Eating Greek Food at Home Parties and Holiday Foods with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
The pungent, cold odor of lemon and oregano rose from the calf skull that I carefully held together with the two sides of my “doggie bag.” The skull was what was left of my meal of boiled brains in Chicago’s Greek town.
I entered my college dorm at the University of Chicago. I looked over at my Greek-American roommate, who was peacefully sleeping, and stifled a laugh. I quietly walked over to her bed and put the skull under her nose, which immediately crinkled.
Her eyes popped open and she let out a shriek. “I told you I’d bring home some Greek food,” I said as I menaced her with the stinky skull.
My good sport roommate liked my awful sense of humor and invited me to spend weekends with her family in the Chicago suburbs. I tried some Greek foods in her home that do not show up on restaurant menus like Thanksgiving turkey stuffed with a mixture of ground lamb, pine nuts, raisins, and rice.
I discovered that the Greeks use lemons almost like salt when I ate roasted chicken with potatoes that were bathed in olive oil and lemon juice. On hot days, we would sit on the back porch and eat feta cheese along with plump, black Kalamata olives.
Thanks to eating in Detroit’s Greek town as a child, I was already familiar with Greek foods like pastitio, a baked macaroni dish with meat sauce that is lightly flavored with cinnamon.
During one of my weekend visits, my roommate’s mother had made pastitio and none of the kids except me wanted to eat it. They wanted American food. My roommate’s frustrated mother pointed to two rows of cereal boxes on top of the refrigerator and said, “There’s your American food.”
“Why do you have so many cereals,” I wondered out loud.
“Mom’s always stocking up for war,” one of kids said, which made us all laugh.
We were still laughing when my roommate’s mother served us platefuls of horta, a mixture of boiled dandelion greens, chicory, escarole, and/or kale generally.
“Keep laughing,” my roommate’s mother chided us. “During the War (World War II), all we had to eat was the horta we could find on the mountainsides.” I doused the greens with olive oil and freshly squeezed lemon juice to take away some of the horta’s bitterness.
Luckily, bitter herbs were only part of the Greek menu in America. Getting ready to pull an all-nighter of studying to complete term papers or study Japanese characters, I would smile as my roommate’s mother set out a small pyramid of melamakarona cookies for me to nibble on during the night. These cookies are made with butter and dunked in orange-flavored hot honey and topped off with ground walnuts – very good brain food.
Tables groaning under the weight of melamakarona and other honey-laden desserts like bakalava featured prominently at all the Greek community parties I attended with my roommate’s family.
These parties included Greek Independence Day celebrations, village dances complete with circle dances, and dances organized under the auspices of the Greek-American youth organizations called the Sons of Pericles and the Maids of Athena.
Celebrating Greek Orthodox Easter, though, with my roommate’s family remains my favorite college memory. We attended midnight mass and as we left the church lit only by candles we said, “Kristos Anesti (Christ is Risen)” and wished each other “Hronya Pohla (May you have a long life.)” We repeated these greetings when we arrived at the relative’s house for the midnight meal.
The main dish of this midnight meal is a lemon and scallion flavored soup made with lamb tripe, lungs, heart, and liver. During the meal, we tapped the ends of our gleaming red eggs against one another’s eggs to see whose would crack. The person with the last unbroken egg won them all.
The next day, red eggs showed up again peeking out through bread lattice-work in the festive round loaves made by all the ladies for Easter. While we waited for the spit-roasted lamb to finish cooking in the backyard, we noshed on Greek village salad, heavy with plenty of cucumbers, purple onions, green peppers, anchovies, tomatoes, black olives, and feta cheese.
We used bread as if it were another utensil to soak up the oregano-flavored vinaigrette.
Sitting there balancing plates of this delicious food on my knees as I talked with the Greek cousins and friends, I thought of how I wanted a life like this, too.
By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
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