THE GREEK CYPRIOTES who used to live in the village of Bellapais had a reputation as the laziest folk on the island. And with good reason, since the infamous Tree of Idleness cast its shadow over the village square and the dusty quadrant in front of Dmitri’s café. Beneath its branches mustachioed old men, clad in the black baggy trousers that were once the uniform all over the eastern Mediterranean, passed long and tranquil hours sipping thick, heavily sweetened coffee or anise-flavored ouzo, nibbling on olives or bits of the local goat’s milk cheese, playing endless games of backgammon, or trictrac as they called it, and keeping an eye on village comings and goings. Unlike the women of the village, who kept up a constant chatter as they went about their work (no idleness for them), the old men were often silent, contemplative, deep into what Lawrence Durrell supposed to be a Moslem quality called kayf, in his words, “a fathomless repose of the will.”

Bellapais was the village Durrell wrote about in Bitter Lemons. We lived there in the early 1970s, long after Durrell had left, in a happy lull between two periods of political struggle on the island. What kind of tree it was that cast its invidious shade over the old men I no longer even remember—walnut perhaps, since walnuts encourage indolence, or so they say. In tribute to the tree’s powers, the new and sparkling café-restaurant that opened opposite Dmitri’s shortly after we arrived in the village was also called the Tree of Idleness, and that was appropriate, too, since it was on the terrace of the Tree of Idleness Café that we were introduced to an even more seductive form of indolence, the meze table.

The café quickly became famous island-wide for the extent and variety of its meze, or mezedakia as the Greeks say, and we became frequent and enthusiastic customers. Entire Sunday afternoons were idled away over the meze table while houseguests came and went from Kyrenia, Beirut, and farther afield and the children wandered in for a bite of this or a nibble of that between the games they played—Saracens and Crusaders instead of cowboys and Indians.

The food came on white china saucers and oval platters, and the dishes piled up in the center of the table as the afternoon wore on. There would always be hummus, pureed chickpeas or garbanzos mixed with sesame paste, and baba ghanouj or melitzanosalata, charcoal-roasted eggplant pureed with garlic and olive oil, along with wedges of flat pita bread for dipping. There were always olives, both shiny plump black ones and little bitter green ones flavored with coriander, and chunks of that tangy, salty sheep’s milk feta cheese that seems to have been created solely because it goes so well with black olives. These were the sine qua nons of the meze table. And then, depending on the season, there would be grape leaves, stuffed with meat and served hot or stuffed with rice and currants and served cold. And since we were only 15 minutes from the sea, there would almost always be something fishy, if only salted anchovies or canned sardines or rosy-colored taramosalata, made with salted cod’s roe. But if the fishing had been good lately, there might also be a little plate of fried whitebait or a pile of sweet red mullet no more than five or six inches long or chunks of octopus braised in red wine with bay leaves and cinnamon—as well as lamb sausages flavored with grains of coriander, deep-fried and melting haloumi cheese, fresh radishes and scallions and creamy, garlic-scented yogurt to dip them in, fat fasoulia beans dressed with rich, dark green Cypriote olive oil and juice from lemons grown in the orchards below the village. And so on till the afternoon had magically melted away, till twilight began to creep along the craggy peaks above the village, till the last honey touch of sun mellowed the old Crusader-built walls around the abbey church. Then kayf, whether Moslem or not, really did set in, the contemplation, Durrell says, that comes of silence and ease.

What exactly is a meze? Like so many ideas about food, a meze is vastly different depending on where you are and whom you’re with and what you’re planning to do with the day. In its simplest form it might be like what the old men had at Dmitri’s, a few black and green home-cured olives on a plate with a chunk of sheep’s milk cheese and a little olive oil sprinkled over it. Add slices of cucumber and quarters of dark red sweet tomatoes, dressed with a few grains of sea salt, perhaps some pickled green peppers or beet-dyed red turnips, and you start to have something worth talking about. Add more dishes, especially freshly cooked dishes, and you begin to approach a spread like that at the Tree of Idleness with which to while away a Sunday afternoon.

The elements of the meze table are part of a category I’ve called “the small dishes of the Mediterranean,” a panoply of little dishes that are eaten informally and without a great deal of ceremony, whether meze in the eastern Mediterranean, tapas in Spain, antipasti in Italy, or the variety of merendas and casse-croûtes and snacks that are taken between meals all over the region.

Meze may have evolved, as Turks like to claim, to accompany their favorite alcoholic drink, raki, an anise-flavored distilled spirit that, like Greek ouzo, Arab arak, and Provençal pastis, all of which it resembles, turns cloudy when mixed with ice or water. If the Turks are right, then meze’s closest cousin around the Mediterranean is surely Spanish tapas, which seem devised specifically to encourage drinkers and revive flagging spirits or at least to keep them going till a proper meal can be served.

Tapas, strictly speaking, are served only in a bar, never in a restaurant, and even more properly eaten only while actually standing up at the bar, one foot resting on the brass rail. But that custom is changing, and even in deeply traditional Andalusia, where some suspect the custom began, you’ll find tapas served at restaurant tables these days. The nature of the fare is changing, too. No longer will you find the things that were served free or for a couple of pesetas with a well-chilled fino or a late-night coñac in the tasca bars where the bullfighters used to hang out around the Plaza Santa Ana in Madrid, things like little cubes of coagulated lamb’s blood speared with toothpicks, or percebes, a strange kind of goose barnacle that looks like miniature elephants’ toes—tastes like them, too, some would say. But there are still chunks of well-aged queso manchego or sheep’s milk cheese, wedges of tortilla, the Spanish potato and onion omelet, and slices of jamón serrano, hand-cut from hams that hang over the bar with a little plastic cup beneath them to catch the dripping juices. In season you might get gambas al ajillo, tiny shrimps roasted in olive oil with garlic and chilies and presented in the terra-cotta dishes in which they were cooked, or in the springtime chanquetes, horrifyingly expensive baby eels, no more than an inch or two long and given a similar treatment. And there are always crackling fresh salted almonds, whose flavor is so complementary to the nutty taste of chilled fino sherry, and as with meze there are always olives, big fat green ones called gordales often stuffed with an almond or a bit of salted anchovy.

In Italy the “small dishes” are almost always served at the table, as antipasti to begin a meal. An antipasto course (the name means “before the meal,” not before the pasta) is by no means invariably included in a meal; rather it indicates that the courses that follow will border on elegance or at least on showy presentation. Unlike tapas and meze, antipasti are not particularly connected with bars and drinking, although of course, like every part of an Italian meal, they are served with the appropriate wine. This is really restaurant food and rarely part of family dining except on special feast days or to impress an honored guest. In that way antipasti are more like what the French call an amuse-gueule or an hors d’oeuvre (literally, “outside the work”), a little something to stimulate the appetite for the real food that will follow. In an Italian country restaurant the antipasto might be a platter of local salumi, all sorts of cured hams and sausages flavored with garlic or the seeds of wild fennel; there might also be a few crostini, little bread crusts topped with a mash of chicken livers and capers or with fresh ripe tomatoes minced and sprinkled with basil and salt.

Sometimes vegetables, especially fresh ones just coming into season, will star in an antipasto. They might be served raw, as in a salad like puntarelle, chicory shoots dressed with an anchovy-garlic sauce that are treasured in Rome in late winter and early spring, or they might be cooked—the first wild mushrooms of the season are often simply grilled and presented as an antipasto. Raw or cooked, a singular presentation like this carries a clear message: “This is so special it is to be savored and cherished on its own, undistracted by anything else.” An admirable attitude and one we would do well to adopt.

Provençal hors d’oeuvres and crudités are similar to Italian antipasti—a platter napped with slices of rosy pink and dark red sausages, for instance, alternating with some of the spectacular early vegetables cooks in the region dote on—tiny artichokes, fennel, and broad beans to be eaten raw, or barely steamed haricots verts, the most delicious of all green beans. Or the feature might be the startling goodness of those big, deeply ridged Provençal tomatoes, thickly sliced and eaten with wedges of crusty bread and salty local jambon or with aïoli, that garlic lovers’ died-and-gone-to-heaven sauce of mounted egg yolks and olive oil and cloves and cloves and cloves of garlic.

Of all these presentations, the most spectacular is surely the Italian pinzimonio, a cornucopia of the earliest spring vegetables, either raw or barely blanched: baby onions, tender little carrots, tiny violet artichokes, pencil-thin wild asparagus, young lettuces, cucumbers, fennel. These are served with a simple glass cruet of the finest olive oil of that year, perhaps still with the slight throat-catching edge of bitterness that denotes oil of the highest quality, along with salt and pepper—nothing more. Each diner pours a puddle of golden-green oil in the center of the plate, adds judicious amounts of salt and pepper, scrambles them with a fork to mix, and then happily dips the vegetables, one by one, and consumes them out of hand.

Outside of restaurant kitchens, few cooks these days are both willing and able to produce a full-blown meze like the one at the Tree of Idleness or a succession of tapas like those still served in bars and cafés throughout Spain. But the idea behind these small dishes—to produce something quick and tasty out of a lively and informal attitude toward eating—is a good one, and for that reason I have also included in this chapter recipes for salads and egg dishes that seem to fit the job description well.

Many of the recipes here can be served singly or in a small group of two or at most three to keep guests happy with a bottle of wine while the cook gets on with the rest of the meal. Others can form the basis of a meal, either as a main course or as a garnish for something more substantial. Most of these small dishes are based on vegetables, beans, or grains; where meat is used, it is as a flavor adjunct. In the midst of the bustle of modern life, this is one way to get in those multiple servings of fresh vegetables that we are told should be our goal. A couple of small vegetable dishes to start, a substantial green salad in the middle, and a finish of fresh fruit should keep even the most confirmed carnivore happy and healthy and perhaps even wise. And whether the small dishes come at the start or in the middle of the meal, be sure there’s always plenty of good, crusty bread served with them.

Keep in mind too that various savory pies (see here)—whether pizza, Catalan cocas, or the spinach-and-cheese-stuffed tarts of the eastern Mediterranean—can make appealing small dishes or first courses, as do many of the poultry or meat dishes (see here) served in small portions. Where it’s appropriate, I have made suggestions about when and how to serve. Anyone who wants to attempt a full-scale mezedakia should keep in mind that many dishes can be prepared ahead of time and indeed benefit from it.