Home life in Hellas, Greece and the Greeks - eBooks4Greeks.gr

DOMESTIC LIFE 181your salad swimming in a lake of oil.Then thereis fruit in its season—always excessively dear, bythe way, in Athens. The flavour of a new potatoor of green peas or artichokes you will neverknow, unless you cook them yourself. The sugarpea,called by the French mange-tout, for the podis eaten as well as the seed, is grown extensivelyfor the Athenian market—it ought to be betterknown in England. I remember seeing it once ina Wiltshire garden. Thinking to renew acquaintancewith it in an Athens restaurant, I was servedwith an amorphous mass which tasted, alas, ofnaught but rather rancM oil—and salsa. Sweetsin Greece are purely Turkish and are called bytheir Turkish names, cadaif, baklava, etc.Turks, the Greeks eat young cucumbers inLike thelargequantities, not in salad, but with the addition onlyof a little salt. They are grateful and refreshing inthe warm weather of early summer.On the otherhand, they prize things which the Turks willnottouch—snails, for example, and the octopus, and thecuttle-fish, which is very popular, but not temptingin appearance. When cooked it looks like a dishof ink. The long fasts enjoined by the OrthodoxChurch lead to a very large consumption of saltfish and caviar—not the Astrakhan caviar, which isas costly as in England—but red caviar, which isimported in tubs. This is pounded with garlic andlemon juice into what is called tarama salata andis eaten with oil.It is a distinctively Greek dish.The Greeks, like the Turks, have the commend-