Gastronomy

Greece and its sun-kissed isles offer a tantalizing cuisine that is fresh and fragrant, served with warmth and vitality. The Greeks' zest for the good life and love of simple, well-seasoned food is reflected at the table. Theirs is an unpretentious cuisine that makes the most of their surrondings. 

This land of blue skies and sparkling seas offers a variety of fresh ingredients close at hand. Olive trees flourish, providing a flavor-packed oil to bathe other foods. Vineyards thread the rolling hills, and the grape crush and ferment produces excellent wines, some resin-flavored. Greece produces a number of excellent wines. Sample them at wine festivals in Athens, Patras (the largest wine region), Thrace and Crete. Ouzo is the national liqueur. Fragrant lemon trees produce the golden fruit whose tang pervades greek gastronomy.

The seas have a variety of fish and shellfish and harbor-side tavernas serve them grilled, baked, and fried.

Lamb is the principal meat served and a holiday festivity calls for ceremoniously spit-roasting a whole carcass out of doors. For everyday meals, lamb is braised and stewed in casseroles with assorted vegetables and skewered and broiled. Pork, beef, and game are marinated, grilled, and baked. Chicken is broiled or braised. Good meat and vegetable combinations are endless, often enhanced with the golden lemon sauce, avgolemono, or a cinnamon-spice tomato sauce. Mezedakia, modestly referred to as hors d'oeuvres, may include dolmades (stuffed grape leaves), tyropitaes (cheese pies) and keftedakia (meatballs).

Moussakas, layered with eggplant or zucchini and a garlic-scented meat sauce, and bearing a custard topping, is one of the most famous casserole dishes. Pilaffs are laced with spices and nuts. Fila pitas, composed of the wafer-thin pastry, and layered with chicken and mushrooms, spinach and feta cheese, or lamb and leeks, are a delight. An abundance of fresh vegetables inspires imaginative cooked and marinated vegetable dishes and salads, often strewn with mountain-grown herbs: garlic, oregano, mint, basil, and dill. Fresh Feta cheese, Graviera cheese, and Kasseri cheese, in particular, are used lavishly to accompany homemade whole-grain bread or salad or to grate and top vegetables or pasta.

Undoubtedly baklava is the most famous pastry, a multi-layered affair ribboned with nuts and oozing with honey syrup. A visit to a Greek pastry shop reveals the versatility of fila dough in dozens of different fila pastries. The honeyed fila pastries and buttery nut cookies compose a separate late afternoon meal accompanied by thick Greek coffee.

Fresh fruit -generally figs, orange, apples, and melon- usually conclude the late evening dinner.