A few nights ago, before falling asleep, I finished up the wordy crumbs of Small Fires: An Epic In The Kitchen by Rebecca May Johnson. I had slowly slowly slowly been working my way through this book - my excitement spattering over the edges, like her red hot epic - wanting to savour every sentence, underline every paragraph. I had to place a quota on how many corners of the pages I could turn over. And so, I don’t think I should write too much about her book, as I run the risk of potentially quoting every sentence she wrote. Not only is that plagiarism, it is not the best antidote to my recent lack of writing and stubborn brain fog. Her words are still too hot for me to digest, to write about in any coherent manner. An ingredients list, of ideas and words and sentences that swim through her text, could look like this:
the recipe is a method for responding to things
the recipe is always a method for seeking
the recipe is a method of navigation
the recipe becomes an ensemble performance
the recipe intends life
the recipe establishes a correspondence between materials change and language, between time and language
the recipe is rewritten by the people to whom it attends
an epic with infinite possible translation
the recipe is an archive of all life - that is slippery, unarchivable, moving always and changing
the recipe is generous: it makes space for our refusal of it.
Throughout the text, she is continuously making and re-making the definition of a recipe, and making and re-making a tomato sauce, a tomato sauce for friends and lovers, strangers and flatmates and very occasionally herself. Her life becomes measured out in spoonfuls of sauce, that taste angry or lustful, too salty or sweet, that welcomes in new ingredients depending on the mouths it will feed.
Recipes - routine family meals, tear-outs from magazine columns, Frankenstein creations born out of store cupboard desperation, estimated attempts to mimic a fleeting restaurant dish - are inherently paradoxical: they are simultaneously specific, methodological - whilst also containing wide margins for change and interpretation. They are also archival and yet ever-changing, always in conversation, never isolated. While they capture habits, pleasures and preferences, heritage and community, your feelings and my feelings in the very moment - everything I have ever brushed against - they are forever being re-written, re-interpreted. Consciously, we adapt recipes for a friend who does not like raw onion or an inability to locate a certain ingredient, or almost unconsciously - by a whim or mood we add courgette, leave out the chilli, swap coriander for parsley.
When I moved to Norway, I was unable - and still am unable - to find the salty, fermented anchovies needed to make puttanesca. Cheese is expensive. I only discovered butter in the supermarket a few months ago. Self-raising flour does not exist. I wrote about this extensively for a week in late Winter two years ago. I am still writing about it, apparently. Tomatoes do not have a taste. Capers are hard to come by (J’s mum sent over a large jar of capers after hearing this news). Good black tea is rare, herbal teas need a small loan from the bank.
For a while, I fought against my context - I tried to make the recipes I came here with, finding substitutes for anchovies, over-seasoning my way through through bland sauces - before learning to cook with, rather than against. I was also, for the first time, eating always with another person. I watched as my shopping list changed, with J not liking strong cheeses or fish. I would curiously watch as he made Indian eggs for breakfast, make broths with tofu, burgers on a Friday night. Orange juice became part of my life again. In an accumulation of new tastes, bad tomatoes, shortages of capers and anchovies and cheese - Puttanesca, Greek salad and smoked salmon pasta got left behind.
Whenever we visited family in Greece, in those long stretched out Summers of pebbly sand and scooping out crabs from happy rock-pools, there was χωριάτικη σαλάτα (horiatiki salata) on the table every night. Horiatiki is the word for Greek salad, translating roughly as village salad. I recall being told that it was actually born in Athens, ironically, in the 1960s and was made for tourists. I don’t think a recipe can be born. A recipe is always in a process of becoming and un-becoming. A choreography of moods and ingredients and climate and circumstance and mouths.
I sadly have forgotten much of my second language, the one my parents use to talk about serious issues, the one that I am fluent in in my dreams at night. The Greek words I do know are food words. I know how to order in a restaurant, how to ask for frappes in a way that makes the bitterness of coffee just sweet enough, without tasting like artificial. I know how get the ripest tomatoes from the market stalls that build up overnight under the sleeping balconies of Athenian flats. The Greek salad I know is a language mutated from childhood memories, translated from Greek to English, to Norwegian supermarkets. It is shaped through generations of my family and of cooks and of their families and their lives. It is an amalgamation of everyone’s lives who have sliced a tomato and dressed it in olive oil before I ever tasted one.
I came back to Greek salad last week, for the first time in many, many months. Spurred on by some Greek-imported feta cheese being on offer in the supermarket, I very skeptically swooped around locating capers (which I now know are nestled amongst the dried herbs and spices section), Kalamata olives, the healthiest looking cucumber I could find (long and very dark green are good signs), red onions, red pepper and tomatoes. This was the hardest decision: choosing between tasteless beef tomatoes, as is customary in the Greece I know - the size, not the tasteless part - or small cherry tomatoes that can sometimes surprise with a slight burst of tangy sweetness.
Cutting up the cherry tomatoes on the chopping board, I scrape them into a glass bowl, making sure every drop of juice follows. Cucumber, pepper and red onion come next, chopped small but actually not that small. I think white onion is more traditional. Capers and olives. A lot of olive oil and salt, a very hesitant drop of red wine vinegar - I don’t trust it - and a downpour of oregano. The feta sits on top in one whole block. More oregano. We used to serve my brother his salad first as he is cheese-adverse, before crumbling apart the feta with the back of a spoon. I remember finding out a few years ago that my Dad doesn’t actually like feta, which for some reason gave me whiplash. I thought his favourite dish was saganaki - deliciously fried feta with honey and pastry and sesame seeds. I don’t really want to understand this.
An hour later, I had finished a whole bowl of Greek salad. I think of the white plastic-y paper table cloths that lay over taverna tables, ceremoniously anchored down by metal clamps against the Cycladic wind. Sometimes printed with blue motifs of ropes, islands, compasses. By the end of every meal, new islands of oil stains and tomato seeds rocks would have formed. As my yiayia got older, she slowly omitted ingredients from Greek salad, until her plate was just salted sliced cucumbers.
A few days later, I make Greek salad again. I am cooking only for myself for the next few months. This time, I chose the big tomatoes and add chickpeas - which feels wrong and hard to do. I’ve always felt very precious about not altering the recipe, but I wanted to justify eating Greek salad for dinner, and chickpeas were going to be my alibi. It worked - tasting slightly like I had just had hummus before eating the salad. It was filling and I had enough left over to pile into a Tupperware for lunch.
The best part of Greek salad is the residual tomato juice, oniony olive oil and tiny flecks of feta at the bowls base. I’ve been told many times to use bread to mop up the juices, but I do as I have always done - lift the bowl to my lips.
A recipe for a Greek Salad
Pick your tomatoes. Prioritise redness and juiciness over shape or type. Slice them and put in the bowl with all their juice. Add half a cucumber, cut into half-moons, and then cut again. Half a red pepper, cut up roughly. It should be green but I like the sweetness of red. A small red onion - in long slivers or small pieces depending on your enjoyment of raw onion. A lot of olive oil. Salt - quite a bit but less than you think. Red wine vinegar if it sitting near-by. Don’t bother mixing it together as a dressing, just add it into the bowl. Muddle everything together. Add in olives - don’t cut them. Capers. Oregano. A block of feta on top, with a sprinkle of oregano. Chickpeas can be added, but at risk of feeling weird about it. Eat straight from the bowl if serving only yourself. Notice how every forkful tastes different - fresher with more pepper and cucumber. Salty and deep with capery tomatoes. Experiment with just onion and feta, cucumber and feta on the fork. Olive and red pepper.
Lift the bowl to your lips.
Served best the day that the clocks go forward and spring feels closer.
I ❤️ Greek salad! Thank you for the authentic recipe 😍