CHAPTER 6
Through the Kitchen Window
One of the exciting aspects of research into everyday cooking was learning how articulate Kalymnians are about their cooking practices. I suppose this shouldn’t have been surprising, considering that Kalymnians tend to have well-formed opinions on most subjects, from relations with their neighbors to international politics.1 But in reflecting on how casual cooking seemed to be for many of my friends and family in the United States, when I embarked on my Kalymnian research I was surprised to find consistency, even an aesthetic component, in people’s approaches to the daily task of cooking. This consistency fitted with larger Kalymnian cultural practices in other domains—though, of course, these were not without their own contradictions as well.
In this chapter I present a number of short portraits of Kalymnian cooks. In using the term portraits, I take inspiration from Daniel Miller’s book The Comfort of Things, in which he suggests that individual people can display a kind of pattern, or aesthetic, in their approach to life, similar to the notion of pattern that anthropologists once associated with cultures. These patterns are, he notes, “an overall organizational principle that may include balance, contradiction, and the repetition of certain themes in entirely different genres and settings” (Miller 2008, 293). While I would not go as far as Miller in claiming that these patterns can be more important for analysis or can even preclude larger cultural and structural influences,2 I find his focus on the centrality of material objects to these aesthetics to be helpful in thinking about everyday cooking practices, as I have argued in one way or another throughout this book. As he puts it: “People exist for us in and through their material presence,” which puts emphasis on the role of relationships, that is, not just among people, but among people and things. I would add here, perhaps, not just material presence but also sensory embodiment, to stress that objects are always apprehended in terms of an embodied and sensory enculturation, as David Howes (2003) has long argued.
Miller, for example, describes the aesthetic of Elia, a Greek-born Londoner, as revolving around the relationship among her understanding of clothes, jewelry, and gravestones, among other objects and practices (including cooking!). Objects, for Elia, are “forms that actually mediate and transfer substance and emotion between people” (2008, 37). He also notes that Elia “infuses food with ancestry” (much as we saw with Lambros in the previous chapter), and that she remembers the precise details of past meals, in particular the meal she prepared for her mother when she was dying in the hospital (2008, 40), a mnemonic ability that would be right at home on Kalymnos. My point here is that what Miller describes as Elia’s aesthetic is recognizable to an anthropologist of Greece as part of a larger cultural repertoire, even if Elia creates her own particular combinations and syntheses.3 This was my goal in chapter 3 when I explored Nina’s particular relationship with her ambivalent Kalymnian identity. And I do the same here, in briefer fashion, reflecting the fact that I recorded these Kalymnians fewer times than I did Nina, although in almost every case my recordings are based on a ten- to twenty-five-year acquaintance with the participant.4 Thus, in using the concept of “portrait” to describe Kalymnian cooks, I hope to highlight the ways that people create particular syntheses of wider, recognizable themes that resonate in different aspects of daily life. My goal, once again, is to explore the relation of everyday practices to values and shared islandwide, national, or global discourses about cooking.
POLYKSENI MIHA: EATING HEALTHY, EATING MODERN?
The notion of eating “healthy” is not a new one on Kalymnos. Since I began fieldwork on the island in the late 1980s, I was often told about the health and nutritional value of different foods: fish was full of phosphorus, good for the eyes; beans contained iron; and pomegranates offered lots of energy. There was also an extensive discourse about the contemporary risks to health represented by the growth of meat consumption, the use of pesticides and fertilizers, and the general increase in foods for which the provenience was not known. This was part of a larger discourse about the relation between “modernity” and “the good old days” that tried to skirt the dangers and recognize the benefits of each.5 One change I noticed in the mid to late 2000s was what seemed to be a growing quantification of these health beliefs, objectified in measures such as cholesterol numbers (cf. Yates-Doerr 2011). As I suggested in chapter 1, the notion of “healthy” food needs to be seen as a total social fact, part of a larger landscape of beliefs about what makes food good. But how do these ideas about health, which can be elicited by interviewers, play out in everyday practices in the kitchen? I began to get a sense of this when I filmed Polykseni Miha making moussaka. Polykseni is a nursery school teacher, who lives with her husband (from Kos) and her teenage son on a hill overlooking the neighborhood of Ayios Mammas. I had known Polykseni since she befriended me on one of my first research visits to Kalymnos in the late 1980s. At that time she was living with her parents in the center of Ayios Mammas, just off the main square; we were introduced by her neighbor, someone I had known since my first visit to the island in 1980. Polykseni took an interest in my research and, as a teacher, was patient with what was at the time my beginner’s Greek. Polykseni’s wedding in 1992 was the first Kalymnian wedding I attended. Even though they lived about a half-mile distant, Polykseni’s mother, Eleni, in her mid-eighties, often prepared daily meals for them during the week, when Polykseni was working. Polykseni herself might cook something more elaborate on the weekend and share it with her mother.
When she agreed to have me film her in 2008, she decided to make dishes that were not out of the ordinary, but still not everyday food, which was why she chose moussaka (and, on another occasion, mushroom pies). Over coffee we talked about current changes on the island, and Polykseni raised concerns about the invasion of “fast food.” As many others told me, Polykseni insisted that the desire for meat every day was the biggest change in eating habits, with all the negative health consequences that accompanied this shift. As a teacher and a parent of a teenager, she was particularly concerned with children’s eating habits, especially the snacks that children now consumed (which contrasted with the typical snack of “the old years”: a slice of bread with olive oil and tomato). Indeed, she had told the parents of her class that she didn’t want to see potato chips, ready-made croissants, and other ready-made snacks in her classroom—or at least not on a regular basis, noting that if you completely deprive children of something they desire, this can lead to a worse reaction. She said that fast food hadn’t really inundated Kalymnos since there was no McDonald’s or Goody’s (a Greek hamburger chain) like they have on Kos, but that when Kalymnian students went to Athens, they went crazy for fast food, and since their bodies weren’t used to it, it affected them more.6 She insisted that I write all this down. The discourse on fast food paralleled discussions of the influx of drugs on the island, something unprecedented that young Kalymnians simply weren’t prepared for, and that parents had not provided the proper guidance in teaching their children to avoid.
When we begin filming, Polykseni once again shows her awareness of the context of my research, directing comments about my long acquaintance with Kalymnos to the colleagues at my university who, she assumes, would be viewing the video. She also introduces her kitchen, noting that the house was completed in 1983, and that she had put in a special Greek-made marble for the counters, which had held up extremely well over the previous twenty-five-plus years. She also “introduces” the dish she was going to make, noting, “We think of moussaka as a Greek dish,” though others suggest that it was perhaps brought from Turkey after the population exchange following the Asia Minor catastrophe. She states that she will first present the ingredients, and then show “in practice how we make it.” In some ways this introduction paralleled Little Katerina’s presentation at the beginning of her zucchini omelet video, as discussed in a previous chapter. But in this case there was no note of mimicking Vefa, or cooking shows in general; rather, Polykseni’s introduction to her dish seems structured more like a school lesson.
Halfway through the list of ingredients, Polykseni pauses to note the issue of the potential “heaviness” of this dish: she uses Vitam, a butter substitute, because “in olden times [palia] people prepared things in an extremely fatty way [para poli pahia], because they ate meat only once a week.” In modern times, Polykseni notes, cholesterol has reached new heights. This has led people like us today to raise our children in a more healthy manner, by banning butter and replacing it with olive oil and with corn oil for frying, and by buying meat with little fat on it (indeed, later she shows me how lean was the ground beef she had bought, admitting that there was still some fat, but that was unavoidable). Always aware of contrasts, Polykseni says that there are still families today who use lots of fat, especially in dishes like Kalymnian filla (stuffed grape leaves); they use pig fat, put bones at the bottom of the pot, “They insist on making it this way!”
This discourse on fat provides a backdrop for Polykseni’s cooking, and she refers back to it throughout the presentation. But, to my surprise, her discussion becomes more nuanced when she is actually illustrating the process of cooking. As I found with Nina, Polykseni justifies each of her decisions—whether health-related or otherwise—in relation to a larger community that might practice different variations. She uses potatoes only as a bottom layer, while other families put several layers of potatoes in the dish. Noting other possible variations (e.g., adding zucchini), she insists on her own preference for eggplant as the central ingredient. When it comes to health, however, Polykseni’s initial insistence on concern for fat is modified when she describes her own practice as being less extreme than that of some women she has heard of, who don’t fry the vegetables before putting them in the casserole: “Even the idea of this I don’t like to think about. But since I don’t make it often, when I make it I want to feel it!” While Polykseni can’t imagine not frying the vegetables, she is equally insistent on using several layers of paper towels to absorb as much oil as possible, noting, “The more oil that remains in the eggplant, the heavier the dish gets, and we don’t want that.” Other small moments of health concern are expressed in cutting up onions for the dish: “lots of onions, because they make the food both healthier and tastier.” As she cooks, Polykseni moves between talking about food and analyzing society, saying that while it is more difficult for women nowadays to balance the demands of jobs and home, people are also suffering what she calls “occupation syndrome” (katohiko syndromo), in which the older generation, who had lived through the privations that came with occupation during World War II, don’t want their children and grandchildren to suffer the same, so they work harder than they need to.7
An interesting moment comes when Polykseni is adding salt to her tomato sauce. She turns to me confidentially and admits that her husband doesn’t want her to use salt, and she knows it’s not good for you, “but I like it, I want it. It makes the food tasty, without it the dish would be useless [ahristo]! So, I know it’s not good, but. . . .” When I ask her about other spices, she says that she doesn’t use cinnamon, because her husband thinks he’s allergic—“He has the idea, whether it’s true, I don’t know. But I will add nutmeg; I don’t think it will bother him.”
When it comes to making the béchamel sauce, a careful balancing act of fats and choices come into play, once again with awareness of a larger community of people who might do things differently. Polykseni uses half full-fat and half low-fat milk, noting that sometimes she uses all low-fat milk, but this time she is making it special (presumably because of my presence). She takes a 500 g (about 1 pound) container of margarine from the refrigerator, noting that it is “made from oil, not animal fat,” and says, “Of course, we don’t use the whole thing.” She uses about three-quarters of the package though others use only half to make it lighter, she says, but she finds three-quarters to be the right amount. Later she reflects that using actual butter is tastier, but, of course, makes it too heavy “for those of us who have cholesterol.”
All this leads Polykseni once again to reflect on how moussaka used to be made in the old times (palia), when it was done differently: they would pile the pan with two full layers of ingredients, potatoes-eggplant-meat sauce-béchamel-potatoes-eggplant-meat sauce-béchamel. This was “much tastier,” she said, moving her hands in circles to emphasize her point. “But slowly the nutritional habits [diatrofikes sinithies] have changed, and we said, yes, we should eat, but not quite so richly.”
For Polykseni the road to health was through maintaining a balance: a balance of “good” and “bad” foods, as well as a balance of “modern” and past practices. Everything should be done in some moderation, she believes, whether that means using three eggs in her béchamel, rather than the two or five that others use, or using fresh tomatoes in her sauce rather than canned tomatoes. She says she does this because the canned tomatoes are full of preservatives; however, the fresh tomatoes are not ideal because “they are far from the ones we used to know, but we must try as much as possible.” This leads to memories of the tomatoes that her father used to grow in his garden without fertilizer, noting, “Things have changed for the worse, always they change for the worse.” While this is part of a common Kalymnian view that vegetables (and most foods) were tastier in the past (see Sutton 2001, chap. 2), it also contains a critique of some of the contemporary prescriptions for health that elsewhere she subscribes to. She remarks, “We say ‘This is healthy,’ but it is only in theory that is healthy. In essence [stin ousia] . . . who knows?” She expresses similar sentiments in relation to the question of whether to bake bread at home to ensure its healthfulness: you may see what ingredients are in the bread, but you don’t know about the flour and its provenience. She says the one time she baked bread that she could trust completely was when she was living on Kos and had found a mill where they ground fresh flour. In the news at the time was a scandal in Greece in which cooking oil had been cut with motor oil, feeding into Polykseni’s perception (and that of many Kalymnians) that the further you were from the processes of production, the less trust you could have in the health and safety of a product.
In focusing on health, we see how healthy cooking is infused with many larger ideas about tradition and modernity, continuity and change, and the reasonableness of choosing a middle course between extremes, once again with a strong awareness of the range of acceptable Kalymnian practices. Interestingly, this middle path for Polykseni is negotiated during the cooking process itself, as prescriptions to use less salt are balanced against her desire to make the food “tasty,” and her husband’s concerns over spice allergies are given some sway—no cinnamon—but ignored when it comes to nutmeg. Indeed, at one point she enlisted me to tell her whether she had added enough salt to the tomato sauce, deferring to my claim that it tasted fine. Polykseni’s embrace of contemporary health knowledge and discourse is always tempered, then, by a commitment to balance, and to a wider belief in traditional authenticity and the potential in the present to be deceived by appearances.
ANGELIKI RODITI: I COOK FOR THE CUSTOMERS
We last met Angeliki in chapter 4, when I talked about her in relation to her daughter, Vakina, and Angeliki’s unusual claim that she learns from her daughter, rather than vice-versa. Angeliki was an interesting interlocutor. While she clearly took pride in her cooking, it was often hard to get her to talk about the details of the taste of food in the way that other Kalymnians did. I filmed Angeliki on more than a half-dozen occasions between 2005 and 2012, but I also spent many afternoons in her kitchen, and stayed in her home for more than a month during 2011 and 2012. In following Angeliki’s kitchen practices, I found an overwhelming emphasis on the social nature of cooking, one that was a familiar dimension of Kalymnian culture, but that seemed to receive its strongest articulation in Angeliki’s cooking.
Angeliki was shaped by the loss of her father when she was a child and her mother when she was a young woman, which put her in the position of cooking and caring for several of her brothers before they were married. Angeliki also lived together with her mother’s sister, a teacher who never married. This aunt was known on Kalymnos as “the teacher” for her devotion to religious instruction on the island, as well as for her lively sense of humor. She became a second mother to Angeliki, living with her and her family for many years, even after Angeliki’s marriage. Angeliki told me that she learned much of her cooking from her aunt who, she proudly told me, was known as the “first feminist on Kalymnos.” Her aunt had broken the gender line in coffee shops at the time by insisting on sitting down and being served. And she didn’t choose just any coffee shop for her act of protest; she chose the one in the center of the harbor that served as the island’s cultural center.
FIGURE 13. Angeliki Roditi in her kitchen (2014). Photo by Dimitris Roditis.
Because of a longstanding family dispute, Angeliki and her husband, Yiannis, were never able to extend their yard beyond a small space (roughly ten by twenty feet) used for planting flowers, hanging clothes, and placing a table and chairs when they wanted to eat outside. Thus, Angeliki’s situation was unusual in that there was no second kitchen or outdoor processing area in her kitchenspace, and she used her kitchen sink for cleaning fish, unlike many other Kalymnians.
Angeliki’s cooking was very much oriented toward hospitality and generosity: she referred to her son and husband as her “customers,” and also joked that she was the “most inexpensive restaurant on Kalymnos.” The humor in this joke came from the fact that for Angeliki, cooking food is as far from an economic transaction as she can imagine. But it also referred to her adjustments to the tastes of her family members. She took pride in her ability to cook typical dishes in ways that satisfied them, such as putting a whole onion in her lentil stew so it would be easy to remove later because her son didn’t like the texture of cooked onions. She also mentioned preparing stuffed grape leaves without the leaves—in other words, as meatballs (youvarlakia)—as per their preferences. She said, laughing, that she made these adjustments in order to “satisfy the appetites of all of the clientele.” Her wording had a formal ring to it, which was part of the humor: yia tin ikanopioisi tis orexis olonon ton pelaton. For the lentil stew she had rinsed a bowl of lentils in water. She said that the new machines clean the lentils, while in the old days you had to clean them yourself: “But I still rinse them, just to be sure” (indeed, she found a little bit of dirt in the water). As she transferred the lentils to the cooking pot in handfuls, she explained that she was counting a handful per person, but she always estimated the amount first for the invited guests; this way she never had to throw away food, which is a sin.
Any discussion of cooking with Angeliki focused on the issue of generosity, and she regularly fed certain people (including myself) who could not feed themselves. While some Kalymnian women took pride in feeding many different passing strangers, Angeliki’s house was on a side street off the harbor of Kalymnos town. So it was usually personal relationships that she cultivated, and she would feed a few extra people regularly rather than many people occasionally.
Angeliki has had to adjust to cooking for herself over the course of the past several years. Her husband, Yiannis, secretary to the mayor for many years and a recognized local artist, died in 2006.8 Her son, Dimitris, was married in 2007, so by the time of my research he only very occasionally ate at his mother’s house. Her goddaughter, who used to come by frequently for a meal, was now a student studying in Cyprus. For a while she cooked for a needy—unemployed and disabled—neighborhood man who would stop by several times a week, until she found out that he had become a drug addict. She looks forward to visits from her daughter and son-in-law—who live in Italy, and who often bring friends with them to visit Kalymnos—as a time to display her cooking skills. But in the main, her “customers” have become scarce in recent years.
Angeliki’s daily cooking was suffused with memories of past acts and gestures. Even small gestures, such as the peeling of an onion that made her tear up, reminded her that her son told her not to buy the red onions because they are stronger. Preparing filla without meat (with a zucchini stuffing), she was reminded of how much her daughter in Italy and her friends enjoy this dish, and how she brought grape leaves with her when she visited Italy so she could make it there. Food memories are mixed with other memories of generosity. Looking out the kitchen window at her yard, she noted that there used to be a lake where their yard is, that’s why the chapel is called Panayia I Limniotissa (The Virgin Mary of the Lake), and she knows this because a plant that is hard like a straw and normally grows in lakes sometimes comes up there. This led her to think about her aunt, the teacher, climbing the big fig tree and picking figs to distribute to everyone in the neighborhood, even though the milk from the figs bothered her skin, thus emphasizing the self-sacrifice that generosity demands. Angeliki found an old censer under the fig tree, but she gave it away to someone who asked her for it: “I never was scheming [den eiha pote afti i poniria] to try to benefit from something like that, and my daughter’s like that too, always giving; she could have a nice house in Italy, but she doesn’t because of her generosity” (once again implying the importance of self-sacrifice).
There was an antimaterialist thread to Angeliki’s views, and she was often critical of other islanders whom she saw as interested only in making money and building houses, rather than contributing to the island either through religious good works or through artistic achievement. It is not the building of houses in itself that Angeliki dislikes; indeed, she praises all the little houses that have been built by Italians, Swedes, and other visitors to the island “because they love Kalymnos.” It is the self-regard and egotism of some Kalymnians that draws her critique. In this context, food is simply one of many potential channels of generosity that make for proper social relations in Angeliki’s view. But there is always the potential for a lack of reciprocation, or ingratitude, in such relations, as illustrated in the case of the young man who turned out to be a drug addict and who, after Angeliki’s long investment of care and feeding and even enlistment of other family members to help him, ended up demanding large sums of money from her to pay off his drug debts. Such “ingratitude” does not alter Angeliki’s generous practices, though it contributes to her view that “the world has changed,” and that there are few good people left on Kalymnos. She tells of her husband, when close to death, warning her to take care not to be taken advantage of in this changed social environment on Kalymnos.
One interesting touchstone in Angeliki’s memories is that of her mother cooking for German officers during World War II. Angeliki was a small child at the time, and they were living in Athens, facing the worst of the famine that ravaged the city during the war.9 Before the war had begun, she recalls, her father had opened up a restaurant along the Piraeus harbor. The restaurant was a failure, Angeliki said, laughing ruefully, because many Kalymnians came to it and her father insisted on feeding them for free. I realized that this was not a critique of her father’s business skills, but rather intended to situate her family’s generosity as including both of her parents. Overgenerosity was not a flaw in Angeliki’s eyes: when she spoke of the former mayor of Kalymnos, Yiorgos Oikonomou, she said that he was the best mayor that Kalymnos had had, as shown by the fact that he was so generous that he never even owned a house (i.e., he had never saved enough to buy his own house, according to Angeliki).
During the war, her father was killed when he was struck by a German officer while trying to get a little wine that was spilling from a boat in the harbor at Piraeus. Her mother had to care for her and her four brothers, and indeed her younger sister died during this period. The others survived thanks to the fact that some German officers staying near them took on her mother as a cook, and she was able to bring home extra food that she had prepared. Thus, cooking even extended in this case to the enemy, though certainly in desperate circumstances. The Germans fed them as well. She remembered the officers giving her mother lots of food for the family—boiled eggs came to mind for her—because they thought so highly of her cooking. She also told of the generosity of a number of prostitutes living in the neighborhood. They had been paying her mother to do laundry for them, and they offered to pay for the funerals of her husband and her young daughter, showing that generosity and humanity knows no social class or occupation.
While I have written about Kalymnian food generosity in my previous work (Sutton 2001, chap. 2), thinking about Angeliki’s practices leads me to some further conclusions. Implicit in many of Angeliki’s statements is a dichotomy between surface and depth—hence her criticisms of the shallow materialism of Kalymnians who accumulate money instead of turning that money into value by using it to give back to the wider community. The distinction between surface and depth is reflected in Angeliki’s preference to talk less about the flavor of food or even the details of food preparation—though she would provide recipes for me when I asked—and to focus rather on the social good that comes from cooking and sharing food. I noted similarly that Angeliki did not seem interested in cooking shows when they came on TV, and would flip the channel looking for something “educational,” such as nature, art, or history programming. And it was also reflected in her stories about the foreigners whom she had come to know through her daughter and son, and how they were never pretentious, showing off their knowledge or wearing fancy clothes. She talked about serving meals to doctors and professors from around the world who would dress in shorts and T-shirts.
These comments reminded me of some of Katerina Kardoulia’s reflections on hospitality. Katerina recalled a man from Sweden, “a huge man with big teeth,” who had seen her milking a sheep and asked her about it. When she offered him some sheep’s milk, they had begun talking, and she had invited him to have lunch. She was cooking fava beans that day, and he had never tried them before, didn’t know what they were even though he had traveled all around the world and despite her attempts to offer the word in several different languages. Eventually he joined her and her husband, offering a bottle of retsina that he had bought. After that encounter he sent them regular postcards from Sweden at Christmas and Easter for a number of years. Her conclusion about such encounters had a religious twist. She noted that in our origins “humanity is one” (I Anthropotita einai mia), and that only much later were we divided into different races and different languages. Hospitality, Katerina implied, recognizes our shared humanity as an ideal value. This sentiment would certainly be recognized by Angeliki, though her discussions of hospitality focused on respecting the value of particular people despite their humble appearance, in effect echoing the ancient Greek maxim that you should always be generous to strangers because you never know which one might turn out to be a god in disguise.
Cooking and sharing food is then, for Angeliki, part of creating a value that circulates through acts of generosity in the community and allows for the possibility of others to contribute to the kinds of values that transcend money and crass materialism. Sometimes, however, I believe Angeliki wondered if she could have made some other kind of cultural contribution. While we were watching a show about a Kalymnian woman who had become a singer, she reminisced, “Imagine if my uncle from the United States had taken me to New York when I was a girl to become a singer as he had promised [laughing]. Forbidden! I had to remain here on Kalymnos and do the laundry of my brothers.”
NOMIKI TSAGGARI: LIVING TRADITIONS
While “tradition” is a popular touchstone in talk about Kalymnian cooking, and indeed we saw its influence in Polykseni Miha’s practice, no one I filmed illustrated the importance of this category more clearly than Nomiki. Tradition was present not just in her discussions of cooking, but in multiple aspects of her daily life. Nomiki, in her mid-forties when I made a video of her in 2006, lived with her husband, Mihalis; Nomiki’s mother; and one teenage daughter, Maria. Their older daughter, Popi, having started college on Cyprus the previous year, was at home for the Easter holidays while I was there. Mihalis works as a civil servant in the mayor’s office, while Nomiki’s father had been a carpenter (he died in a tragic dynamite accident), and her mother does part-time sewing, producing “traditional costumes” for sale to Kalymnians in the United States and Australia to use for holiday celebrations. While neither of Nomiki’s parents had gone to high school, Nomiki had studied music and had the option of continuing study after high school, but had dropped out when she decided to marry. Several years earlier, Mihalis and Nomiki had gone in on a partnership with a friend and opened a pizza restaurant on the harbor, catering mostly to tourists and young Kalymnians. By 2011 they had closed the pizza restaurant but opened a restaurant and café with Nomiki’s sister, Polymnia Vasaneli, near one of the tourist hubs of Massouri.
They had invited me over to video the preparation of and then partake in Sunday lunch, an elaborate meal of stewed fish and pastitsio, the popular noodle and meat casserole with béchamel sauce. It was the first time I had seen their new house, as on previous trips they had lived in Nomiki’s parents’ house. Most strikingly, the house was designed in some respects to re-create the traditional Kalymnian home. The typical parlor for greeting guests opened onto a krevvato or krattho, a large bed with storage area underneath that is a key feature of “traditional” Kalymnian homes. Renée Hirschon describes a similar feature still found on Karpathos, where it is called a soufas: “The great architectural feature of the Karpathiot house is the elaborately carved sleeping platform, which can be said to constitute the house itself. It is the center of attention, both for the owners of the house, and visitors” (2008, 570–71). Families sleep on the soufas platform, which is also used for displays of family wealth, its treasures, and for special festivities such as weddings. This was the first of its kind that I had seen in a recently built house on Kalymnos, as most Kalymnians have adopted “Western-style” beds. However, a number of people mentioned that this feature was making a comeback in the past five or six years in newly built houses. Interestingly, in the case of Nomiki and Mihalis it no longer had one of its original functions as a sleeping area for the entire family: the daughters slept on it, but the parents slept in their own room. When asked about it, Nomiki noted that they saw it as really for the grandchildren, so that they would have a sense of being close, instead of being isolated in separate rooms.10 On Kalymnos, the “traditional” is not simply discursive, or relegated to special occasions, but incorporated into mundane, bodily practices such as sleeping arrangements. However, while the krevvato remained the central visual feature, it no longer took up the entire house as it once would have. In Nomiki and Mihalis’s house, this area also opened directly on the right into the kitchen, with a corridor leading to an indoor bathroom.
Other “traditionalizing” features included the second-floor fireplace built into the corner of a wall, and the outdoor oven in the front courtyard. Mihalis was using this oven to bake the pastitsio for lunch, the first time they had used it for something other than lamb. He showed me the special kindling he had gathered from particular mountain shrubs to infuse the food with a unique smell while it was cooking. After asking me to notice how nicely it caught fire, he noted, “Thus, back then the old ones made [their fires]. They didn’t have lights, electricity, nothing. Therefore, in order to survive they needed to cook their bread, their food, their sweets in outdoor ovens.” Similarly, when I asked Nomiki about the meat sauce for the pastitsio, which she had prepared the night before and left on the stove, she said, “It doesn’t hurt to leave it overnight. That’s what the old ones did, since they didn’t have refrigerators, they cooked things in a pot for a long time.” At this point she turned to her mother and asked, “Was it with oil?” When her mother affirmed this, she said, “Yes, they cooked it this way to preserve the meat.” What was interesting was that neither husband nor wife was present for the other’s comment, and yet they used almost the exact same phrasing, “thus did the old ones . . .” (etsi kanane oi palioi). This discursive reference to the past as justification for present practice rolled off the tongues of Nomiki and Mihalis throughout the afternoon: Nomiki, for example, showed me a vegetable appetizer that Mihalis had preserved in salt, noting, “Back then people would make this for appetizers. And Mihalis made it [now]. It’s called toursi, and is made with carrot, two kinds of pepper, cauliflower . . . and they used to make it. It’s preserved with a little oil on top, and it keeps for years.” Here the continuing of tradition is metaphorically embodied in the object itself, which “keeps for years.” But it is also marked by the use of the past imperfect tense to refer to something in the present: Nomiki was holding the object in her hand while talking about it as part of the past. Contrast this to U.S. popular usage, in which to “enter the past tense” is “to literally cease to exist.”11
An interesting moment came when Nomiki and her older daughter were listing for me the ingredients the daughter had put in the ground beef for the pastitsio. Not hearing it mentioned, I asked Nomiki whether there was nutmeg in it, which I had previously noted in other people’s preparations. She responded, “Some have gotten used to using that, but a long time ago those things didn’t exist, they came later to Kalymnos, those ingredients. Like curry, all that stuff. Those didn’t exist.” At this point her mother interjected, “They did have nutmeg.”
Nomiki: Eh, it didn’t exist, nutmeg. In the food?
Mother: It did. Nutmeg, cinnamon, pepper. Whoever liked it put it in.
Nomiki: Ah, I didn’t know, perhaps, perhaps . . .
In each of these two examples, the past is a direct reference and justification for present practices (of commission and omission). In the case of the nutmeg, it’s interesting that her mother corrected Nomiki, noting that there was also choice in the past, challenging the typical suggestion about tradition that it is uniform and accepted by all, and only in the present do some deviate from the norm. Later, while preparing béchamel sauce for the pastitsio, Nomiki reiterated that she didn’t like to use nutmeg, though this time she said it was because it overpowers the other spices and you don’t get to “hear” them as well. I noticed that Nomiki was preparing her béchamel differently from the way Polykseni Miha did, as she did not brown the flour in butter first, instead adding it directly to the warming milk. I asked her about this and she insisted that both ways were acceptable; indeed, sometimes she did it the other way, but it made no difference to the flavor. Similarly, Nomiki referred to the number of eggs one adds, saying that some people add more so that the béchamel has a more yellow coloring, but this didn’t matter to her because she was interested in the flavor. On the other hand, she referred to the possibility of making béchamel from a ready-made powder that you buy at the store, noting simply, “It’s nicer to do it yourself.”
So for Nomiki the keys to cooking seemed to be a concern for tradition and for variations that affect flavor. I might have thought that the references to tradition were made for my benefit if not for the fact that they fitted completely with the decor of the home: objects such as the TV and microwave were not displayed prominently; instead, the house was decorated with all kinds of objects representing the past. These included a number of kitchen items—pans, casserole dishes, sifters, bread boards, bowls for allowing bread to rise in (which she claimed still to use), all of which were displayed on walls, in corners, or on top of cupboards in the kitchen, or in various spots in the front yard. She even claimed that she hoped to buy an old-fashioned Kalymnian refrigerator, which she asked her mother the proper name for (fanari)—a box suspended in the air from a string—which she would display for decorative purposes. I had heard about fanaria in other Kalymnian accounts of the past, but Nomiki was the first person who suggested using one in such a way.
Also displayed in the front yard were several farm implements that Nomiki had found abandoned in fields on Kalymnos. She referred to these, as well as to some of the kitchen implements, using their local, Kalymnian names (identifying them even more with the past). Finally, all the furniture that she bought, both for her use and for her daughters’ dowries, were antiques, though not all from Greece. In relation to these last Nomiki said, “I don’t like getting these modern things. Everything here is made of wood. I want to know the history of the furniture,” noting that the set she had bought for her elder daughter was made in the 1930s, owned by a doctor in Switzerland, and that the chairs had pigskin coverings. While keeping old things is not uncommon—indeed, some homes on Kalymnos display ancient Greek amphorae brought up by sponge divers—new houses more typically tend to be sparsely decorated, such as the home of Polykseni, who had on her walls a few icons, locally done paintings of Kalymnos harbor, and a few handcrafted plates. For Nomiki these claims on tradition extended to everyday practices as well. She has encouraged her younger daughter to learn the sandouri, a Byzantine instrument (somewhat like a xylophone), and with Nomiki playing accordion, they perform in traditional music groups on and off the island. Her daughters had also participated in the local dance school, dressing in costumes that represented the different Dodecanese islands.
In talking about cooking, Nomiki dismissed cooking shows like Vefa’s Kitchen, which she saw as failing to uphold traditional Greek cooking. Her daughter piped in that Vefa’s salads were particularly awful. Nomiki agreed that Vefa “mixed things up,” admitting that she needed to do this on her show for variety. She contrasted this to the proper traditionalness of Mamalakis’s show, Forgiveness with Every Bite. Although she said she hadn’t cooked any recipes from his show, she intended to make a kind of cheese pie from Epirus, which had a sauce (krema) mixed in with the cheese. She wasn’t sure about it, though, because it called for a lot of mint, and she wasn’t a big fan of mint. Nomiki proudly showed off a cookbook of traditional Cretan recipes that she had bought on a trip to Crete; she said she liked it because the recipes were linked to the seasons and to holy days, and described the associated traditions, that “it was more about traditional life than about food.”12 Indeed, she said, recipes were not that important, you could add what you wanted to any particular dish, as long as you showed concern and care for the food, tasting things as you went along, doing things not with indifference but with passion (na to frontiseis, na proseheis to fagito; meraki).
Nomiki was one of the few women of the younger generation who knew how to make the labor-intensive Greek funeral food kolliva (Sutton 2003). An older neighbor had showed her how to prepare it, as her mother had not learned either, many Kalymnian women feeling that this tradition is too “sad,” and preferring to buy prepared kolliva from the store. Nomiki had felt guilty about buying prepared kolliva for her father’s memorial, and had heard a priest say that not preparing it yourself was like inviting your ancestors to eat and taking them to a restaurant. Of course, there was a certain irony here, considering that Mihalis and Nomiki own a restaurant. Their restaurant, which they referred to as a good investment for difficult times, was seen as a place mostly patronized by young people, who had learned to eat things like hamburgers, souvlaki, and other snack foods, foods that Nomiki and Mihalis saw as inappropriate on a regular basis for their own children.
A number of authors have suggested that the revaluation of “tradition” has been an undertaking of the middle classes, a project of symbolic capital and class distinction.13 Here, however, it is important to note that many of Nomiki’s practices, such as learning to make kolliva, or to build a house with a krevvato and with the living space built for her daughter on the second floor of their house (rather than a separate house), are not necessarily given status by the community. Indeed, when I repeated Nomiki’s comment about the priest who said that you should not buy kolliva prepared by others, people were highly dismissive, one man calling that “bullshit” and classifying kolliva not as a valued tradition, but as a stupid superstition.14 Even in the realm of food and expressive culture, then, there are traditions and there are Traditions. There are many other aspects of Kalymnian life in which it would make no sense to embrace “tradition.” Despite the traditionalizing features of their house, Nomiki and Mihalis did not reject indoor plumbing, for example, despite the fact that for many older Kalymnians, bathroom practices were the site of a kind of nostalgia for community intimacy (Sutton 1998, 37–38). Nor did they reject opening a pizza restaurant, despite its association with fast food, tourism, and the antisocial aspects of “modern” eating. It makes more sense, then, to see the views and practices of Nomiki and her family as ontological attitudes about time, about the problem of facing the present appropriately, rather than as calculated displays of authenticity as symbolic capital or dressing up for tourists. This is also implied in the amount of tradition that is “embodied” in memories of taste, as well as in sleeping and other spatial practices. I address issues of time and temporality more specifically in relation to the timing of cooking in the next section.
POPI GALANOU: IF THERE’S TIME . . . .
In 2008 when I made a video of Popi making octopus stew, she was in her late thirties, married with two small children born to a sailor who was absent for several months out of the year. I had known Popi’s family since my fieldwork in the early 1990s. Popi’s father—a cousin of Yiannis Roditis, Angeliki’s deceased husband—had run one of Kalymnos’s fish farms at the time. Her mother was active on the cultural scene on Kalymnos, organizing performances, and had run a “traditional” coffee shop and venue for local artists from 1999 to 2003. Her brother Pavlos was the director of the Kalymnian Transportation Department. Sadly, her mother had died fairly young, in the mid-2000s. The family had a certain cosmopolitanism about them, reflected in the fact that the children had grown up in Athens. Before marrying her current husband, Popi had been briefly married to a German man whom she had met while he was visiting the island, and had lived for a short time in Germany until their marriage dissolved.
Time and timing are, of course, always part of the calculations of cooks. Nomiki Tsaggari complained about how in contemporary times it seems as if you were always checking your watch. But time can have different experiential dimensions in different contexts and settings. As Jean-Claude Kaufmann notes in his writing on cooking in France, the French woman “is always juggling two contradictory injunctions: something quick, something good. . . . To that extent, she is a perfect illustration of contemporary family life, with all its contradictions and its difficult juggling acts” (2010, 85).15 But with two small children, a husband often gone at sea, and no female relatives to share labor with, Popi felt the temporal dimensions of cooking particularly acutely as they structured her cooking discourse and practice.16
In the video, the issue of time is immediately raised by Popi because she is using a pressure cooker to soften the octopus. She notes that using the pressure cooker isn’t as good as cooking the octopus slowly, but it saves time. She says she uses it often, for certain types of beans like chickpeas or other beans, which take a long time (argoun para poli). For the octopus, to make up for the speed of the pressure cooker, she adds soda water (which she has to hand, and which she says works as a substitute for baking soda), in order to help “the poor thing” to soften more while cooking. While the pressure cooker is regarded by Popi as a second choice—if she has time she won’t use it on things such as white beans—she notes that for most meals she does use it.
Shortly after discussing the benefits and problems of the pressure cooker, Popi begins to prepare some tomatoes to add. In this case she notes that she normally tries to buy the nicest, freshest tomatoes, and, indeed, that’s what she has done this time. “But when you don’t have time it’s difficult, because the right thing to do is to be able to remove the skin and any hard parts inside so that it cooks easier.” She says this as she is peeling the tomatoes by hand, so I ask her whether she ever grates them. She says that she plans to grate them, or rather to blend them using a small blender, “which is the most modern version of grating, and which helps a lot.” But she returns again to the issue of not always having time, and says that of course it is possible simply to blend them with the skin on, but that is a bad solution. Note that the issue of tomato skin is something not everyone agrees on; as Nina mentioned in chapter 3, many Kalymnians prefer the skin left on, but once again it is seen as one of the decisions that matter in Kalymnian cooking. Later Popi notes that the best way to prepare the tomatoes is to grate them, but she has gotten used to the blender. Here, as throughout, she mixes a sense of “best” practices with the ever-present constraints of time.
Because Popi is concerned with feeding her young children properly, I ask her what “healthy food” means to her. While she begins with the issue of “heaviness” or fat discussed by Polykseni, issues of time quickly enter in as well. She raises the issue of not overboiling vegetables to keep them from losing their vitamins, but at the same time, she says, one needs to boil the vegetables to kill microbes and other things they might contain: “There are ways to avoid this overboiling. But I think that because modern life doesn’t give you the time—I mean, I’ve learned some of these ways, and I do them when I have time. When you soak greens for a long time in vinegar, all of those little bugs (zouzounakia) leave by themselves. But you have to do it two or three times, it takes two hours. Especially if someone is working, they won’t be able to do this, thus they would prefer to boil the vegetables a bit longer to be sure.”
Even within the constraints of “modern life,” however, Popi insists that she would never consider buying preprepared food at the supermarket. At most they might go out for an occasional pizza or souvlaki when her husband is in town. She is insistent that not only she, but hardly any Kalymnians, would buy such food from the supermarket. Only perhaps a single man might buy it, but, she suggests, he too would probably have someone to cook for him. She is convinced that such food is perhaps used in Athens, but on Kalymnos even if a woman works full-time she will find the time to cook; “That’s why there are few of these ready-made meals in Kalymnian supermarkets.” Popi claims that at most you will find ready-made pasta sauces, but even with these it’s easier and quicker to make them yourself—since the ingredients (for carbonara, for example) are things that every kitchen has—rather than take the time to go and buy it at the supermarket. However, she does find acceptable frozen pearl onions, which she tried recently and found were a convenient way to make the Greek-style stew known as stifado.
Popi’s sense of time creeps into her cooking in that she stops at several points to review what she has done so far and what she still needs to do. She says that this happens often; because cooking is automatic, she sometimes forgets steps. That’s why she puts out all the ingredients in advance, so that she is reminded to use them. At one point while she is reviewing, she remembers not that she has left out bay leaves, but that she hasn’t taken them out of the cupboard so they would be there when she needs them. As Kaufmann notes for French cooks: “cooks constantly rely on objects that act as signs telling them what they have to do next” (2010, 181).17 Timing also played a role: while she is frying the onions, Popi is cutting up the boiled octopus to add it in, but she takes a bit too long so the onions begin to burn. Here she notes, “I shouldn’t have left it so long, but it happens, the damage has been done.” Even for small gestures, timing plays a part. When I ask why she uses a spatula rather than a fork to stir with, as other Kalymnians tend to do, she says that a spatula gets it done faster, though in this case perhaps it was the smallness of the onions that made her choose a spatula, because she adds that for some things she does use a fork.
While a number of the women I interviewed talked about time as an issue, Popi’s consistent references to time seemed striking. In part, no doubt, this reflected the fact that, as noted, she was caring for two small children without help from relatives and with her husband absent for much of the year. Indeed, while we were cooking, Popi’s aunt was watching her two-year-old daughter, and both children came into the kitchen several times as Popi was preparing the meal. Popi mentioned that she often cooked with her daughter clinging to her leg.
However, another element of Popi’s time consciousness became clear when she talked about her mother and her experience growing up. When I asked Popi how she had learned to cook, she immediately insisted that it was through her mother. But when I asked her whether it was through helping her mother prepare the daily meal, she complicated the picture. When Popi was a child they had lived in Athens, and her parents were both working full-time—her mother as a real estate agent—and Popi had been home with her brother, who is six years older. Thus, she explained, while her mother sometimes found time to cook the night before, on many days it was she and her elder brother who prepared dinner. But, she told me, her mother had “a gift for cooking,” and loved to do it; she cooked or prepared food for guests in a way that concerned not only the taste of the food, but also the appearance and all of the sensory aspects. I sensed from Popi’s description that her mother had struggled with finding the time for cooking, and that this was part of her culinary legacy that Popi had adopted.18
Interestingly, when she contrasted her mother’s cooking with her own, Popi immediately thought of her own shortcuts—using the pressure cooker and adding soda to the octopus to help soften it—things she said her mother would never have done. She contrasted her pressure cooker with her mother’s pot with a tight-fitting lid, which she said was healthier because it kept the substance of the food from escaping through the steam. The pressure cooker represented for Popi her own, “modern” attempt to deal with issues of time, though one that she regarded with ambivalence as lacking authenticity, because she had brought it from Germany from her time living away from home and family. Even her grammar reflected the omnipresence of time concerns. When she described being at home with her brother learning to cook while her parents were at work, she stated, “We helped a lot because there wasn’t time from our parents” (voithousame k’emeis epidi den ipirhe hronos apo tous goneis mas). This sentence is grammatically incorrect in Greek because the verb iparhei (to be, to exist) doesn’t take an object, but its usage reflects the fact that Popi has made “time” the subject of the sentence rather than her parents (i.e., she could have said “because our parents didn’t have time”).
I was also struck by the way time entered into her discussion of other issues, in particular the death of her mother and her uncle, which she referred to by saying, “So many important people left us in such a short space of time, I can’t take it in that they no longer exist.” Shortly after making this remark, however, she noted that her daughter, who following the Kalymnian tradition was named after her mother, had been born just twenty-five days after her mother’s death, and how important that had been in helping her come to terms with the loss of her mother: “For me, Katerina [her daughter] was my mother. For all of us.”19 In these two examples we see larger time trajectories at work, in one case acting cruelly to take away the important people in her life, and in the other providing the “medicine” that allows Popi to deal with her losses.
Kaufmann writes of the constant struggle of French cooks against time: “Women of working age who have to cope with the demands of work but who still have family responsibilities often have to do everything in a rush and are always short of time.” At the same time he sees this experience as part of modernity in which “we” are constantly “project[ing] ourselves into the future” and imagining “so many possible scenarios” that there is never felt to be enough time for mundane cooking chores.20 I do not think that this adequately captures the experience of time pressure for Popi and other Kalymnian women. Cooking may be a burden, but it is not a chore in the sense that Popi does not see it as secondary to other pursuits. Time is a problem not because cooking is seen as something to be dispensed with quickly so as to pursue other activities—“eating, relaxing, working” (Kaufmann 2010, 184)—but because doing cooking in a proper way, one that respects tradition, the senses, and health concerns, takes time. Popi doesn’t always have that much time, thus necessitating various types of shortcuts, from pressure cookers and spatulas to soda. When I asked Popi about whether she cooked from cooking shows or recipes, she complained that the TV recipes were inconvenient or expensive, always calling for some ingredient that might not be available on Kalymnos, might be prohibitively expensive, and might be used only one time. On the other hand, Popi told me, when she has time she likes to try new and unusual things, like trying a recipe from a magazine for pierogi that she and the children both enjoyed. “It was something special, not the usual stuff” (kati idietero, ohi to sinithismeno). Moreover, Popi saw things moving not toward the death of cooking, as others insisted, but rather toward people spending more time on growing and cooking their food: “The world is moving back toward nature” (olos o kosmos yernai pros tin fisi) as people become increasingly concerned with the problems caused by industrial food. “Even if you don’t have time, you’re going to try to make things more naturally.” She mentioned that she had begun to bake bread “because they told me that the things that are used in making bread are really bad, and it’s very easy for me to make bread once a week and freeze it so that we have it for the whole week.” She said she hadn’t done it this week because she hadn’t had time, but she had done it a couple of weeks earlier, and planned to do it more regularly. Time may take battling with, but Popi seemed up to the task.
MALE COOKS
When Popi was contrasting her brother’s cooking with hers, once again her phrasing suggested the importance of time. Rather than claim that her brother’s cooking is inventive while hers is traditional, she said that her brother’s cooking is more “spontaneous,” while hers follows a “typical procedure,” which in Greek implies following a certain order in which you can predict how things will go, once again stressing the temporal, processual dimensions of cooking. While I was not able to capture video of many male cooks during my research, what I did learn about male cooking conformed to the idea that it did not deal with the everyday, or the temporal constraints that Popi was so aware of. Rather, when men cook, it is by definition a special occasion.
I’ve suggested throughout that Kalymnian men take seriously the value and importance of cooking, even if it has been by and large an exclusively female domain. When I ask women about men cooking, they typically assimilate this practice into discourses about the “old years” versus today. For example, when I asked Evdokia Passa about male cooking, she responded:
In my mother’s generation the man would not have cooked, even if he knew how to cook. In my generation I see that Dimitris [her husband] and others of his age will cook to give their wives a break, or else because it makes them happy [yia na efharistisoun]. And so I think that slowly this [i.e., the old way] will change. But for sure, even if the man starts cooking, he won’t be cooking every day, the basic cooking will still be done by the woman. But at least we’re taking steps, we’re progressing.
Another woman made a similar comment, noting that at a “competition for taste” for island cookery that occurs yearly on the island of Patmos where groups of islanders prepare and present traditional dishes, while the other islands had male cooks, the Kalymnian team was all female: “Forget it! Kalymnos is a little backward, the men here are only interested in going to the coffee shop, hunting, gambling [zogos], and prostitutes!”
When I spoke with men, however, I got a more complicated picture. Even among the generation of men in their mid-forties to mid-sixties (the age range of most of the men I spoke with), there was a variety of distinct attitudes about and practices of cooking. Certainly there were some men who did not cook at all, as Evdokia suggested, or who might only “cook” when it involved grilling fish or using an outdoor oven, the Kalymnian equivalent of male barbecue expertise. These men were not totally divorced from food, however, as many of them, like Nikolas Mihas (Katina’s husband), played an active role in food provisioning through activities including hunting (birds, rabbits), casual fishing, collecting snails, and gathering sea salt and other occasional finds. Thus if they did not cook, they still might “prepare” food by cleaning sea urchins or pounding an octopus on the rocks for a friend or guest.
I interviewed Pavlos Roditis, a Kalymnian in his late forties. Pavlos is the brother of Popi Galanou, whose description earlier of the two of them cooking on their own as young children while their parents were gone at work first prompted me to talk to him about cooking. For Pavlos, however, childhood was not the period that he referenced in explaining how he learned cooking. As he noted offhandedly, he “came into contact with cooking” as a child, but learned only to make “simple things, out of necessity.” Nor did he cite his mother’s cooking as a touchstone, as did his sister. Instead, Pavlos saw the period when he was going to college in Italy as his most formative period. During this time, he explained, he lived in an apartment far from the student union, so he had to take on daily cooking for himself. As he put it, “I started to learn some of the local dishes, especially pasta and different sauces, from watching others, and asking advice from some of my neighbors and friends. I didn’t use a cookbook, I learned orally.” Interestingly, the idea of not using a cookbook appeared in other brief discussions with men. It seems to follow a pattern of claiming to be able to absorb knowledge by watching and listening, which, while not exclusively male, did seem to follow typical male patterns of craft learning in Greece (see Herzfeld 2003). Italy was formative for Pavlos as well in shaping his style of cooking, which I discuss further below.
Pavlos was married with two young daughters, and his wife worked importing solar panels to Kalymnos. While at the time I interviewed him Pavlos cooked typically only on Sundays, he insisted that this was a matter of circumstance. Several years earlier, when he worked in his own business and his wife ran a clothing store, he cooked at least three or four times a week. Now that he had set hours working as the head of the Kalymnian Department of Transport and his wife had flexible hours, things had shifted so that he was primarily a Sunday cook.
I asked Pavlos how he used to decide what to cook when he was cooking more regularly. He responded that it was decided in discussion the night before with his wife (a discussion that increasingly included his daughters), but also by following a typical Kalymnian balance among fish, meat, and vegetables (they didn’t eat beans because he was allergic to them). When I posed the question of what kind of cooking he did—what he had learned in Italy or the typical Kalymnian dishes—he responded by insisting on the key importance of freshness in his cooking:
Pavlos: More Italian style. Because it’s lighter and more healthy. But over time I’ve begun to mix Italian and Greek cooking. Because Greek food can be healthy if you fix it with all fresh ingredients, in other words, you buy your ingredients every day and don’t let them sit in the refrigerator for a week or two, and if you eat the food you have cooked that day, and don’t cook it one day and eat it the next day.
David: In Greek cooking typically you use tomatoes, garlic, onions, and parsley as the base of the dish. What do you use in Italian cooking?
Pavlos: The same things. It’s simply that you may use less water in Italian cooking, or use certain ingredients like balsamic vinegar, more garlic, and you always use fresh tomatoes, not all the tomato paste that is used in Greek cooking.
David: Your sister tells me that your cooking is more spontaneous—
Pavlos [laughing]: Yes, even now I improvise.
David: For example?
Pavlos: I just made a grilled meat dish with carrots, nutmeg, and a preparation of local herbs. Then I add a lot of wine while it’s grilling. The nutmeg gives a depth to all the other flavors, as long as you add just enough so that you “understand” it; if you add more it becomes heavy. Nutmeg was used in ancient Greece, so it’s not strange, but most people now use it only in making sweets.
Pavlos’s comments on nutmeg had echoes for me in the discussion between Nomiki Tsaggari and her mother about the “traditionality” of nutmeg, except that Pavlos was referring all the way back to the traditions of ancient Greece. Because Pavlos was cooking only on Sunday at this time, he was typically cooking meat dishes, grilled or otherwise. However, when he cooked more regularly, he often cooked vegetarian meals. He said the most important aspect of cooking, whether it be meat, fish, or vegetables, was that all the ingredients had to be fresh. This was a slight variation on the theme of “healthy” food that I elaborated earlier with Polykseni. Indeed, Pavlos also insisted that his cooking was “fresh and healthy” and that he used only oil, no butter or margarine, and he didn’t sauté the food so that it became heavy. But his discourse was less aimed at Kalymnian community norms, and more toward his personally acquired knowledge of Italian food.21 Pavlos embraced a certain cosmopolitan localism in his view of cooking. In the pursuit of health and flavor, one should cook with the freshest, most local ingredients possible. He contrasted Kalymnos with other Aegean islands he had spent time on such as Leros and Mytilini, where, he claimed, they had a richer cuisine based on their own specific local vegetables, herbs, and other ingredients. It’s this kind of cosmopolitan localism that we saw in the last chapter represented by Mamalakis’s cooking show and some of the audience reactions to it.
At the end of the interview I posed the question of male cooking directly: whether it was looked down upon on Kalymnos. Pavlos echoed the temporal view of male cooking that I had heard from women, saying, “Perhaps it was like that in the past, but now [male cooking] is seen as something natural.” Perhaps this view does capture the fact that women are increasingly working outside the home so that, as was the case with Pavlos, the husband might step in to take over the primary cooking duties if the wife was unable to.22
However, there were other aspects of Kalymnian life in the past that might foster male cooking knowledge. Manolis Papamihail, Nina’s husband (see chapter 3), embodied a number of these different factors over the course of his life. His mother died when he was three, and he lived with his father’s sisters and several cousins. One aunt was blind. He would help her cook while the other aunts worked during the day as agricultural laborers. Like Pavlos and Popi in an urban context, Manolis took on learning to cook at an early age. While he did not describe this period of his life in detail, he said that he learned by watching his elders. His aunt was a good cook—he remembered her sautéed eggplant with fondness—and so he picked up whatever he could from watching and helping her. As he became an adult, Manolis found work as a seaman, another context in which men might cook, certainly learning to make things like grilled octopus, fish soup, and other foods from the sea.23 Later in life Manolis became a seasonal migrant, traveling to the United States on a regular basis to do painting and other odd jobs in Brooklyn, New York. Living on his own for several months of the year, he cooked regularly, “mostly vegetables, but some fish and meat too.” Thus, throughout his life Manolis has been in situations that required him to develop his cooking skills if he wanted to eat well.
Unlike Pavlos, Manolis saw himself as cooking in a traditional Kalymnian style, and he told me that his cooking hadn’t changed in any significant way since he first learned as a boy. His nostalgia about the past revealed some mixed feelings. On the one hand he recalled the poverty of Kalymnos, when people didn’t put carrots in fish soup because carrots were a luxury. He also recalled that you had to wait for summer to eat tomatoes. But while tomatoes were now available year round, they were very different from the summer tomatoes of his youth: “Back then you cut open a tomato and you could smell it! And inside it was full of little balls [volarakia, a Kalymnian term] of sugar. Now when you cut open a tomato, it is like a vegetable.”24 Manolis also had interesting memories of the endless supply of food available on some of the ships he worked on, and recalled one day grilling seventeen pounds of shrimp and another day seventeen lamb chops for his own consumption.
Manolis still cooks on occasion when Nina is not able to, or when he has a particular desire to make something. He is also in charge of grilling fish and meat, as well as cooking dishes in the outdoor oven, and he sometimes prepares whatever food is being cooked in the outdoor oven (stuffed vegetables, for example). If Nina is tied up during the morning with appointments of some kind, Manolis will prepare the afternoon meal. When Nina went for ten days to Athens for medical tests, Manolis did do some cooking, yet neighbors and relatives also brought him food on the assumption that a man on his own would need to be fed. He complained to me, though, that he had received meat from everyone, so he got tired of eating meat every day. He made himself a simple pasta dish with oil and ate that for two days.
One aspect of Manolis’s discussion of cooking that stood out was his focus on the importance of process for making a dish turn out right. When he makes fish soup he cooks the vegetables in the broth first. Then he strains the broth and uses it to cook the rice. In this way, he can make sure that everything is cooked to the right degree of doneness, while still allowing the flavors to meld properly. He doesn’t add much oil to the soup because while it is simmering the oil will “jump” out of the pot. Instead, he adds oil to the fish once they have been removed from the soup for serving. He also describes adding the fish to the soup in a way that keeps them from breaking into pieces. And Manolis told me about a “trick” for making Greek coffee that he had learned when he was a seaman: boil the coffee in the standard way, but after pouring the much-desired foam into the coffee cup, return the pot to the flame and let it reach a rolling boil again.25 He claimed it is in this second boil that all of the scent of the coffee is released (bgazei to aroma): “That little extra boil at the end brings out the scent. And it makes a difference, I have noticed it. I find it better than the other system. The more you grow, the more you learn.” Nina mentioned to me another example of Manolis’s concern with process: he was always telling her to wilt onions in a pan before adding the olive oil. She wasn’t sure why he did this, but when I followed up with him, he said that this method gives the onions more flavor (mirodia, literally, “smell”). He explained that the onions cook better in the oil if they have softened in the dry pan instead of putting them into the oil “live” (zontana), that is, raw.
FIGURE 14. Manolis Papamihail demonstrating the secret to making the best Greek coffee: bring it just to a boil, pour the foam into a cup, and then give the remainder a good boil (2013). Photo by Nina Papamihail.
It is interesting to examine Manolis’s interest in process in relation to his claim that his cooking hasn’t changed since he was a boy. This reflects an overall allegiance to traditional Kalymnian dishes, even if one can always be on the lookout for new “tricks” to improve them. Thus Manolis’s approach is very much like what I discussed in previous chapters as key to Kalymnian women’s view of cooking. The difference might be that Kalymnian women’s “tricks” extend to the social aspects of cooking in relation to the different tastes of the family and in relation to cooking while taking care of other daily responsibilities. I might suggest, though this would await further ethnography, that men’s tricks are more narrowly focused on the process of cooking itself. This would fit with the fact that many men like to discuss cooking and recipes even when they don’t cook, as in discussions reported earlier about how to remove the proper amount of salt from an octopus in preparing octopus stew.
One other difference stood out in my research on Kalymnian male cooks: the tendency to think of cooking as a hobby rather than as a daily necessity. Mihalis Tsaggaris (Nomiki’s husband) used the word hobby in describing his own apprenticeship in cooking. He learned from his grandfather when he was a young boy because he liked spending time with him, and cooking was a “game” for him. As he got older, Mihalis started experimenting by cooking with wine and other things, and so “what began as a game stayed with me and became a hobby.” Mihalis used this characterization despite the fact that he cooks quite regularly, as he and his wife own a restaurant and they share cooking for home and work on a daily basis. Pavlos Roditis didn’t use the word hobby, but he suggested a similar idea in claiming that men on Kalymnos tend to be better cooks: “For women, cooking is a routine, so they get tired of it, and they lose the feeling that they are doing something special. Whereas for men, since they don’t cook constantly, they are more interested in what they are doing.” The notion that while men may increasingly cook, cooking—with all its burdens and its rewards—is still a woman’s primary responsibility seems to be very much alive on Kalymnos.
CONCLUSION
In this chapter I have used cooking portraits to present some of the different meanings and values that Kalymnians attach to cooking, and some of the different ways in which they go about it. While I have focused on a different style, or theme, in each of these portraits, I have also suggested that there are considerable overlaps, in concerns about health, tradition, time, and so on. Indeed, these values are quite general, and it might be possible to generate a fairly similar list of themes in looking at discourses about cooking in France, the United States, or elsewhere.26
But what is interesting is how these values are put into practice in very different cooking landscapes. Thus the significance of the value of “health” for cooking practice will look very different for a middle-class American than it does for a Kalymnian steeped in notions of the traditional Mediterranean diet. The same goes for time pressures, which will be experienced differently in a normative nuclear-family household, as contrasted to the Kalymnian matrilocal household. And if there may be said to be a correlation between healthy food and one political ideology on the one hand, and “traditional” food and an opposing ideology on the other, in the United States,27 it would be hard to find such correlations on Kalymnos. Quantitative studies that measure the frequency in appearance of different values in cooking discourses cannot capture the nuances of the interrelation of these values, both with one another and with the distinctiveness of cooking practices, that I have documented in this book.