whom the child is named, which I have explored elsewhere (see Sutton 1998, chap. 8).
20. Kaufmann 2010, 184. Note that Kaufmann does contrast weekday cooking, which is seen as a chore, with weekend cooking, when French cooks give their imagination free rein. I found no such distinction on Kalymnos.
21. Pavlos also told me that he watched an Italian cooking show that used to air, and got ideas for different spaghetti sauces from it. And he liked Jamie Oliver for some of the salads that he presented.
22. Note too that in the case of Pavlos there was also no grandmother on hand to take responsibility for the primary cooking. Pavlos’s mother-in-law lived in Australia, and his own mother had died several years earlier.
23. Wilk and Hintlian suggest that some seafarers’ cooking is cut off from female traditions and is “a cuisine of ingredients rather than preparation” (2005, 162). This is clearly not the case for Kalymnian sailors, who take their cooking seriously and draw on the food and preparation techniques with which they are familiar. For a detailed discussion of Kalymnian sailors’ preparation of fish soup, see Riak 2012.
24. The reference to “like a vegetable” indicates the lack of sweetness of contemporary tomatoes.
25. Sometimes he would repeat the first step several times: bring just to the boiling point, pour off the foam, bring to a boil again, pour off the foam. Then he would allow it to reach a rolling boil.
26. On France, see Kaufmann 2010; on the United States see Trubek 2008. For an interesting comparison of food values in France and Sweden, see Bildtgård 2010.
27. See, e.g., Wasserman 2011.
1. This question was posed by Aldona Jonaitis. See Jonaitis 2006 and Edwards, Gosden, and Philips 2006.
2. See the description at the beginning of Pachirat 2011.
3. She told me that she had used the store-bought béchamel the first couple of times, but once she hadn’t wanted to go to the supermarket and decided to make it herself, and since then she had been doing it on her own.
4. Her Internet connection was spotty, so we watched only a few, shorter videos.
5. Except that the details are somewhat off: according to my notes, at least, it was her grandmother who told her that you put salt directly on the tomatoes when they are appetizers, while for salads the salt could go anywhere.
6. When I spoke to Little Katerina by phone in the summer of 2013, she bragged that she had made filla that day that were “just like my grandmother’s.” She told me that she follows all the advice her grandmother gave her, and that her dishes are often “better than my mom’s.” This was nine months after the death of her grandmother, perhaps one part of the reason that she might at that moment emphasize the explicit oral transmission of knowledge.
7. Other variations that Katina described to me include simply the shredded phyllo dough covered in honey and nuts, which she said was from Turkey and called ek-mek, and another variation that was a sweet cheese pie made with the Greek cheese myzithra.
8. For a discussion of restaurants and eating out on Kalymnos, see Sutton 2001, chap. 4.
9. Katina told me that she, along with many others, no longer bought sweets from the bakery when visiting a friend’s or relative’s house. Instead, she would bring homemade sweets, or perhaps some juice, or fish caught by her husband. To the extent that this is true, it represents a real shift from earlier, better economic times, when gifts of bakery-bought sweets were standard practice. However, Katina’s comments about not eating out at restaurants or getting fast food during difficult economic times were simply a reassertion of what most older Kalymnians have always known—that home cooking is always the better option than public eating.
10. See, e.g., Christie 2008 on the way men deride women’s cooking abilities.
11. Compare this to Williams’s discussion of Tejano cooking (1984), in which the demand that wives cook for husbands is enforced by the entire kin group, at the same time that women’s cooking is recognized as a key source of female prestige and influence.
12. Two important studies of changing urban Greek gender relations are Halkias 2004 and Kirtsoglou 2004. It is interesting that despite tremendous changes in Greek society, some of the same issues are raised by these studies as were highlighted in Cowan’s 1991 analysis of Greek gender discourses of twenty-plus years ago.
13. This is true even for women who are excellent cooks. For example, Evdokia Passa, who runs a restaurant during the summer months, told me in 2008 that during the winter she takes a vacation from cooking, and she and her husband eat on alternate days her mother’s cooking and her mother-in-law’s.
14. Of course, as noted in chapter 4, on Kalymnos these expectations are very different from in other parts of Greece, where a girl might be expected to learn cooking in her preteen years.
15. See also McCabe and Malefyt’s discussion of indeterminacy and “tweaking” in cooking in the United States (2013). Risk itself is a dangerously polyvalent word, as Mary Douglas, among others, has argued (Douglas 1992; see also Boholm 2003). I intend to address the relationship of risk and cooking more fully in a future publication, tentatively titled A Theory of Cooking, or, How “Natives” Cook, While Thinking, for Example.
16. Modernist cooks seem to fetishize science and technology and ridicule the human, “female” elements of cooking. See Wilson 2012, 257–58.
17. Thanks to Amy Trubek for these insights.
18. See Shapiro 2004; McFeely 2001.
19. See Ouroussoff 2010; Scott 1998; Carrier and Miller 1998.
20. I should note that Morozov explicitly exempts molecular gastronomy from his critique of technological solutionism because he says that all the additional technology introduced makes cooking more challenging rather than simpler. This is an important point to consider; however, as Sophia Roosth’s ethnography (2013) suggests, this technology is, in fact, being employed toward the goal of perfectibility, and of transferring the skills associated with tradition into the laboratory setting on the model of reproducibility.
21. Instead of using fruits, vegetables, and meats, note-by-note cuisine uses “compounds,” and there are exponentially more possible compounds than there are ingredients: “If we assume that the number of compounds present in the ingredients is about 1,000, and that the number of compounds that will be used in note by note cuisine is of the order of 100, then the number of possibilities is about 10 to the 3000. And, in this calculation we have not considered that the concentration of each compound can be adapted, which means that a whole new continent of flavor can be discovered” (This 2013, 5).
22. See Roosth’s discussion of the funding for molecular gastronomy laboratories by large food companies. As she notes, “By following either the money or the chemicals, one traces a path from frozen French fries to foie gras foam” (2013, 10).
23. This is a point that I develop more fully in Sutton 2011.
24. Bud from Portland. www.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/magazine/cooks-illustrateds-christopher-kimball.html.
25. For a discussion of trends among leading restaurateurs such as Ferran Adrià and René Redzepi, see Davis 2012. Davis argues that these chefs are using their differently styled high-tech creations to access the links among taste, memory, and the senses in a way that is similar to what Seremetakis 1994 describes for rural Greek culture. In the absence of an ethnography of the restaurant customers, I would say that I reserve some skepticism.
26. I translate the Greek word psyche as “soul” here because both words are deeply multivocal.
27. See Janeja’s discussion of food and agency (2010). This could also be seen as part of the “analogic thinking” that I have described as the essence of Kalymnian historical consciousness (Sutton 1998). The connection of such food metaphors to historical consciousness, however, awaits further thought and ethnographic elaboration.
28. Available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPRumYmy9PQ&noredirect=1.
1. One example is the “potato movement,” which has been challenging the role of middlemen and supermarkets in setting prices and attempting to provide direct exchange between producers and consumers (see Rakopolous n.d.; Vournelis and Sutton 2012).
2. To migrate to Australia one needs to have an employer willing to guarantee a job upon arrival.
3. By August 2013 he had left for Australia on a temporary visa.
4. Katina’s parents had long worked as craftspeople, tanning leather and making leather products mostly for sale to tourists.
5. Katerina passed on in November 2012. In the fall of 2013 they once again collected snails. But this time Katina prepared them using a method she had learned from a neighbor from the island of Astypalia, which involved potatoes rather than rice. Katina said it came out very tasty.
6. A pseudonym.
7. Papacharalampous 2012 discusses this in reference to the rerelease of a World War II cookbook—Themos Potamianos’s Cooking to Suit the Times—in 2012. This cookbook, which received enthusiastic reviews in the press in 2012, advocates creativity and flexibility in using local substitutes for ingredients that were unavailable during wartime and, by extension, during other times of hardship. See also Knight 2012.
8. See Sutton 2001, chap. 2; Panourgia 1995.
9. Indeed, Katina’s mother, Katerina, who had been a strong supporter of the socialist PASOK in the 1980s and 1990s, told me that she hadn’t voted in the past two elections and was disgusted with all of the political parties. For an analysis of the political aspects of the crisis in Greece, see Vournelis 2013.
10. Na skavei, a phrase suggestive of hard living.
11. Mihalis owns a furniture factory with branches in Queens and Manhattan.
12. An ongoing debate on Kalymnos concerns whether the garbage on Kalymnian streets is the fault of the poor social services provided by the mayoralty, or the fact that Kalymnians refuse to follow rules about putting out garbage on a particular day because, as Nina puts it, “Greeks do not want to have anyone tell them what to do.” For further discussion of these issues, see Sutton 1998, chap. 2.