Greek Festival Pointers – Part 1 -by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
One
of the first articles I wrote for the Monterey
(CA) County Weekly (Circulation: 200,000) when I was a food writer for the
newspaper was about Monterey’s popular Greek festival. My family regularly attended the Greek
Festival when my daughter Florence was little to pick up our box of Greek
desserts and cookies.
Parts
of the article I wrote about the Greek Festival have shown up in the newspaper
over the years, but the following is the original article with slight format
modification:
Have no Fear of Greek
Gifts
Greek
sweets that you cannot find in restaurants should make any visitor to the Greek
Festival want to start lunch with dessert.
For
Greeks, desserts symbolize joy and good wishes; you always take them to a
friend’s home, for example, “to sweeten the friendship.” With thoughts of festivalgoers tasting the “sweetness”
of Greek culture, the ladies of Monterey’s Greek community have been busy
making traditional foods for weeks.
Reasonable
individuals will start with a plateful of desserts and cookies from the
following offerings:
-galataboureko
– a custard filled pastry whose crust is built up with layers of thin phyllo
pastry softened with melted butter
-karidopeta
– cake made with ground walnuts instead of flour and flavored with orange zest
and topped off with a syrup made of sugar, lemon, and cinnamon
-koulourakia
– shiny twisted butter cookies
-kourabiedes
– small crescent-shaped butter cookies sprinkled with confectioner’s sugar
-baklava
– You can find this diamond-shaped pastry made with ground walnuts and cinnamon
and topped off with lemony syrup in restaurants, but baklava has a different
soul when a yia yia, Greek grandma, lovingly makes it.
Telling
anyone about melamakarona cookies poses a major ethical dilemma for me, because
I want them all for myself. I used to
eat these all the time at my Greek college roommate’s home when I was a student at the University of Chicago.
The
spirit of hospitality that the Greeks are famous for, though, requires me to
divulge the melamakarona are butter cookies flavored with clove, cinnamon, and
orange juice that are dunked in a hot syrup of honey and lemon. Before they cool, you sprinkle ground walnuts
on top of them.
The
best way to eat any of these desserts is with a cup of strong Greek coffee.
After
indulging in dessert, you can walk around and look at craft items for sale that
you always find at paniyeri (festivals) in Greece as you watch folk dancing and
listen to music.
The
Aegeans band will regale you with dimotiká, folk songs, recounting stories of
love, politics, war, and lament whose origins go back to the 15th
century and the Fall of Constantinople, capital of the Greek Byzantine Empire.
End
of Part 1.
To
be continued…
By
Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
Click here for: Ruth Paget's Amazon Books
Click here for: Ruth Paget's Amazon Books
