“Vefa or Mamalakis? Who do you watch? Who do you prefer?” These questions stimulated strong reactions among Greeks on Kalymnos and in Thessaloniki when Leonidas Vournelis and I began to pose them in 2006.1 The hosts of Greece’s two most popular cooking shows, one female, one male, each had their following. Some referred to Vefa as “full of imagination” and “golden-handed,” while others insisted that Mamalakis embodied authentic Greek cooking and Vefa was a crude infomercial, or a representative of “the oppressiveness of tradition.” While not everyone opposed one to the other, it was clear that many people were watching and were deeply interested in this new phenomenon, the cooking show, one of the most striking examples of cooking and recipes moving out of the localized circuits of communities and into the wider community of the nation.
The previous chapter looked at the conflicts and negotiations that constitute daily cooking within families. This chapter widens the focus to get at the ways that cooking knowledge is shared throughout a wider community. This community consists of the circle of neighbors and friends who make up the local community, as well as migrants who return to Kalymnos during the summer. Moreover, while the majority of this ethnography has been focused on cooking practices on Kalymnos, this chapter explores cooking in relation to the wider Greek society through the medium of cooking shows. Ethnographically, this chapter expands to include work done in Thessaloniki, Greece’s second-largest city. We analyze the content of Greek cooking shows to get at some of the key debates over the values surrounding daily cooking in Greek society at large. We also look at how Kalymnians and Thessalonikans define their own cooking practices in relation to the wider discourses generated by these shows, what kind of knowledge they derive from the shows, and what influence the shows have on daily cooking practices. We also use this chapter to trace some of the changes in cooking shows from the mid-2000s, when the only cooking programs available on TV were produced in Greece, to the second decade of the twenty-first century, which has seen these shows complemented by foreign ones, in particular The Naked Chef featuring Jamie Oliver. Let’s begin with a consideration of some of the ways that cooking knowledge and knowledge of other crafts circulate outside the family on Kalymnos.
I have suggested throughout these pages that food discourses saturate Kalymnian everyday life, as discussion of recipes and their variations are commonly shared among family, friends, and neighbors. Part of what makes Kalymnian food a “cuisine” is, in Sidney Mintz’s words, that people feel a shared investment in talking about it.2 Whether one cuts or grates tomatoes for octopus stew, whether one uses bags or jars to store one’s rice, how to add flavor to a dish of green beans by mashing feta into it, the virtues of different types of containers for cooking Easter lamb, discussions of food shopping and the pros and cons of different markets—all of these make up unending fodder for Kalymnian conversations among women and men, young and old. But what about more specific claims to cooking knowledge? What kind of teaching and learning goes on beyond the family, and with what implications for food practices and identities?
It is in some ways difficult to establish a reputation as a cook on Kalymnos because one is generally cooking to feed the immediate and extended family circle. While oral discourses about recipes abound, one doesn’t typically invite a friend or neighbor into one’s kitchen to observe some dish or cooking skill. However, food generosity is a key social value on Kalymnos, and when cooked food is involved it does allow one to extend one’s reputation so one is spoken of within the neighborhood, if not the wider community. This is not as common as you might think, however, since cooked food is more commonly offered to visitors and other foreigners rather than to neighbors, who are expected to have food available at home. Among neighbors and friends, food generosity typically involves unprocessed ingredients: fresh produce from one’s gardens or fields. It is only on the occasion that a neighbor or friend passes by on the way to work, or on an excursion to the beach, that one might offer cooked food and be able to display one’s talents. In some cases one does exchange cooked food with a few neighbors with whom one may have ongoing transactions of various sorts, and this is, indeed, a chance to comment on the small differences in preparation technique that make for much of the substance of Kalymnian daily conversations about food. One woman regularly shared food with a poorer neighbor who often came by asking whether she could help with tasks such as lighting candles at the graveyard (an ongoing female responsibility). When money was tighter, this poor neighbor would be offered leftover cooked food as well, and might herself bring vegetables that she had gotten from a vendor who deemed them no longer salable. This might be a time when neighbors would compare preparation techniques; one woman deferred to her neighbor’s preparation of moussaka as being better because she cooked the eggplant just before assembling the dish, rather than doing it the night before and letting it sit.
Most women with whom I spoke insisted that they were happy to share knowledge of cooking as well as skills such as crocheting, sewing, and other tasks related to making a trousseau. In this regard sharing knowledge parallels sharing food itself, in that the important thing is for the generosity to be narrated within the community. A woman complained to me how she had taught a friend crocheting for her daughter’s wedding trousseau, and had helped do much of it. The friend failed in her social task: when asked by relatives who had done the crocheting, she claimed the knowledge herself rather than defer to the woman who had taught her. The woman who had offered the help complained, “And this she did right in front of me!” However, she added, “It is not important. Do these good things and they will come back to you. I taught another friend crocheting, and she taught me some knitting stitches, even though a neighbor had told her not to teach me because then everyone would be producing the same thing. So she taught me on the sly.”
This type of exchange between female neighbors and friends is not uncommon, and it may be one of the ways that skill knowledge is learned in a less-fraught context than mother-daughter relations. What is important is that the provenience of any special skill or trick be recognized and acknowledged. A woman told me how she had taught an acquaintance to make pizza—a novel dish on Kalymnos at the time—and when she ran into the woman several years later, she said, “Every time I make pizza you must sneeze because I talk of your ‘trick.’” Other women mentioned that their crochet designs “are famous throughout Kalymnos.” Another example comes casually at the beginning of the video “Katerina and the Can Opener,” which I discussed in chapter 2. Katerina mentions that her neighbor who gave her the can opener asked her where she found maskalies in the middle of the summer. Katerina then explains to me that maskalies is a “wild local herb, very aromatic,” which, when you add it to bean soup or codfish, makes it really a “traditional Kalymnian dish.” Katerina tells her neighbor how she collects it and freezes it, along with other herbs, so that she can use it year-round.3 “My neighbor Vangelio said, ‘You’re a real school if someone observed you.’” These are the kinds of interactions that ensure that one’s reputation for skills, like one’s general reputation, circulates throughout the community (see Sutton 2001, 45ff.).
Another potential source of knowledge circulation for many Kalymnians is the visits of return migrants, typically during the summer. While many return migrants are eager to eat the foods they remember from the past, they also can occasionally be a source of new knowledge of ingredients, techniques, or combinations. For example, although soy sauce has been available on Kalymnos since at least the early 1990s, it was typically something bought only by non-Greeks living on the island.4 Soy sauce was introduced to Katerina and her family in the summer of 2005 by her grandson and his girlfriend, who were visiting from Australia and took it upon themselves to make a few dishes, including fried rice. Katerina enjoyed the fried rice and praised her grandson for his kitchen abilities. I asked Katerina whether fried rice is something that she could imagine cooking herself. She said yes, she would cook it for guests, but not for her family because of her concern about excessive sodium. Several days later, however, I saw that Katerina was using the soy sauce as a supplement to salt in a spaghetti sauce she was making. In this case the flow of knowledge (of a “new” ingredient) was from the younger to the older generation, but this was also framed by the fact that the knowledge was coming from Australia, and thus had a positive connotation of exoticism.
A few women gave examples of gaining cooking knowledge in circumstances that I would label “class-based transmission.” One woman worked as a servant for two rich sisters, and she said that they shared their knowledge of how to cook with her as part of her work preparing foods for them. She noted that her mother had been a terrible cook, so she had learned very little from her, and that she was grateful for the knowledge from her employers. Another woman spoke of being a regular visitor at the home of the mayor and his wife when she was a teenager and in her early twenties: “They invited me over because I would sing and tell jokes, and I would also help the wife prepare sweets and desserts when they were hosting visiting dignitaries.” She noted that many of these desserts were cakes and other sweets not typical on Kalymnos at the time, so she learned some of these preparations. She also learned other skills from the mayor’s wife, such as spinning silk from silkworms. One woman got to know a rich family with whom she would normally never have socialized because the young daughters had become friends at school. She noted being impressed by the fact that the rich woman didn’t “put on airs,” but made her own jam, and made the birthday cake for her daughter’s party rather than buy it from the store “not out of cheapness, but because she likes to do these things.” Class distinctions can be somewhat submerged on Kalymnos, however (see Sutton 1998, chap. 2), so I did not hear about many other explicit discussions of the kind of cross-class knowledge transmission that other writers have seen as a key aspect of the development of traditional cuisines (e.g., Diner 2001, chap. 2).
Learning on one’s own is also not absent on Kalymnos, though interestingly enough, the three cases of it that I recorded in depth involved Kalymnian women who were not residing on Kalymnos at the time. In these cases women referred explicitly to relying on cookbooks to help them. One was Vakina Roditi, who learned cooking in the context of migrating to Italy, and thus claimed to learn a combination of Greek and Italian cooking based on her memory of her mother’s cooking, often combined with advice coming from Italian neighbors. Another was Polykseni Miha, who discussed a period in her life when she was helping her sister who had moved to the neighboring island of Kos as a teacher, and who had a young child to look after. In this case, Polykseni would frequently consult the classic Greek cookbook by Nikolaos Tselementes in order to help her figure out how to reproduce the dishes she had become used to from her childhood on Kalymnos. The third was Popi Galanou, whose parents were absent because they worked full-time in Athens. While she initially learned by helping her brother prepare meals (he was six years older), she remembers her excitement on receiving a cookbook at age twelve. None of the Kalymnian men I spoke with indicated that cookbooks were important in helping them learn to cook, typically in circumstances where women were absent, such as migration or being a professional sailor. Rather, they suggested that their own observational powers and creativity were key factors in their ability to master cooking, themes that appear in my discussion of male cooks in chapter 6.
Today, cooking knowledge and cooking reputation can grow from other sources as well. In 2011 the Kalymnian church had set up a “kitchen of love” to feed those on the island hardest hit by the ongoing economic crisis. Some neighborhood women from Ayios Mammas cooked food to donate to this drive, moving their domestic efforts into a more public setting where kitchen ability could be commented on. And now that birthday parties and sleepovers are more common, women have the opportunity to observe each other’s food more than they might have had in the past.5 For an older generation, as discussed in the previous chapter, cooking skill continues to mark the sign of a good woman in Kalymnian terms.
When I was doing research on Kalymnos in the 1990s, TV cooking shows did not exist, though perhaps an occasional recipe might be shown or discussed on a variety program. So by the mid-2000s I was surprised by the extent to which Kalymnians were watching, and talking about, cooking on TV, and in particular two shows: Vefa’s Kitchen and Forgiveness with Every Bite. Even those who claimed a lack of interest in the shows were familiar with them and could give opinions about their content. As I began watching the shows myself, and watching Kalymnians watching the shows, it became clear to me that the programs were compelling partly because of the way they were playing with ideas about gender, nostalgia, and Greek identity. Their popularity, and the familiarity people felt with the personas of Vefa and Mamalakis even among those who didn’t watch, suggested that they were touching on some of the key strains and tensions of contemporary Greek society. I begin with a brief description of each show before getting into some of the ways they played on cooking values in Greek society and how they were watched and discussed by Kalymnians and people from the city of Thessaloniki.
Vefa’s Kitchen was a daily feature on Greek channel Antenna at 4:00 P.M. for several years in the mid to late 2000s. The show was indeed set in Vefa Alexiadou’s kitchen (her studio kitchen, with an audience looking on).6 The kitchen was outfitted with her endorsed products, and indeed, much like Martha Stewart, Vefa has an empire that includes monthly cooking magazines and stores selling a variety of kitchen gadgets. The commercials shown during her program often advertised kitchen appliances that Vefa had endorsed. Like Martha Stewart, one could say that her main focus was on presentation: decorative sweets, sandwiches shaped like animals that children would want to eat, and other such inventions were typical features of her show. Like the majority of the cooking shows in Greece, Vefa’s show presented mostly variations on typical Greek food (though the sweets and desserts tended to be more “Western”). Vefa’s recipes did sometimes incorporate unusual or not typically Greek ingredients into familiar Greek recipes. A salad might include such ingredients as black Mission figs, radicchio, walnuts, and a balsamic vinaigrette dressing. She tended to cook more “traditional” recipes around religious holidays, and in these programs she would also talk about religious celebrations or “the meaning of the day.” She generally took for granted that all her viewers were religious and practiced Greek Orthodoxy. Thus she would say things such as, “Now that Sarakosti [Lent] is beginning, I will only show you recipes for fasting because, of course, you have asked for it, and this is the proper thing to do on these holy days.”7 On such days she would end the show with a religious blessing. She would occasionally chant a religious hymn from the day’s church service on the show. She also made comments, such as “When you’ve come back from church at night, and you are tired, here’s a quick thing you can cook. . . .”
It was clear in watching Vefa’s Kitchen that the show tended to promote traditional gender roles and an image of the traditional Greek Orthodox Christian family. She clearly envisioned those in the kitchen as normatively female, sprinkling her dialogue with comments, such as “On your son’s or husband’s or child’s name day, you can make,” or “When you are cooking for your husband,” or “Your husband will definitely like such-and-such food.” In appearance on the show she came across as an urban, educated older woman, and often would bring on children, allowing her to act the role of the wise, caring grandmother.8
Vefa’s Kitchen typically would begin with a written recipe, which she proceeded to make, sometimes with the help of an audience member or a visiting chef. Sometimes she would invite children to help her make some sweet dish, and she would occasionally have her own daughter on the show. But in all these cases, she remained in control of the kitchen. She displayed a casual conversational style: noting variations in recipes for a meat pie, she said rhetorically, “Tell me what you think would be in it, liver of course, but you can decide whatever other organ meats suit you, though naturally you will also put in ground beef.” While the recipes involved precise measurements, her own descriptions were often more casual, noting for a pie (pita), “You know when it’s done when the phyllo turns brown-orange.”
Always well dressed and wearing expensive-looking jewelry, Vefa was very soft-spoken and smiling. However, compared to other similar shows on Greek TV she would generally avoid becoming confessional by telling her own stories related to food and cooking. Her language was precise and all about the food, the ingredients, and the kitchen utensils.
Vefa typically took several calls from viewers toward the end of the show, offering comments and suggestions, such as how to freeze eggs for a trip. She would also read letters from viewers, which were almost always laudatory, most of them noting that the viewer has “all your books.” One letter chided her gently for referring to her viewers with the female pronoun, protesting that many of her fans were male as well.
Elias Mamalakis’s show appeared over a similar period during the mid to late 2000s, daily in reruns on the privately owned channel MEGA, with a new episode at 6:00 P.M. on Sundays. The title of the show was Boukia kai Sihorio, which literally means “forgiveness with every single bite.” This is a traditional Greek proverb that has come to be uttered when one is enjoying a well-prepared meal. Basically, one proclaims that the tastiness of the food has made one forget and forgive life’s sorrows. Sihorio means “forgiveness,” but its root meaning is “agree or be of the same disposition with someone else,” suggestive of the kind of commensality that is an unquestioned part of Greek food values.
The host of the show, Elias Mamalakis, was a middle-aged man, chubby, sporting a thin, upturned mustache of the type associated with Greek intellectuals. He had a very playful and simple way of carrying himself. What was striking about the show was that only half of it was focused on the actual cooking and preparing of food. Each episode was set in a different region, most within Greece but some abroad. The shows shot inside Greece avoided any hint of professional high-class cuisine. In fact, Mamalakis rarely visited urban locations. The show was typically shot in rural areas, mountain towns, small islands, and so on. When the setting was urban, Mamalakis tended to focus on a particular neighborhood locale. He would occasionally go to restaurants within Greece, but once again he was typically in search of a “traditional” restaurant recipe that people might remember but that was no longer available.9
At the beginning of each show, Mamalakis announced the episode’s location. He then went on a tour of the region, focusing on the most important monuments, local architecture, local historic and tourist sites. He would talk about the geography of the area and the history of the region and its people, usually starting from ancient times and ending with more recent histories, seamlessly mixing “official” history and local lore. For the better half of the show Mamalakis functioned as a guide to the viewer and rarely as a cook. The camera shots usually focused on strikingly beautiful natural landscapes. Quite often the show would include the locals performing some folkloric song or dance.
Historical information, in the form of either major historical events or local trivia, did not stop when the cooking started. Rather, the locals would take over the history telling from Mamalakis. It was in the midst of their storytelling that the cooking process would be discussed. The cooking was rarely done in a kitchen setting; rather, it was almost always done outside, using some gas-operated small burner or a traditional stone-built oven in the back of someone’s yard or, quite often, in the middle of the street in a small village. Occasionally, the show was shot in the kitchen of a family-owned Greek tavern, but once again without any trappings of professionalism.
Thus, although he was definitely the star of the show, Mamalakis rarely did the actual cooking. He would almost always wear an apron, but he was just a second pair of hands, maybe to help with washing a plate or chopping the onions at the most. This allowed him to seem less authoritarian in the sense that, unlike Vefa, he did not instruct the viewers directly. The cooking was done by the locals. They were the camera’s focus, with their cooking techniques and their storytelling, as well as their appearance; the locals were almost always older women and men, occasionally dressed in traditional local clothing typically seen at folkloric festivals and the like.
When the locals were of a younger age they usually fell in two categories: either daughters and granddaughters helping their mothers and grandmothers, or males occupied with traditional professions—fisherman, goatherd, monk, the town baker, and the like. In these cases, the younger generation would be shown following faithfully in the footsteps of the older generation, even when the latter were not actually present. For instance, the town’s fisherman, in his twenties, would explain his recipes by telling how they were handed down to him by the older generations; or a daughter would be cooking with her older female relative watching over her.
Whether the episode was shot within Greece or outside, the recipes were familiar. They were usually not fancy or experimental or personalized. The style of the cooking might be personal (the way an older grandmother peels a tomato or the way an older fisherman cleans the scales off a fish), but the recipes were always traditional, verging on quaint. Although Mamalakis sometimes featured a local delicacy not to be found in major Greek urban centers, primarily the recipes were local variations on common dishes like cheese or spinach pie, baked chickpeas, or Easter lamb. Another point about the recipes concerns the ingredients. There was the occasional local herb or product, but the ingredients were rarely unknown to his audience, even if not readily available all over Greece. The show, however, focused heavily on the purity of the local ingredients, whether they be a particular type of goat cheese or handpicked herbs from the nearest mountain. The person doing the cooking would be asked to share stories about his or her youth and verify what all the viewers suspected: local products are pure and healthy and they are of a superior quality, not to be found in big cities.
Mamalakis’s own discourse was, in style as well as in content, an interesting blend of the “good old days” and a contemporary celebration of multicultural diversity. Being from Crete himself, he retained in his speech traces of his native dialect (archaic or village words), while his style was quite poetic. The poetic style of speech is one that is to be found in rural Greece and is hardly ever used now. It is associated with the carefree villager in touch with “nature,” enjoying a simple yet happy life, and creates an imagery of playful innocence and wonder at the natural world.
The most striking examples of his poetic discourse would be exhibited when talking about the cooking ingredients or about the local mountains, rivers, lakes, and other natural features. Mamalakis would assign a will and desire to them, as if they possessed independent agency. In his language, they became actors and not inanimate things. They shared the same natural space with the people who were themselves in touch with this idyllic nature. Ingredients and local geographical features participated with the locals in the town’s life. This tendency to animate nature is perhaps the most recognizable feature of traditional Greek poetry (Politis 1969), and Mamalakis’s discourse was laden with it. It was perhaps his most recognizable signature, since almost all of our interviewees used the word poetic in describing him.
Another key feature in Mamalakis’s discourse was an insistence on the primacy of the senses, not just in the actual food experience, but more generally in experiencing life. Quite often the host would stop his narration or a villager’s narration to look at the camera and exhort the viewer to be quiet for a moment and listen to the food cooking, the onions sizzling, the water boiling, or the wind blowing through the leaves of an ancient olive tree. He would then proceed to talk about the colors, smells, and texture of the local ingredients and geographical features with boundless enthusiasm and awe. Thus, although some aspects of Mamalakis’s persona might identify him as an intellectual, in other ways his discourses of the senses and locality identified him clearly as an “ordinary” bon vivant. Indeed, Vournelis found a number of Mamalakis’s fans among working-class Thessalonikans who are typically suspicious of intellectuals. While he did not hide his culinary knowledge, his personal style served to portray him as a man who not only knew his French wines but was also able to enjoy the little things in life, such as a fresh vegetable from an old lady’s garden in a mountain village. This served to undercut any air of pretentiousness about Mamalakis.
While Vefa and Mamalakis clearly displayed strikingly different styles, there was considerable overlap as well. They both focused on “traditional” Greek recipes, and often used “traditional” locales as backdrops for their shows. Both used a sensory-oriented discourse to talk about the recipes, though Mamalakis did so to a greater extent than Vefa. Indeed, it was the place itself that was in some ways the focus of his show, though food and place were shown to be inseparable. In light of these similarities, why did Vefa and Mamalakis provoke the strong antithetical reactions we observed among their viewers? In the next section we turn to general responses that we elicited from informants on Kalymnos and in Thessaloniki, before focusing on particular informants and how they incorporated these shows into their daily cooking lives.
In general, there were some broad indicators in people’s responses to the two shows: more formally educated, middle-class informants tended to dislike Vefa and like Mamalakis, and broadly speaking, men were more likely to prefer Mamalakis, while most favorable comments about Vefa were made by women. Surprisingly, however, many who said they disliked Vefa also said they were more likely to try a recipe from her show than from Mamalakis’s, that she, in fact, taught you cooking. A Kalymnian housewife in her seventies noted the way Vefa showed you how to do everything and then gave you all the ingredients and measurements, so “you’d have to be an idiot not to be able to do it.”
An interesting contrast is provided by a Thessalonikan middle-class woman who, after watching Mamalakis make a Cycladic baked fish dish, commented on how good she thought it would taste. When asked whether she would try making it, she responded, “What’s the point, since I don’t have a backyard? Where would I cook it, on the balcony? Look at that backyard, look at that [outdoor] oven.” When asked why this mattered, she said, “Everything plays a role, the sun, nature, the climate of the particular island.” By and large, although it provided the featured recipes to its viewers, Mamalakis’s show did not seem to encourage people to go into the kitchen, but simply to appreciate the food, as well as the wider social context in which it was produced. Indeed, the question of authenticity, or rejection of admixture, seemed key to many people’s assessments. A Kalymnian young woman in college on Cyprus noted that Mamalakis’s food was real Greek food, whereas Vefa would tell you to put strawberries in a salad. Another Kalymnian woman complained on a more practical level that Vefa used English or other foreign words in recipes, and you might not know what the ingredient was and make a mess of things. A young Thessalonikan woman, who admitted to not liking cooking very much, noted that she once tried to make a chocolate soufflé she saw on Vefa’s show but gave up when she was unable to find some of the “curious” ingredients. An older Kalymnian woman, however, noted that while Vefa’s ingredients sometimes seemed strange, “She convinces you that they would be good.”
Both in Thessaloniki and on Kalymnos people responded strongly to what was seen as Vefa’s commercialization: her peddling of kitchen products on her shows and in her signature stores, called Vefa’s House. A Kalymnian woman in her forties, married to a manual laborer, found this one of the things that was most attractive about Vefa: she sold special tools to help decorate cakes, cookies, and other baked goods, and she illustrated their uses on her show. For her, it was these kinds of things that were most useful about Vefa, since the recipes were “all the familiar things.” Her views contrasted strongly with those of a Thessalonikan woman, also in her forties, who is a housewife (and an active member of the Greek Communist Party). Noting that Vefa was more of a salesperson than a chef, she commented, “How many specialized utensils do I need? Vefa has a specialized tool for everything; that’s just stupid. I don’t need a special spatula to turn my fish in the pan; I can use my fork to do everything.”
In her study of cooking shows on American television, Pauline Adema speculates on the pleasures of “arm chair cooking,” noting that it was part of a larger cultural context in which, because of the concerns with diet and health, the pleasures of eating were deferred in the act of consuming television: “The home viewer defers the sensual pleasures of cooking and most important of eating what is being made” (2000, 115). It would seem that this might be the case for Mamalakis’s show, in which, as we saw above, there was a reluctance to make the recipes outside of their local context. Even here, however, people might pick up techniques from the show, as with Polymnia Vasaneli, who, as noted in the previous chapter, first saw someone cutting an onion on a cutting board while watching it. Thus, both shows were part of the circulation of cooking knowledge, even if they didn’t necessarily inspire people to cook the exact recipes shown, as we’ll see in more detail in the next section. Moreover, many informants noted that both shows drove them, if not to make the specific recipes (though this did happen more commonly with Vefa), at least to eat. Indeed, one Thessalonikan woman complained that every time her husband watched Mamalakis, he demanded that she cook something for him. But even here, there seems to be a subtle difference. When expressing desire while watching Vefa’s show, people tended to focus on the food itself, while with Mamalakis it was his eating of the food. Indeed, one Thessalonikan woman noted that she liked the way Mamalakis’s mouth watered as the dish was prepared, the way he showed it in his mouth, the way he savored the tastes and kept the food in his mouth before swallowing. By contrast, Vefa “doesn’t even eat her food, at most she’ll take a bite and that’s it”; she spoiled the intimacy made possible by imagining shared food consumption.
If both Vefa and Mamalakis played on nostalgia for the traditional, they did so in different ways that provoked strong reactions. Vefa’s nostalgia was clearly for what is imagined as the traditional Greek family, in which the woman is responsible not only for cooking, but also for looking after the religious devotions of the family (see Hirschon 2010), set within a society in which everyone is assumed to be a practicing Greek Orthodox. This gender nostalgia fits with the Kalymnian view that women should have primary responsibility for feeding the family, even if it is more in line with the patrilineal, patriarchal traditions of northern Greece, which, as noted, demand a much younger enculturation into cooking for girls. Setting her show within a home kitchen suggested traditional gender roles as well. However, if Vefa harked back to an imagined 1950s version of Greece, it was an urban traditionalism, and one that was comfortable with “modernizing” gestures—reflected in what people identified as her consumerist ethos, in expensive and diversified kitchen gadgetry, and in the incorporation of foreign, particularly French, recipes into Greek cooking.
Mamalakis’s tradition was, on the surface, more of the romantic nationalist variety. This is a nationalism drawn from the folkloric tradition, so well documented in Greece, which takes common, everyday, intimate practices and parcels them out to different ethnic or local identities. It assumes that authenticity is a condition that existed in the past, and only its remnants can be seen in the present. Here we can incorporate many viewers’ reactions to why they disliked Vefa and preferred Mamalakis: because she often seemed to disregard or blur these boundaries, while he purified them (even while showing respect for the traditions of other groups, similarly conceived). However, it is important to qualify the characterization of Mamalakis’s show as romantic nationalist, considering that he did not treat tradition as a series of fossilized remnants of a dead or dying past, but as very much alive and part of the present. Thus, his show struck an optimistic note for those who might fear that cooking is dead.
The nostalgia evoked by Vefa’s show was undercut by what a number of people on Kalymnos and in Thessaloniki identified as her commercialization of cooking. A number of people in Thessaloniki complained that Vefa “even brought her daughter on her show.” Vefa’s daughter is, in fact a celebrity chef who has her own cookbooks and other paraphernalia. While this seems in keeping with Vefa’s theme of traditional family roles, a number of people (including Lambros, below) saw this as a part of her inappropriate commercialization of domains of life that should not be thought of as “for sale,” including kinship and food (see chapter 1 and Sutton 2001). Mamalakis seemed to get away with commercialization without viewer disapproval because he kept the commercial aspects of his show separate from his encounters with the food itself, for which, as noted above, he showed a kind of quasi-religious devotion. While Mamalakis was thus concerned with making distinctions and preserving boundaries, it should be noted that he also had a certain playfulness, which might have helped him appeal to more intellectual Greeks. While his food remained pure and locality-specific, he often played foreign music such as David Bowie songs during the show, a fact that one urban interviewee commented on as part of his appeal.
If the preceding tracks some of the issues raised by these two shows, in this section we address how people on Kalymnos and in Thessaloniki actually incorporated Vefa and Mamalakis into their daily lives and practices, in order to get at the larger theme of the chapter: what kind of cooking knowledge is transmitted through the medium of cooking shows? We examine two cases in detail in order to explore the complexity of ordinary Greeks’ influences from and dialogues held with Vefa and Mamalakis.
Lambros is single, in his forties, and prides himself on being an excellent cook of traditional Greek cuisine. He is not a professional cook, though; he is a dock worker for the Port Authority of Thessaloniki. He is in the leadership of his union, and has traveled throughout Europe. He traces both his taste in traditional Greek food and his skill in cooking to his family origins. He is a third-generation refugee from Asia Minor, and he still identifies himself as a refugee. When asked why, he said that his “land is still over there” (afou ta horafia mas ekei einai). He watches as many of the cooking shows on TV as he can (even the ones he claims he does not like), but preferred Mamalakis by far.
Lambros often cooks for his friends. His house is a very sensory-intense environment, and he prides himself on paying attention to every possible detail that has to do with preparing food for guests and friends. The sounds of traditional Greek music are the first thing a guest notices on arrival at Lambros’s house. Lambros also uses the same type of music to accompany his cooking well before his guests arrive. The first few times that Vournelis was invited for dinner, he was not allowed to help in any way (setting the table, bringing the wine from his wine cellar, etc.); after a few more visits, when they had developed a friendship, he would be allowed to do small things, like fetch an extra chair or maybe at most help set the table. Lambros made it clear to Vournelis that he was there only to observe and ask questions, not to help.
Although Lambros enjoys taking ownership of his creations in the kitchen—which represent both his cooking ability and the veracity of his claims to his roots—Lambros is one of the few people in our study who claimed that he did cook the recipes Mamalakis presented with any regularity. When asked for specifics, however, he noted that he rarely follows through an entire recipe, but rather “gets ideas” from watching the show of what “the old ones”—that is, an older generation of Greeks—used to do, and will sometimes incorporate these ideas into his cooking. For example, he said that he made a cheese pie, but after he took it out of the oven he covered it with butter and homemade jam—very unconventional—because he saw an old lady on Mamalakis’s show doing the same thing with a homemade bread. The cooking show was not in any sense providing a recipe, but simply an inspiration for Lambros’s experimentation.
Nevertheless, Lambros said he loved Mamalakis because his show was not strictly a cooking show; it was, according to him, a “documentary” of the people, the place, the customs, and the food. Lambros seemed to be attracted to the anthropological aspects of Mamalakis’s show: he loved looking at the local topography, how people live, and what they eat. He said he always liked the way Mamalakis let you get to know the people and their food. This he contrasted to Vefa, who “executes recipes out of nowhere.” He criticized Vefa for being “grandiose” by mixing Greek and foreign food in her show. When Vournelis mentioned that Mamalakis had shot numerous episodes featuring foreign cuisines, he answered that Mamalakis “does not try to enforce that on the [viewers]”; rather, he showed the people “what non-Greeks eat.” Thus, it was Vefa’s perceived boundary transgression that Lambros found objectionable.
When Vournelis asked him what was wrong with blending cooking styles and cuisines, Lambros responded that there’s nothing wrong with it, but Vefa did it in a way that made him feel like he was a “poor relative to the Europeans.” He said that he considered it pretentious to serve game with blueberry jam; “We don’t do that here.” He said that Vefa was not a real cook because the recipes were not hers. When Vournelis asked Lambros if the recipes Mamalakis was presenting in his show were his, he said, “That’s a different case altogether; that is traditional Greek food.” Lambros meant that traditional food falls into a category of belonging to the people rather than being the possession of an individual author or chef.
Lambros said that he liked Mamalakis because on his show “you see the people” (vlepeis ton kosmo). When he saw Mamalakis’s episode on Asia Minor, he got goosebumps and couldn’t stop crying because he saw the foods his grandmother used to make: “I could imagine my grandmother going to the bazaar and getting her spices.” Lambros then recalled stories his grandmother had told him about how the Turks and the Jews and the Armenians would go to the panygyria and eat the food the Greeks would make, and the Greeks would go to the other ethnic groups’ celebrations and eat their food.10 Referring to the Greek army’s occupation of parts of Asia Minor—a venture that ended in all Greeks being expelled from the region—he concluded that the catastrophe “was Venizelos’s fault.”11
At first it seemed that we had left our discussion of food behind and he was just talking about history. But in fact for Lambros, all these things were tied together. This was after all the reason he liked Mamalakis, and it was the same reason he did not like Vefa. When Lambros said that Vefa “executes recipes out of nowhere,” he was really saying that he perceived her cooking to be out of context. For him food has history, and he was not able to see that in Vefa’s show. Vournelis asked Lambros if he had ever seen Vefa cooking anything traditionally Greek and he responded that he had, usually when it was some major Greek or Christian holiday. Then her cooking would be “Greek,” Lambros admitted. But he immediately added, “She will still tell people to buy her products! She never stops!”
It is interesting that Lambros echoed a number of other informants in criticizing the commodification of cooking in Vefa’s show. Both shows were, of course, commercial programs and both hosts had a series of products they had endorsed. When asked why this was okay for Mamalakis but not for Vefa, Lambros and others said that Mamalakis never pitched a product during the show, while Vefa did so all the time. It would seem that pitching a product such as a book or a kitchen utensil, while in the process of cooking, was seen as particularly offensive to Vefa’s critics. Indeed, notice that Lambros brought this up directly after admitting that Vefa sometimes cooked “traditional Greek dishes.” It is as if he were saying that when Vefa was not transgressing boundaries between cuisines or nationalities, she was transgressing other boundaries—between public and private, the intimacy of the home and the calculation of the marketplace.
Turning to Kalymnos, I watched cooking shows for several weeks in April 2006 along with Katerina Kardoulia and her family (at which time Katerina’s husband, Yiorgos, was still alive). Vefa’s show was in favor with Katerina, and even more so with her daughter, Katina. Katerina said that she did not make many things from Vefa’s show because her husband had his preferences and did not want any changes. She said that Vefa was “for the younger generation,” her daughter and granddaughter. Katerina, Yiorgos, and Katina, however, sometimes watched the show together, along with Little Katerina. They all seemed to enjoy her show, noting how hungry it made them. In one episode we watched, the recipe was for a Greek bread called tsoureki. At first Katina said she would make Vefa’s recipe only if she used nuts in it, but later, despite the lack of nuts, she said it looked really good. She also got excited when she saw the way Vefa cut the dough and put the pieces standing up on the baking sheet, saying that that was the “trick” (patenta) so that it wouldn’t spill over in baking. Vefa suggested a variety of ingredients you could put inside the dough, and Katina had some other possibilities to add as well.
Two things are notable immediately. The first is that Katerina and Katina insisted on the value of such shows in that you could watch what the cook was doing: “Watch and remember. If I simply tell you, maybe you won’t remember, but if you watch, it will stay with you,” Katerina intoned, stressing the importance of learning through observation already discussed in earlier chapters. Second, it was clear that both mother and daughter were having a dialogue with Vefa’s show; they would be excited about certain things, particularly designs or certain “tricks,” but each would express her disagreement or suggest modifications for other things that Vefa did. Vefa, for example, used store-bought dough for one recipe, and Katina suggested that you could save money if you made your own dough, which she subsequently showed me how to do. It was as if Vefa were simply another voice in the familiar Kalymnian community discourse in which food choices and preparation techniques are analyzed and debated. I asked why they watched the show since they knew how to make these things already. Katina said it was for “the tricks,” or maybe Vefa might suggest a different dough recipe, and that was useful. Cooking shows were no more sources of authority than friends or neighbors. Rather, the intelligent cook could glean new ideas and inspiration from these interactions.
Katerina and Katina also had an ambivalent attitude about Vefa’s reliance on measurements. One day they decided to make a “fasting” dish of zucchini balls that they had learned from Vefa’s show. Katerina said her daughter had written down the recipe, which she followed. She made a test ball to make sure it didn’t dissolve when she put it in the cooking oil to fry; if it did, she would have to add more flour. I asked whether Vefa had said to do this, and Katerina said no. “Vefa is all about the measurements: ‘Put in this many grams and it will come out right.’ But I have my own ways, not worrying about timers or grams. But my cooking comes out right because it relies on experience.”
Katina also commented that she liked the show because she liked to watch Vefa and “her movements around the kitchen, the way she decorates things. She has great imagination! But as far as the recipes, it’s the usual, familiar stuff, cheese pies and so on.” Her father, Yiorgos, was the most critical. While saying that some of her recipes might be good, he insisted that most were ridiculously expensive, full of all kinds of strange ingredients, recipes for rich people who want to be seen as rich, but don’t know how to really enjoy life. Instead of taking a nice piece of meat and some potatoes, she had you putting in three kinds of cheese, cream, yogurt, strange sweet things that are meant for kids, “food for crazy people.” Or she had you make a stuffed fish when you could just grill it with lemon and really appreciate the taste of it. While Katina said that Vefa had imagination (fantasia), Yiorgos said that she was “putting on airs” (fantasmeni). Not that you shouldn’t spend good money on food; as he put it: “I want to eat, and want the food to be something. It’s just a question of knowing what’s good so that you don’t waste money or get cheated.”
At times Katerina and Yiorgos were even more pointed in their critiques of Vefa. After watching Vefa’s shrimp and wine recipe with tomato balls on the side, Katerina didn’t focus on the fact that the recipe was supposed to be traditional. Instead, she said that this was a new system of cooking, and Vefa played all over Greece. “The old food was beans or meat and potatoes, but a new generation of housewives will make shrimp in wine with a little rice on the side and say ‘We’ve eaten well.’” This was said with some irony, but also with resignation, the feeling that things were changing more toward the “European” model, and that the change was both good and bad. Yiorgos felt no ambivalence, claiming that shrimp were good only for appetizers, and that tomato balls should be called shit balls (the two terms rhyme in Greek).
However, when not speaking generally but thinking about specific members of “the younger generation,” Katerina had a more positive perspective. She noted that a neighbor (a close friend of her daughter’s) had a daughter in her twenties who was recently married, and who had transformed her mother’s style of cooking:
Her mother cooked heavy foods, bean stew and the like, but the daughter sits watching the program and writing down the recipes, “down to the gram,” and she turns out wonderful things; she doesn’t just make salad, but makes it artistically, so that it looks nice in the bowl, despite the fact that she’s working outside the home as well. And her husband [older, already once married] is so impressed. She “shows off” in the kitchen [apofaneronetai]. It’s good for a woman to be clean, but it’s in the kitchen that she can really show her skills.
While more engaged with Vefa, the family did appreciate Mamalakis as well. One episode they watched involved Mamalakis traveling to the island of Sifnos to learn how to prepare chickpeas in locally produced clay pots. In a typical opening sequence, the camera lingered over the island, the quiet streets (never a car or motorcycle in sight), the priest, the religious imagery, the baker’s oven (Katina observed that it was indoors, rather than the typical Kalymnian outdoor oven), and the ceramics shop where they showed how to make the clay pot. This got Katina thinking about a trip to another nearby island, Nisyros, where her husband had been working a few years back, and where they cooked chickpeas for one of the local religious festivals. She remembered being struck by the fact that on Nisyros they took basil from their windowsills (in Greece basil is decorative, not typically used in cooking) and threw it on the coals where the chickpeas were baking. While she didn’t remember in particular the taste of those chickpeas, she did remember the color of the basil as it burned on the coals.
Katina was constantly aware of these variations on recognizable dishes associated with nearby islands, and trips to other islands were always a chance to learn twists that might be incorporated into one’s cooking repertoire. For example, on a trip to Rhodes to take her mother for hospital tests, the family stayed with her son’s boss, with whom they had exchanged hospitality on a number of occasions. This was a chance to observe her host making giant butter beans (yigantes) in the oven, a dish rarely made on Kalymnos. She also observed that on Rhodes cumin was used for grilling meats, which made it more acceptable to her when in 2012 her daughter, Little Katerina, incorporated cumin into a rice dish.
Part of this recognition of similarities and differences in recipes presented on TV cooking shows can be seen as a memory process. It was notable that both Katerina and Katina, because they assumed they knew the basics of the dishes that were being shown, would attempt to classify the dish. This was particularly noticeable if they started watching the show in the middle, after the show host had explained what was going to be made. At other times, mother and daughter would reconstruct a recipe that one of them had seen on TV, repeating ingredients back and forth to each other and puzzling over how it would turn out. This reminded me of how Kalymnians would ask me what my wife was cooking that day, and suggest appropriate ingredients or puzzle over the “odd” ideas that Americans had about cooking, such as putting carrots in lentil soup (see Sutton 2001, 25). These TV shows seemed to provide more fodder for Kalymnian comparisons and contrasts.
If a careful look at cooking practices reveals the way these shows are integrated into preexisting knowledge and techniques, how should we interpret the focus on foods from other parts of Greece, which seemed to make up an important part of the interest in Vefa’s and particularly in Mamalakis’s shows? Vassiliki Yiakoumaki (2006a) suggests that the new demands of European integration and consumerist agendas in contemporary Greece lead to a self-exoticization, expressed through such food tourism. Yiakoumaki is right to point out that the fetishization of “traditional” cooking practices from different parts of Greece is a new phenomenon. Indeed, elsewhere Yiakoumaki has shown how mainstreaming of Greek minorities through their food cultures tends to flatten or ignore any histories of conflict or oppression, reducing the “other” to a recognizable, palatable sameness (Yiakoumaki 2006b). Certainly we hear echoes of nationalist purifying discourse in the criticisms leveled at Vefa for mixing so-called “Greek” with so-called “foreign” food, as if these ever existed as pure, unmixed categories. However, if we listen with a careful ear, we find that our informants don’t simply mimic a twenty-first-century consumerist, multiculturalist version of typical nationalist discourse. Indeed, recounting variations in customs and traditions from different parts of Greece—as Katina did, stimulated by a cooking show—is not something particularly new in itself. Rather, there have long been lively discussions of people’s travels within Greece, with great attention given to recounting the details of expressive culture in different parts of Greece, their similarities to and differences from local practices (see Sutton 1998). And these discourses, while concerned with issues of continuity and change, are also often at odds with nationalist narratives. Indeed, this is very much the kind of “unreconciled historical experience,” grounded in the senses, that C. Nadia Seremetakis (1994) points us to as a kind of productive embodied nostalgia that mitigates against the closures of modernity and nationalism. We saw this clearly in the case of Lambros’s third-generation memories of food exchanges and good relations among different groups in Asia Minor. Far from eliminating conflict and tension, such memories keep the tensions of identity very much alive in the present. We also see it in Katerina and Katina’s discussion of Turkish dishes, which they treat similarly to dishes from other parts of Greece—they are discussed for their recognizable qualities as well as for their differences.
By 2011 Vefa and Mamalakis were no longer on the air. Instead, there were a number of Greek cooking shows modeled on British and American competition shows like Top Chef. Katina contrasted Vefa’s and Mamalakis’s shows, where you always learned something, with the current show Master Chef: “On Master Chef it’s a cooking school shown on TV, and it’s a competition for who will come out the best. So it’s all anarchy, cursing, and so on. While they say that they’ve gone to the school to learn cooking, they don’t learn. They have no patience.” For Katina, shows had moved from being opportunities for viewers to learn tricks and tips to competitions in which nothing was learned, and she watched them only out of curiosity, rather than watch “some English program full of murders and drugs.”12
There were also for the first time a number of non-Greek shows, including several of Jamie Oliver’s programs, and those of other British celebrity chefs including Gordon Ramsay and Nigella Lawson. A few Kalymnians talked about Jamie Oliver and had actually made some of his dishes, Nina Papamihail being one, as described in chapter 3. Pavlos Roditis, one of the male cooks I discuss in chapter 6, also said that he had adopted some of Oliver’s salads into his repertoire. In general, I found little interest in these shows comparable to what Vefa and Mamalakis had generated. Indeed, some people were still talking about Mamalakis and the fact that he had done a show about Kalymnos in the time since my previous research. In this show he had focused on the Kalymnian version of dolmades, filla, known as the “Kalymnian national dish” because of people’s propensity to eat it most Sundays (Sutton 2001, 105). It was interesting to watch the presentation of this dish on Mamalakis’s show as prepared by Nomiki Leleki, considering how familiar a recipe it is to most Kalymnians.
A number of traditionalizing touches were performed on the show, such as the making of ground beef and pork “by hand” by using two knives to mince the cuts of meat instead of buying preground meat from the butcher. Leleki noted that cutting meat this way was “like in the old days,” and Mamalakis added, “I remind you that mixing beef and pork comes from Byzantine times,” encompassing local history and its oral transmission and reliance on memory in a “national” historical reference, presumably based on literate knowledge. Leleki also added fresh grape leaves at the bottom of the pan, a technique to keep the stuffed grape leaves from sticking. She also added grapevine shoots, known for their aroma, which she referred to with the local Kalymnian word blasti. And she added bones on top of the leaves to enhance the flavor. These are aspects of the recipe that are not commonly done in the preparation of the dish today. When Kalymnians commented on the preparation as shown by Mamalakis, they found some parts of it recognizable but others strange. Putting sliced tomatoes in the middle and on top fell under the category of “never done” for Katerina Kardoulia; indeed, she considered it ridiculous (malakies). Similarly for cutting meat by hand: this was simply what they did before they had the machinery to grind meat. Her daughter elaborated:
They did it like that when I was little, and it was good, coarsely cut like a lentil or a chickpea. But slowly the children say they don’t like it coarsely cut, the machines are an available luxury [polyteleias], and that way of doing it is gone. Sometimes we still remember it. This summer my neighbor on Telendos [a small island next to Kalymnos] didn’t have any ground meat and wanted to make filla for her husband, so she cut it by hand. I don’t have time for that, but when I get older, a grandmother, I might get bored and start remembering the old ways [boro kai na thimitho ta palia].
The latter claim is interesting in that it projects “the old ways” into a potential, imagined future. It also equates the act of preparing a dish a certain way with “remembering” it, rather than simply calling it to mind, once again stressing a more active version of memory.
Compared to cutting meat by hand, using bones to add flavor was something that people still did, whenever they might be lucky enough to have bones set aside for them by their butcher to add to the dish. What was most striking, however, was that Mamalakis’s version of filla was like any invention of tradition in that it froze one particular version of what is traditional into a standard that showed both shared and idiosyncratic aspects, while leaving out others. For example, I observed Katina Miha making filla in 2012, and she used cabbage leaves along with grape leaves. While this is not uncommon, Katina stressed that these cabbage leaves were from Vathi, the agricultural center of the island, and that they grew from a type of seed that had been preserved through time, giving the leaves a distinct flavor that could not be reproduced using regular cabbage.
Katina was still watching cooking shows on my visits in 2011 and 2012, and she—unprompted by me—decided to make a rice cream pudding that she had seen on the Greek show Chef in the Air.13 She had made it a few times previously, and her neighbor and friend Vangelio had asked her to make it, both because she wanted to have it again and because she wanted to observe. Katina noted that the recipe was from Turkey, but she and Vangelio insisted that it was very similar to traditional Kalymnian puddings because the basic ingredients were rice flour, milk, and sugar. This was a combination that mothers raised their children on “back in the days before pizza,” Katina noted, and was also the basis for popular sweet-shop deserts like galactoburico. With a little cinnamon on top it was a popular dessert for grown-ups. But this recipe was a “modernization” of the traditional pudding, according to Katina (se moderno rithmo). The main difference was that the recipe called for gum mastic and rose water or orange-flower water, and after the pudding was set it was topped with a layer of jam—which, once chilled, Katina insisted, made it taste like ice cream. Here once again we see the pattern of cooking shows extending knowledge and practice around the margins of Katina’s repertoire, rather than adding any radical new elements. Indeed, it was both because this recipe was familiar—reminding her of a “traditional” dish—and because it displayed “modern rhythms” that Katina decided to use it. A year later, however, she said she had gone back to the old recipe, finding this one not worth the extra fuss.
It is clear from our ethnographic observations that, for Kalymnian and Thessalonikan viewers, cooking shows offered an extension of their already established cooking practices but did not change them in any radical way. While Lambros tended to have a strong emotional reaction to the shows, particularly in terms of the memories invoked, using them to confirm his attitudes about family and national history, Katerina and Katina focused on the “tricks” that they could learn, the small adjustments that, for them, were essential to being a good cook. Thus these shows may represent a change in scale, but not any basic alteration in the forms of cooking knowledge that I have been tracking in this book. Indeed, they integrate themselves well into the kinds of discourses and practices that are typical of Kalymnian cooking.
However, perhaps a change simply in scale does make a difference. When I compared cooking practices in 2012 with those observed on earlier trips to the island in the 1990s and 2000s, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that more experimentation was occurring.14 The number of sources of alternative recipes, from television to cookbooks and magazines, had mushroomed since the early 1990s. But perhaps more important, the different sources of authority provided by television programs, especially when associated with familiar personalities like Vefa and Mamalakis, seemed to make many Kalymnians more confident about trying different recipes gleaned from multiple sources, whether a mass-mediated one or a more local one—a neighbor, a trip to a local restaurant, a discussion of practices observed on a visit to a neighboring island.
In reviewing research on cooking in France, Jean-Claude Kaufmann sees a decisive shift between traditional and modern cooking: “The breakdown of any direct transmission from one generation to the next is [a] decisive change; that tradition has been destroyed by the growing individualization of culinary practices.”15 This may or may not be true for the French middle class.16 On Kalymnos, as we have seen in this and the previous chapter, the transmission of cooking skill and knowledge is, and always was, anything but a smooth and direct process. But it is only through careful ethnography that we can begin to document the multiple avenues through which everyday cooking practices are reproduced, as well as slowly altered.