‘I HOPE ALL THESE PEOPLE ARE LIKING SNAILS.’
The speaker, Ariadne, is a dark-haired Cretan beauty of the kind recorded on the vases unearthed in the ruins of the palace of Knossos. Her audience – a hundred of us food writers, nutritionists, chefs and academics, mostly American – are gathered together for breakfast in a vast hotel on the outskirts of Heraklion on the fourth day of our conference on the Seven Countries Study, whose half-century we are here to celebrate.
‘Today, I am happy to tell you, those of you who wish to accompany me into the mountains will be able to gather and prepare this important foodstuff for yourselves.’
None of us has anticipated the need for liking snails, let alone gathering, preparing and – presumably – consuming the fruits of our labours. Some of us can’t eat the slithery creatures for religious reasons; others don’t want to have anything to do with something so slippery and slimy and, not to put too fine a point on it, primitive. A quartet of us – Nancy Jenkins, author of The Mediterranean Diet; Paula Wolfert, author of The Food of the Eastern Mediterranean; Aglaia Kremezi, author of The Food of Greece; and I – are anticipating snails with undisguised enthusiasm.
We are here to celebrate the fiftieth year of the migration of the Cretan Diet into the Mediterranean Diet and from thence to the Seven Countries Study, an assessment of the general health of those who live around the shores of the Mediterranean that continues to this day. The Cretan Diet that started the whole thing off was first identified as a blueprint for longevity and health by Ansel Keyes, a heart specialist from Minnesota seconded to Naples Hospital in 1945 to look after Italy’s war-wounded.
The good doctor observed in the course of his ministrations that his patients from the islands – most of them members of the resistance movement on Crete – were unlike those of Minnesota in that they were never likely to be in need of his expertise since their hearts were beating like clockwork and their arteries were magnificently unfurred. A visit to the island itself confirmed that the secret was a diet of grains, greens and olive oil, wine in moderation, modest amounts of cheese and yoghurt, fish occasionally and meat only on feast days.
The omission of snails from the roll-call, continues Ariadne, is unjust. Snails were the reason the self-sufficient peasantry of the Cretan hills – not to mention those who took up arms and were obliged to live from the wild – survived the German Occupation in rude good health. The soldiers emptied everyone’s store cupboards and slaughtered the sheep and goats, but they left the snails untouched.
Snails, Ariadne continues, warming to her theme, have not been accorded their proper place in the Cretan diet, even though in her own experience in her grandmother’s village, the succulent molluscs are – or were, since most of the crop is now shipped off to France, Italy and Spain – eaten three or four times a week.
The proper accompaniment to a dish of Cretan snails is Cretan paximadia, twice-baked barley bread. Paximadia, fist-sized rock-hard rusks, are as much a statement of Cretan identity as – well – the Cretan diet of grains and greens. Once split and dampened with a little water, they are ready to mop up a sauce, or heap with ripe tomato and a sprinkle of oregano, or top with a sliver of salty myzithra cheese and a handful of young dandelion greens.
And finally there must be olive oil, as much as the crumb can hold of the thick green juice freshly pressed from ripe fruit no bigger than a fingernail, gathered from thousand-year-old olive trees descended from others the juice of whose fruits, many millennia ago, filled the tall earthenware jars stacked in close-crammed ranks in cellars preserved beneath the palace of Knossos.
Ariadne inspects her audience for evidence of enthusiasm.
‘Those who wish to accompany me on our expedition into the mountains for this special event, please to raise your hands.’
A couple of dozen hands are tentatively raised while the rest remain firmly clenched round their coffee cups.
This field trip is of unparalleled interest, continues Ariadne encouragingly, to all of those who wish to discover the truth of the Cretan diet. Snails are one of the most venerable foodstuffs known to man. Snail debris has been found in the middens of Neolithic Jericho. There is evidence of snail feasts enjoyed seventy thousand years ago in the fertile valleys of Mesopotamia. All snails – small, middle-sized and the monster molluscs sold in African markets – are edible and good, but none are more delicious than the vineyard-fattened snails of Crete.
Ansel Keyes’ investigations on Crete, the moment of truth for the Cretan diet, came to the attention of the Rockefeller Foundation, who sent a group of scientists to verify his findings. The scientists confirmed that the islanders enjoyed remarkably good health, with many climbing hillsides like mountain goats well into their nineties. Longevity and vigour could be ascribed, they concluded, to a diet limited by what could be grown, harvested or husbanded in a region known for mildness of climate, fertility of soil, ancient vineyards and olive groves of equal antiquity.
The study inspired our host, Dun Gifford – Boston Brahmin, friend of the Kennedys, veteran of the America’s Cup – to set up Oldways Preservation Trust, our hosts at the conference, an organisation dedicated to persuading the founders’ fellow Americans to stop eating saturated fats, white bread, fizzy drinks and hamburgers in buns and start eating the diet of deprivation as experienced on Crete.
Three days into the conference, not a few of us would rather jump naked into one of the oil derricks overshadowing the hotel than experience another back-projected flow chart. As a result, Ariadne’s offer of escape to the hills, with or without snails, is irresistible – at least to me and around a dozen others, including Nancy, Paula and Aglaia.
‘Your attention, please, kind ladies and gentlemen! I have brought some examples of the most important foodstuff, also of great antiquity, which is eaten with our snails.’
Ariadne gets straight to the point by banging on the communal breakfast table with what looks like a fist-sized nut-brown billiard ball. The ball splits in two, revealing a pale-brown crumb.
‘This,’ says Ariadne, brandishing the two halves, ‘is the paximadia which is eaten with the snails that my grandmother, Kiria Eleni, will be preparing for us today when some of us visit her in her village.’
Paximadia is the daily bread of Crete. When eaten, as anticipated, with snails under the shade of a thousand-year-old olive tree in the Cretan hills, it explains more about the longevity of Cretans than any amount of Seven Country studies and an army of scientists. Neither Paula, Nancy nor I have much confidence in the science of things, preferring direct experience to staring at diagrams and graphs. Ariadne’s proposal, snails included, is a lot more appealing than listening to PowerPoint lectures in an air-conditioned conference hall.
Ariadne starts our education without delay. Dismissing the hotel’s international breakfast buffet – a hybrid array of Florida orange juice, Swiss muesli, Israeli grapefruit, German sausage and French pastries – she distributes the Cretan version of the breakfast croissant.
A few of us bang the balls on the table, producing shards of crumbs. One or two of us split the ball with the hotel cutlery and proceed to butter and spread the crumb with jam.
‘This is not the way to eat paximadia,’ says Ariadne severely. ‘How to eat paximadia is like so.’
She cracks one of the billiard balls into a bowl provided for cornflakes, dips her fingers daintily in a water glass and sprinkles the dry crumb with droplets. ‘Not too much – just enough to soften. And now you may eat your paximadia as you wish at any time of day. Me? I like it right now with American coffee.’
She pours herself a bowl of the hotel’s reheated coffee, adds a splash of the hot milk considered appropriate for tea-drinkers among those who don’t drink tea, and tips in the softened paximadia.
‘This is good,’ she says, spooning up a mouthful.
I crack and soak. She’s right. It is indeed good – nutty and toasty, like coffee-flavoured porridge.
‘Paximadia,’ our instructor continues, ‘must stay a little firm, unless it is for babies or toothless old people, although this is not much experienced on Crete, where there is little work for the dentist. My grandmother, ya-ya, is nearly ninety years old and has all her own teeth. You will meet her today and see for yourself.’
Nearly-ninety-year-olds with teeth seems like an excellent recommendation for a diet – any diet – though I reflect that this might also have to do with an absence of sugary fizz among those who rarely find themselves in supermarkets.
Barley-meal formed into ashcakes, an early form of paximadia, has been found in prehistoric rubbish dumps along with snail debris, Ariadne continues, spooning up her coffee-flavoured porridge. There is evidence that leavened ashcakes or barley rusk – true paximadia – were carried in saddlebags by Alexander’s soldiers, provisioned Viking longships and victualled Spanish galleons on the long Atlantic crossings. It can therefore be assumed that Cretan paximadia, being extraordinarily hard and resistant to invasion by weevils and other collateral damage, fuelled the discovery by Europeans of the Americas, a fact which will certainly be of interest to her audience.
Ariadne pauses, then resumes with renewed passion. Her audience will certainly find other forms of paximadia prepared on other islands – and indeed on the mainland – some of which are even made with inappropriate wheat flour and sweetened and spiced or rich with milk and egg.
‘True paximadia,’ adds Ariadne indignantly, ‘must be made with Cretan barley flour kneaded with Cretan water and leavened by wild yeasts released by fermenting grape-must as it turns itself into Cretan wine. No salt. You may even find paximadia made in America,’ she pauses, glaring dangerously, ‘though these will certainly be covered in sugar and chocolate sprinkles which, as everyone knows, means ninety-year ya-ya will have no teeth.’
Paula, Nancy and I consider this warning with respect. All three of us are grandmothers ourselves, but have a good few years to go before we’re ninety.
The bus leaves the coastal highway and turns inland on a newly finished road running through maize-fields and avocado plantations, crops introduced from the New World and planted, says Ariadne over the intercom, as a result of subsidies from Brussels.
The bus is not in the first flush of youth. The engine labours noisily as the road winds upwards. It is three hours to our destination but, Ariadne promises, this is reduced to two hours on the way back owing to rapidity of descent. Her grandmother, by way of showing us the beauty of the snail, has agreed to prepare bouboutie, a dish that takes its name from the bubbling noise the snails make when cooking. The dish will, of course, be eaten with paximadia and a salad of wild greens that flourish in the olive groves and vineyards, thus delivering all the essential elements of the Cretan diet.
Ya-ya, Ariadne finishes triumphantly, is the only woman left in the village who gathers her own snails and bakes her own paximadia and prepares her own trahana. Snails can be eaten with trahana, the ancient preparation of dried dough not unlike a primitive form of pasta found in the pitoi of Knossos as well as, incidentally, in every supermarket and corner-store in Greece and on the islands, even in Heraklion.
Snails can be eaten with anything you like. There are as many recipes for snails as there are for any other meat – though if you are in a hurry, you can just push them on the fire and eat them with a little vinegar.
‘I am told they only eat them in France with garlic and butter,’ adds Ariadne disapprovingly. ‘This, I think, would not be good.’
Nancy and I enter into an enthusiastic bout of recipe-swapping with Aglaia Kremezi, the only Greek food writer among us. Aglaia’s favourite is sagliara me piperes, snails cooked in olive oil with green peppers and potatoes. Nancy, our Italian expert, makes a case for lumache alla romana, snails cooked as they like them in Rome, in a fresh tomato sauce with anchovies, pepperoncini (fiery little dried peppers) and mint leaves. I, on the other hand, love the little summer snails no bigger than a fingernail that my children and I gathered by the bucketful from dried-out thistle stems when we lived in Andalusia. We cooked them as everyone else did in the valley, in a big pot in a broth flavoured with pennyroyal, black pepper, coriander seed and chilli. Reheated daily, the potful would last us for a month. If you’d cooked them carefully by gently raising the temperature of the broth so the snails didn’t disappear back into their shells with fright, you could nip the little molluscs from their brown-speckled shells with your teeth. Big brown snails similar to those found in Crete are gathered from the rice paddies of Valencia for the traditional paella con caracoles – a dish of such venerable pedigree that it takes its name from the implement in which it’s cooked, a double-handled iron pan of Roman design.
Ariadne is unimpressed.
‘The snails of Crete are mentioned in Homer.’
I stop talking as we lurch towards a hairpin bend, reversing to make the turn. On the non-driver’s side the drop is vertical all the way down to a dried-out riverbed.
‘This place is very good for snails,’ says Ariadne, waving her hand at the lush valley below.
The bus grinds upwards as the vegetation thins. This is goat territory, threaded with paths which stop and start without warning among grey rock patched with lichen and the many-branched flower stems of asphodel, a tall lily with white flowers streaked with crimson and known as the food of the dead, perhaps because it grows enthusiastically on ancient battlefields.
I once lost my way in such a place on another island, Ulysses’ island of Ithaca. I had been wandering in the hills among tall stands of flowering lilies, not long before sunset, following a goat track that stopped without warning at the edge of a precipice sheer to the sea. The sun was already low on the horizon. There was nothing to be gained from retracing my steps, and no way forward. So I stayed where I was, in the lee of a rock among the lilies, fearful of shadows, hoping to pass the hours of darkness in a place of safety. I heard the goat-bells first, and then the herd and herdsman. The path to the village was close at hand and I followed my rescuers, four-footed and two, feeling foolish to have been so fearful. Later I discovered the place was indeed a battleground. There were lilies everywhere and they never lie.
Adriane has been visiting her grandmother’s village every summer since she was a child. After the war was over, few of the survivors returned to the villages and the farming households lost their menfolk.
And this, she continues sadly, means that grapes are left to rot on the vine, olive trees which have borne fruit for more than a thousand years go uncropped, and the snails that grow fat in untended vineyards and olive groves are gathered by workers from Algeria and Morocco, brought in by dealers who export the crop mostly to France, Italy and Spain, but also the gourmet restaurants of New York and Hong Kong and all the other places where the food of the poor becomes a luxury for the rich.
Ariadne has reservations about the conclusions drawn by the Rockefeller scientists whose discoveries we are here to commemorate. It’s only common sense that the Cretan diet was – is – far more than a list of ingredients which, when combined in certain ways, can be measured, quantified and reproduced under laboratory conditions. Even more absurd is the notion that an entire way of life can be packaged up and delivered to supermarket shelves as a ready-meal.
In 1947, the year the Rockefeller scientists came to visit, those who remained, her grandmother among them, were mostly women, children and old folk. The scientists wanted neat and tidy answers, so they asked neat and tidy questions. What they didn’t ask was what really matters: how far you had to walk to fetch water from the well, what you ate or collected along the way when you walked from one village to the other, what happened when the soldiers emptied the store cupboard. Because the questions were all the same, the answers were all the same, which didn’t allow for elaboration or storytelling, as is usual among Greeks, who are natural tellers of tales and very much appreciate the talent in others.
‘Whenever we Cretans throw a party,’ adds Ariadne, ‘there’s always someone with a good joke or story who wants to make themselves more or even less important than they really are, and that’s when you know where the truth is. But the scientists didn’t want to write anything that wasn’t scientific. They wanted facts, and facts don’t fit into stories. You will know what I mean as some of you, I think, are storytellers yourselves.’
‘Absolutely right,’ says Nancy.
Ariadne nods. ‘So what was written down is that the Cretans ate barley bread and olive oil and a little wine and maybe some yoghurt and curds and cheese and perhaps some eggs from the chickens who ate up the scraps.’
No one spoke about the snails, she continues, because all the questions were to do with the foods the scientists understood: pulses, grain foods, vegetables, goat meat, pork, cheese, chicken. Snails were not mentioned, even though they were plentiful enough for people to eat every day and were the only food the German soldiers didn’t steal. Even though what the scientists wrote down about the Cretan diet was by no means the whole story, they went home and prepared charts and discussed how these could be used to prevent clogged arteries and blocked heart-valves.
They didn’t take note, however, of the inconvenient truth that the Cretans were poor and the Americans rich, and that the good health enjoyed under conditions of near-starvation was the diet of necessity. Necessity dictated that the islanders ate only when they were hungry and walked everywhere they went.
If we were to experience the real Cretan diet, we would not be sitting in an air-conditioned bus making a day-trip into the mountains for a gastronomic entertainment specially laid on by the tourist authority. This is something to be borne in mind when considering Ariadne’s grandmother’s delicious dish of snails.
Ariadne clicks off the microphone.
This is quite a speech. Our guide has pulled no punches and her chastened audience falls silent.
‘Bravo,’ says Nancy quietly.
By now we are deep in the mountains. On either side are steep slopes blanketed with pink-blossomed rock roses, little yellow-faced bee orchids, wild hyacinths of a singing blue. The carpet of wild flowers gives way to steep terracing with untended olive trees and abandoned vineyards. The only sign of human habitation is a few rough stone shelters dotted among the terraces.
Before we reach our destination, Ariadne decides we should learn a little of her grandmother’s life and times. The name by which she is known is Kiria Elena. Kiria and Kirios are courtesy titles accorded by children to their elders, and to teachers and doctors and anyone else who merits respect.
‘Now I will tell you a little story about my grandmother, Kiria Elena.’
In the old days, she continues, her grandmother told her that life was very strict and there was little time or opportunity for courting, but there were dances at Christmas and festivals at midsummer when young people could walk together to the sanctuary of the Virgin on the headland and eat honey cake and throw flowers into the sea. The flowers were a tradition on the islands, a way that the living could remember the dead and call on their blessing when needed. The outing was an opportunity for courting, and if it should so happen that Whitsun was celebrated before Easter – a baby on the way before the wedding – the Virgin took care that no one carried the blame.
On an island such as this, Ariadne continues, there is much to remember and stories to remember them by. As a young girl, Kiria Elena loved dancing, so she went barefoot all through the winter to save her shoes for the dance. Her young man was a wonderful dancer, the best, as well as handsome and kind and all things a young girl looks for in the man of her dreams. The two fell in love and were married and had a short time for happiness and just enough time for a little daughter to be born, Ariadne’s mother and Kiria Elena’s only child. And then came the war and the young father, Ariadne’s grandfather, was killed in the fighting in the hills.
His companions brought the husband’s boots back to the village so his wife would know for certain she was widowed. The boots – calf-high and made of polished black leather cut from a single piece – were stitched to order by the cobbler for every boy when he became a man, with the wearer’s initials woven into the pattern so everyone would know they were his. And after they brought back the boots and Kiria Elena knew she was a widow, she never wanted to marry again even though she was still pretty and young.
When her daughter, Ariadne’s mother, left the village as soon as she was old enough to take work on the coast, she found herself a husband, Ariadne’s father. And because she herself had grown up in the village, she sent Ariadne and her sister to stay with their grandmother in the holidays all through the summer.
Then one year, when it was the end of summer, just before Ariadne was off to Athens to study at university, her grandmother brought out the very same boots from the locked chest where she kept her treasures, and they fitted her granddaughter as perfectly as Cinderella’s slippers, even though they were made for a man and moulded exactly to the shape of his foot.
Inviting admiration, Ariadne stretches out a booted foot shod in soft black leather, stitched and moulded to the calf close as a glove.
‘See? I’m wearing them now, as I always do whenever I visit Kiria Elena. Ya-ya is a strong woman who had to work and look after her family without a man, and so am I. She’s proud that I earn my own living and make my own choices. Had she been born in another time, my grandmother would have thought it not right that only sons were given boots, and she would have demanded that the cobbler make her boots of her own. So now, whenever I come to visit, I wear the boots.’
She pauses thoughtfully. ‘Although ya-ya pretends she doesn’t notice, I know she’s pleased. She knows that, even though I never met him, my grandfather who is no longer with us is not forgotten.’
The coach slows and turns down a dirt track that runs along the side of a river until it opens out into a wide valley. Overlooking the valley, tucked beneath a steep cliff, is a cluster of stone-built houses rising to a blue-domed basilica. Some look abandoned and the streets are deserted in the midday sun.
We come to a halt in a flurry of dust and a scattering of chickens beside a gate set in a dry-stone wall topped by a prickly cactus hedge. Beyond the gate are a yard and a vine-covered terrace shading a neat single-storey dwelling with a tiled roof. Rusty olive-oil tins planted with scarlet geraniums line the terrace, and preparations for the midday meal are evident from a pile of brushwood and a trestle table covered with a white cloth set ready in the shade.
At the gate waiting to greet us is Ariadne’s grandmother, Kiria Elena. She has the same large eyes and aquiline nose as her granddaughter, but her dark hair, though thick and lustrous, is streaked with silver and plaited around her head. Her face, at a distance, seems extraordinarily unlined and her eyes are bright blue rather than dark, as is sometimes the way on the islands.
Ariadne is first to descend from the bus, running up the steps and into her grandmother’s open arms. As soon as we are all assembled from the bus, Ariadne’s face is bright with happiness as she introduces her guests to her grandmother one by one.
‘Kiria Elena wishes me to tell you please to forgive her lack of English. She bids you kalimera, you are welcome. As you will notice, there are friends and neighbours come to join the party. We Cretans can never resist a party.’
Behind, comfortably ensconced at the table in confirmation of her words, is a trio of even more elderly folks who, judging from the lined and weathered faces turned to inspect us, might well be the centenarians we have been discussing at the conference.
Ariadne greets each of the onlookers by name with an enthusiastic embrace.
‘As you can see, we are all family. I think I was a little spoilt when I was a girl as I always wanted my own way. If ya-ya wouldn’t let me milk the goat in case she kicked over the bucket, or climb the ladder to collect the olives for fear I might fall, all I had to do was run away to Kirios Nikos or Kiria Lydia or Kirios Alexis and they’d let me do whatever I wanted.’
As she speaks, her eyes light up with happiness.
‘I can tell you that Kirios Nikos showed me how to milk the goat without squeezing too hard on the teat so she didn’t kick over the bucket, and Kiria Lydia taught me how to tell which herbs were good for medicine, and Kirios Alexis carried me on his shoulders to help with the olive harvest. Now, whenever I return, there’s always a gathering and I’m still the little girl who wants her own way.’
There is much laughter at the translation, and Kirios Nikos asks a question.
‘Kirios Nikos wants to know if I remember to drink a spoonful of olive oil every day and always add a little ouzo to the water in my glass to make it safe, just as he taught me.’
‘And do you?’ asks Nancy.
‘Of course. I always do what Kirios Nikos tells me.’
This statement, when translated for the audience, is greeted with gales of affectionate laughter.
Ariadne’s attention now turns to a couple of firmly lidded plastic buckets set in the shade beside the water pump. When one of the lids is lifted, a mass of enquiring eyes on stalks attached to greeny-yellow bodies protruding from glistening brown shells surge towards the light.
The lid is swiftly replaced at a word from Kiria Elena.
Her grandmother is the authority here, and she is not yet ready to embark on snail preparation. First we are to follow our hostess to the gathering grounds in the vineyards to see what we can find.
Paula and Nancy are already on their feet and eager for the chase, even though Ariadne warns us that we are late in the day for gathering and the molluscs will be hard to find. Snails are most easily picked early in the morning, just before sunrise, when they come out of their hiding places and climb to the topmost tip of the vines to drink the dew.
I wait behind for Aglaia to finish a conversation with Kirios Nikolai on the edible greens to be found in the olive groves in this particular part of the island. Gatherers need to know the lie of the land before setting off on the hunt, as I knew from my time with my young family in Andalusia, where the children learned from their school friends how to gather edible leaves and shoots along the roadside.
In our valley, field mushrooms were found in autumn in the burnt patches left by flash-fires, leaving room for the tender green shoots of asparagus that appeared in spring. In damp corners under the cork oaks that surrounded our house, drifts of snowy-blossomed wild garlic were the first sign that summer was on its way. And in the dry pastures by the sea, we would gather the young rosettes of tall yellow thistles to add to the winter pot, and look for pennyroyal to dry for a medicinal tea, the cure for a summer cold.
Nevertheless, I know from experience on other islands – and in the markets in Athens and Thessaloniki on the mainland – that the Greeks are the plant experts of the Mediterranean littoral. City-dwellers as well as country people head for the hills at weekends in spring and after the first rains of autumn with their knives and gathering baskets.
Aglaia inspects the carpet of wild flowers beneath the olive trees with professional expertise. Horta, wild greens, are seasonal and local. Rarest and most prized are the juicy buds of the wild artichoke and the tulip-like bulbs of the tassel hyacinth, volvi. Commonest of all – and here in quantity, though too well grown to be worth the gathering – are sow thistle, field poppy, wild fennel and dandelion.
‘Greeks all love their horta almost as much as they love to tell stories. There are many references to wild foods in the writings of our poets and playwrights. We even use the same names for medicinal plants as our ancestors did.’
She stoops to pluck a hank of feathery green stuff from a tangle of leaves. ‘Smell this.’ I crush the sprig in my fingers and lift it to my nose.
‘Dill?’
‘Yes. We call it anito. It’s what we use for salads and in our dolmades, stuffed vine leaves. It’s stronger than fennel, maratho, which is what we use to flavour the brine for the olives.’
Dried fennel stalks are also used in Spain, I add, to pickle unripened green olives, though I’m aware that Greek olives are only pickled when ripe.
Aglaia nods, then bends down to pluck a slender plant with a little seed-head and leaves all the way up the stalk. ‘This is vlita – what botanists call amaranth. We like them cooked a little – not too much – and dressed with ladolemono, oil and lemon. Sometimes this is all I want to eat in the middle of the day in summer, with maybe a piece of fresh cheese and some good bread from a wood-fired oven and perhaps a slice of ripe tomato with oregano. Or as hortapita, a pie we bake for Easter, or in a stuffing for little fried pastries. Vlita is very important on the islands, where they keep the old traditions alive. On the mainland, in the villages where snow falls in winter and the ground is still frozen in spring and there are no horta for the Easter pies, they dry bunches of vlita and hang them in the cellar and soak them when they need them, so they can have fresh greens all year round.’
The difference between Greek and Turkish cooking, Aglaia continues, is very simple. Turkish cooks use spices to flavour their food and Greeks use herbs. And not just any herbs – you won’t find pre-blended herbes de Provence sold in Greek supermarkets as you do in France or Britain or America – you must choose the right one for the dish. Except for oregano, which grows wild on Greek hillsides and is used as a flavouring for almost everything. Mint is the herb to use in a crisp vegetable fritter made with eggs, thyme is the essential flavouring for lamb, while the herb most compatible with Cretan snails is rosemary.
Aglaia and I are slow to reach the gathering grounds, and when we do, we find Nancy and Paula sitting together on a rock in the shade of an olive tree, discussing the relative merits of Greek and Italian olive oil. Olive oil is an emotionally charged subject and the discussion is getting heated.
The others – those who have accepted the invitation to take a stroll – are already straggling back home behind Kyria Elena. Our own vineyard pickings are thin. The snails are hiding from the midday sun beneath the thick canopy of vine leaves, or taking shelter in crevasses among the twisted roots. When Aglaia and I show Ariadne the few brown-speckled shells we have managed to winkle from the hiding places, our meagre offerings are greeted with a smile.
‘I think we would all go hungry if ya-ya hadn’t already gathered more than enough to feed us all. And if this was all we had to offer, ya-ya would certainly scold us and send us back for more.’
On our return, there is work to be done rinsing and scrubbing the bucketfuls of delicately patterned brown and cream shells with their slippery little occupants.
Nancy and I are allotted snail-scrubbing, a task made easier since the snails have already cleaned themselves after a week of starvation rations and are speckled with little black scraps, a sign that they’ve already evacuated their diminutive digestions. Rejected debris, the scraps that litter the shells, are stored at the end of the body, deep inside the shell.
Snails are voracious feeders, capable of working their way through almost anything green and juicy, toxic or not, leaving bite-marks on fungi and heaving up a bucket lid if not firmly weighted down with stones, as I know well from my own experience of snail-gathering, though I’m keeping this to myself.
As we all work together, Ariadne talks quietly of life in the village with her grandmother when she and her sister came every summer for as long as she can remember. As the eldest, it was Ariadne who helped her grandmother with the younger girl and negotiated the transition from the easy living of the coast to the realities of life without plumbing or running water or the convenience of a modern kitchen or even access to a supermarket – an apprenticeship that forged a strong bond between the two, not least because Ariadne was always eager to learn.
‘I was a curious child and asked questions all the time, though ya-ya didn’t seem to mind. All Greeks are curious as cats. In ordinary life, everyone wants to know everything about everyone so they can make it into a story. It doesn’t matter what it is – who’s courting who, or just something like what people ate for dinner. Ya-ya learned as I did, from watching and learning. She didn’t need a book to tell her how to cook snails or prepare trahana or bake paximadia or know when the olives are ready for gathering.’
The snails are nearly ready for the pot. Ariadne pushes her hand into the bucket, disturbing the forest of semi-transparent bodies and pinhead eyes, allowing the shells to trickle between her fingers like worry beads. Then she fills the bucket with water from the well, and the little black scraps float to the surface.
‘See this? This is what must be rinsed away in fresh water every day till there’s no more left. I always loved to do this when I was a child.’
The snails are ready for salting, the final stage before they’re judged ready for the pot.
The shining brown shells froth white under showers of salt. Ariadne rinses off the foam in a bucket set under the pump, hands working to free the sticky covering. Half a dozen more saltings and sluicings are required before the snails are declared ready for cooking.
Meanwhile a fire has been lit with the brushwood and a boiling pot set to simmer.
‘I hope everyone is hungry. Ya-ya thanks you for your patience. She knows Americans like fast food and our snails are very slow. But I tell her you are special Americans who are happy to wait.’
This statement, when translated for those who speak only Greek, is greeted with shouts of laughter.
Kiria Elena inspects the buckets, gives the shells a final scrub under the pump and tips the snails into the boiling pot with a loud whoosh and a clatter.
Ariadne translates her grandmother’s instructions.
‘Kiria Elena says to tell you that when the pot boils, the froth must be skimmed with a branch of rosemary. This must be done three times until there’s no more froth. And then the snails are clean and ready for the bouboutie, which, as I think you will remember, is the noise the shells make when you stir them into the sauce. Kiria Elena makes the best bouboutie in sauce you will ever taste.’
The ingredients for the sauce – big greenish-red tomatoes chopped into juicy chunks, fat purple onions sliced and sprinkled with salt – are left to simmer gently with olive oil and wine in a shallow raw-iron pan, much like that used for a Spanish paella, set over the coals in place of the snail-pot.
Under the fig tree, the trestle table is set ready with bowls and glasses, wine in jugs, and water fetched from the stream in a pithoi, the tall, pointy-based earthenware jar which is also used to store oil or wine, which has been left to cool in the shade. There is, too, a basket of the barley bread, paximadia, without which a meal cannot be complete, a bowl of trahana me tiri, tiny scraps of the pasta-like dough cooked in soured milk and finished with a handful of crumbled white cheese, and an earthenware serving dish piled with a steaming heap of Aglaia’s favourite salad, vlita ladolemono.
By now the snails have been stirred into their sauce and are clicking merrily against the sides of the pot. Ariadne lifts the lid and inhales the fragrance, releasing puffs of scented steam. Picking up one of the shells between thumb and forefinger, she loosens its occupant with a quick twist of a cactus thorn, pops it into her mouth and chews appreciatively.
The snails are ready and Kiria Elena takes over, providing each bowl with a handful of crushed barley-rusk and topping it with a ladleful of the shiny brown shells slicked with olive oil and scarlet juice.
We all take our places at the table to receive our bowls and thorns, some of us more cautiously than others. The occupants of the slippery shells, once prised loose, are juicy and chewy and taste deliciously of their rich red sauce. Talk continues as the bowls are slowly emptied – no one can eat snails in a hurry – as Kiria Elena presides over the feast and Ariadne refills glasses with water and wine.
Once the debris has been cleared from the table – bowls scooped out with a spoonful of trahana – there are ripe green figs, the first of the season plucked straight from the tree, a creamy fresh cheese to eat with walnuts and honey, and little cups of sweet black Greek coffee brewed over the fire.
Conversation and laughter flow around the excellence of the food, the delights of home-pressed wine, the pleasure of the day, the beauty of the countryside, happiness to be found in good fellowship and a final round of toasts drunk in little glasses of ouzo.
Farewells completed, sleepy and replete with good food and wine, we scarcely notice the rapidity of descent on the homeward journey – a blessing in disguise, considering that our driver is in a hurry to return to his family before nightfall and deliver us to our beds.
The following day, free to wander on the last day of the conference with my sketchbook among the ruins of Knossos, I notice the tasselled heads of wild barley among the grasses that have found a foothold in the tumbled stones. There is, too, among the silvery tufts of wild olive and the twisted roots of a grapevine, a scattering of snail shells.
Retreating to the cool of the marble-floored museum among plaster copies of artefacts too valuable to be left unguarded and glass cases containing four-thousand-year-old domestic implements considered of no commercial value, I join a group of schoolchildren, excited and curious, bubbling like yeast among the tourists.
To the island’s children, the utensils on display are the stuff of everyday living, their uses known and understood. No need of labels to explain that the stack of earthenware jars with pointed bases and narrow mouths, pithoi, are used for storing olive oil and wine, or that the glazed pottery bowls restored from fragments can be warmed on a charcoal fire when rennetting milk for cheese, or are convenient for kneading flour with water before setting dough to rise, or salting snails as Kiria Elena prepared them for the pot.
I settle down to paint in the shade of a bay tree, a soothing patch of green. Midday is hotter than Hades among these barren stones, and my paint dries on the paper as soon as I lift the brush. From these same stones rose sun-struck Icarus, borne upwards on eagle feathers until Apollo took offence and singed his wings.
Legends such as this are ten a penny among the islanders, one story clipped to the other like links on a chain. The mountain people of Crete, Ariadne’s ancestors, are an ancient race, older even than the palace-builders of Knossos. They were here long before the mainland Greeks made the maze where Theseus fought the Minotaur. They were still here when the marble halls were swallowed up by the sea.
Nature was generous to the wanderers who first set foot on her shores. Nomads from the steppes of Asia who crossed an unknown sea in fragile leather coracles with their flocks and herds found themselves in paradise. There were nuts and fruits free for the gathering – wild almond and pear trees, grapevines fertilised by wild bees, olive trees with bitter little fruits that could be pressed for oil. Among the grasses on which they pastured their flocks were emmer wheat and barley. Over the centuries they learned to cultivate the grain and plant vineyards and olive groves on man-made terraces carved from the hillsides.
The changes that came were rapid and final, a story told in abandoned terracings, untended vineyards and uncropped pastures, sucking the life from mountain villages where only the old remain, their usefulness outgrown, their knowledge of no more value than a slick of olive juice scraped from a pithoi dragged from the depths of the seabed.
The schoolchildren wandering round the museum’s exhibits have no appetite for a diet of barley bread and snails, and even less desire to gather cash-crops in the olive groves. Not even Ariadne would want to live as her grandmother lives, still less those of us who eat our fill of whatever we like whenever we want and sleep and eat in warmth and comfort in centrally heated homes, work in air-conditioned offices and travel everywhere in cars. Nor, for that matter, would the chemists and nutritionists gathered together in a conference hotel to evaluate the findings of the Seven Countries Study after fifty years of taking notes and making charts. As for the food writers among us – I speak for myself but have no doubt the same is true of Paula, Nancy and Aglaia – there’s only so much talk of monounsaturates and antioxidants a person can take.
Yesterday, on our journey back down the hill from the village, I began to wonder what Ariadne herself had learned from our expedition into the mountains, whether she thought her little group of volunteers had come to a better understanding of the famous Cretan Diet they were assembled to discuss.
Her answer is simple and direct. ‘I live in the city. Of course I read the magazines and newspapers that tell us to eat so much of this and not so much of that because the chemists have done the science. But I have always known that ya-ya cooks good food for the happiness it brings and the pride she takes in what she does.’
Kiria Elena’s only regret, her granddaughter continues, is that there are no young people left in the villages to learn from the old folks to take pleasure in what’s set on the table, be respectful of what comes from the earth and use it in its proper season.
‘Ya-ya never went to school, but she’s wiser than a whole library full of books. Perhaps your experts don’t understand this important truth. Perhaps they don’t want to see what’s right under their noses.’
BOUBOUTIE (SNAILS BUBBLED IN BROTH)
The name of this venerable preparation is onomatopoeic and derived, some say, from the tap-tap of the shells as they bubble about in the pot. Others maintain it derives from the foam the molluscs produce when scrubbed with salt. Whatever the truth, once the little fellows have undergone their preliminary bubbling, you are free to finish them, shelled or unshelled, in whatever way you would cook any other meat. Here they’re finished in their shells with tomato and chilli flavoured with sage.
Serves 4–6
1 kg large live snails (all land-snails are edible)
sea or kosher or dishwasher salt (plenty)
For the sauce
4–5 tablespoons olive oil
1 medium onion, peeled and diced
3–4 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed
1 sprig sage
2–3 bay leaves
1 generous glass red wine
1 tablespoon ouzo or raki
1 kg ripe tomatoes, skinned and chopped, or tinned
2–3 dried chillies, crushed
salt
To prepare live snails, you may either buy them ready starved, or keep them in a large lidded bucket (with breathing holes) for 3–4 days to a week, rinsing off the gunge every day. The less they eat, the less gunge they produce. There are those who feed them with aromatic herbs or lettuce leaves, and others who sprinkle them with bran as a final meal. I do none of these things.
Once starved and rinsed, scrub the snails under running water with rough salt, rinsing off the baba – the white gloop they exude when subjected to such unkindness. Continue with the salting and rinsing until there’s no more gloop.
Transfer the clean snails to a large pot with enough plain water to cover, then bring gradually to the boil so that the snails don’t get scared and shrink right back into their shells but think it’s just a shower of summer rain. Once the water boils, skim off the foam that rises, turn down the heat, and simmer for 10–20 minutes depending on the size of the snails, then drain.
The snails are now ready for their sauce. You may if you wish remove them from their shells and nip off the little black cloaca at the end. Or you can omit this step and have the pleasure of sucking the sauce off the shells and winkling the molluscs from their shelter with a sharp instrument – a small bendable fork with the middle tine bent inwards, a toothpick, or a cactus prickle.
To prepare the sauce, warm the oil gently in a shallow pan and add the onion and garlic. Fry for a moment. Add the sage sprig, bay leaves, wine and ouzo or raki, and bring to the boil to evaporate the alcohol. Stir in the tomatoes and chilli and leave to bubble uncovered for 20–30 minutes until you have a rich thick sauce. Allow to cool a little before you stir in the snails, adding enough water to dilute the sauce to a depth at which all the shells are covered. Bring to the boil again, turn down the heat, cover loosely with a lid and simmer for 15–20 minutes until the snails are well flavoured and the sauce reduced to its previous thickness. Taste and add salt.
This dish will keep hot without spoiling. Ladle on to crumbled paximadia or bread rolls dried and browned in the oven.
TRAHANA ME MELITZANES (PASTA SHREDS WITH AUBERGINES AND ONION)
Scraps of trahana, a primitive little hand-made pasta, were found in the storage jars at the palace of Knossos. Travellers never leave their island without it: trahana, it’s fair to suppose, provisioned Agamemnon’s ships as they sailed to Troy to recapture runaway Helen. The pasta can be made with any milled or crushed grain, which is formed into a dough using any liquid from milk and water to eggs to yoghurt – it’s simply a way of combining a grain food with a protein source for storage. The alternative grain to trahana is bulgar wheat, which works with the same accompaniments and can be eaten savoury or sweet.
Serves 4–6
500 g strong bread flour (unbleached stoneground is perfect)
1 teaspoon salt
2 large eggs, beaten
100 g plain yoghurt
For the sauce
2 large firm aubergines, sliced into thick chips
100 ml olive oil
2 large onions, peeled and sliced vertically
2 garlic cloves, peeled and chopped
1 tablespoon tomato purée
500 ml stock or water
salt and pepper
Prepare the trahana first. In a large bowl, mix the flour with the salt, then slowly work in the eggs and yoghurt with your hand until you have a few pieces of very stiff dough. If you need more liquid, add a little water. If the mixture is too soft, add more flour. Leave the dough, covered with a cloth, to rest and dry out a little – overnight in a warm kitchen or in summer sunshine on a dry day.
Soak the aubergine chips in salted water for half an hour, drain thoroughly and squeeze dry (this is only necessary if the aubergines are a little elderly).
Heat the olive oil in a large frying pan and fry the onions and garlic gently, sprinkled with a little salt, until soft and golden – allow 10 minutes. Push the onion and garlic aside, add the aubergine and continue to fry gently, turning the pieces in the hot oil until golden and soft. Add the tomato purée mixed with the stock or water, bring to the boil and cook for another 5 minutes to blend into a thickish sauce. Taste and season.
Grate the trahana straight into the hot sauce and simmer, stirring to avoid sticking, for 5 minutes or so until the little shreds are cooked and nearly all the liquid has been absorbed. Ladle into bowls and serve without delay.
Notes: To dry trahana for storage, leave out the salt when preparing. Grate the dough on to a clean cloth over a roomy tray, allowing the gratings to fall loosely in a single layer like grains of wheat or barley. Leave to dry out on the cloth for 2–3 days in a warm dry kitchen, tossing them lightly every now and then to keep the pieces separate and evenly dehydrated until they’re as hard as catapult pellets. Thereafter they can be stored in an airtight jar more or less for ever.
To prepare as a breakfast dish, treat as rolled or porridge oats: bring equal amounts of milk and water to the boil and stir in a handful of trahana per half-litre of liquid. Simmer for 3 minutes or so, until all the liquid has been absorbed. Eat with honey and yoghurt, or with grated cheese for supper.
To prepare as a pilau or risotto, treat as you would round rice: fry in a little olive oil with your chosen flavourings, then add the cooking liquid and simmer until soft (10 minutes, no more).
VLITA LADOLEMONO (SPRING SHOOTS WITH OIL AND LEMON)
Amaranth – a member of the spinach family that grows wild on Mediterranean hillsides – has been brought into cultivation for the sake of its leaves, seeds and tender young shoots since classical times. Among other wild or semi-cultivated shoots prepared as cooked salads are wild asparagus (bitter Asparagus acutifolius as well as the milder-flavoured cultivar, A. officinalis), thistle rosettes, young dandelion, chicory, black bryony (shoots only – the berries are toxic), malva, wild spinach and hop shoots.
Serves 4
1 kg amaranth shoots or thin green asparagus
For the ladolemono dressing
150 ml olive oil
juice of 1 lemon
Trim the shoots – some of them are both woody and sandy – and rinse thoroughly. Steam or cook in boiling salted water until just tender – 3–4 minutes, just as you would cultivated asparagus – and drain immediately in a colander under a splash of cold water to stop the cooking process. Transfer to a serving dish.
Prepare the oil and lemon dressing. Mix the olive oil in a jug with enough lemon juice to please your palate – it all depends on the sweetness of the oil and the bitterness of the greens. Dress the salad or hand the jug round separately, as you wish. Salt or pepper is not necessary.
MELOPITTA (CRETAN HONEY CAKE)
Honey cakes are baked to give comfort in sorrow at funerals, and for joy and happiness at weddings, Easter and Christmas.
Serves at least 12
350 g plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
350 g ground almonds
6 eggs, separated
350 g light olive oil
175 g honey
juice and grated zest of 3 oranges
1 tablespoon flaked almonds
To finish
175 g honey
4 tablespoons water
1 tablespoon orange-flower water (optional)
1–2 curls finely pared orange peel
1 small cinnamon stick
Preheat the oven to 180ºC/Gas 4 and oil a 20 cm square baking tin or similar.
Sift the flour with the baking powder and cinnamon and mix in the ground almonds. Whisk the egg yolks with the oil and honey until light and fluffy. Fold the egg-yolk mixture into the flour, alternating with the orange juice – the mixture should be soft but not too runny. Stir in the orange zest. Whisk the egg whites until stiff and fold them in.
Pour the mixture into the prepared tin and sprinkle the almonds over the top. Bake for about an hour, until the cake is well browned, shrunk from the sides of the tin and the top is firm to the touch. Check after 40 minutes and cover the cake with foil if the top looks like burning.
Meanwhile, make the syrup. In a small pan, simmer the honey, water, orange-flower water (if using), orange peel and cinnamon for 3–4 minutes. Strain and pour over the cake when it comes out of the oven.
To serve, cut into neat little squares and serve with more honey and Greek yoghurt drained overnight until thick enough to hold the shape of a spoon.
You may, if you wish, wrap the squares up neatly as little parcels in greaseproof paper for your guests to carry away as sweet memories when they leave. This is traditional and serves much the same purpose as the goodie-bags handed out to children at the end of a party.