Eating Greek Food at Home Parties and Holiday Parties with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

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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Trying Russian Cocktail Food in Chicago with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Trying Russian Cocktail Food in Chicago with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget 

“So tell me what glasnost is before we get there,” I said to my college buddy as we waited to cross one of Chicago’s eight-lane streets on our way to a cocktail party honoring glasnost.

“Don’t you read the newspaper?” my college buddy asked.

“No, I gave it up when the student subscription ran out,” I said as we crossed the street fighting the autumn wind and crowds of people coming from the other side of the street.

“Don’t you watch the news?” my college buddy asked, trying to keep her little red bow from blowing in her face.  I wore a similar bow with my blue suit in an early 1980s attempt to emulate male neckties at IBM.

“I work too late to see the six o’clock news, and I’m in bed before the eleven o’clock news,” I responded in the pre-CNN year of 1987.

“How do you keep on top of things,” my college buddy asked in disbelief.  I had gone to a PR briefing on CNN at J. Walter Thompson, advertising agency in Chicago, but I did not watch it.

I laughed and said, “I eavesdrop on conversations.”

“Don’t tell me you haven’t heard anyone talk about glasnost,” she said.

I pushed my little red bow out of my face that was flapping in the wind and looked over at her.  

“Don’t pick on me,” I said.  “I know glasnost is Russian, but we’re more into things Asian in my unit at the firm.”  We both fit the type of organization types in our blue suits, even though we had said in college we would never wear these in college.

We arrived at the restaurant and immediately headed to the restroom, so we could comb our windblown hair.   “Who’s sponsoring this shindig?” my college buddy asked.

“The invitation said it’s a radio station that has a Russian political commentator.  Maybe they’ll think we’re potential advertisers and ply us with food and drink,” I gleefully thought aloud.

“I love your reasoning,” my college buddy responded.

We left the restroom and walked towards the meeting room.  “You never did tell me what glasnost is.”

“Well, it’s hard to define exactly…” my college buddy started in.

“Oh really.  I thought you would know since you read the paper and watch the news all the time,” I said.

“Don’t push it, Ruth.  I could leave you in the dark about it all evening.”  

“Oh, come on.  I’m trying to educate myself here,” I said.

“Let’s just say glasnost is about promoting political openness,” my college buddy said.

“Is that all!  It sounds like Mao’s “Let 100 Flowers Bloom Campaign” that encouraged dissent, so it was easy to identify critics and jail them later,” I said.

“My, you’ve gotten some mileage out of that degree in Far Eastern Languages and Civilizations,” my college buddy laughed.

"I know.  My relatives asked if I was an expert on Philadelphia, Boston, and Bangor (Maine) when they saw the Far East Languages and Civilizations BA notice I sent out for graduation money," I said.

The radio presenter was giving a presentation when we walked in the conference room.  We headed towards the food and drink and viewed our first Russian zakuski table.  Zakuski in Russian means “little bites” I learned later.

I had eaten Polish food before, so I recognized the pirozhki (Russian ravioli stuffed with beef and onions) and the cabbage leaves (stuffed with ground beef)  On the other side of the table around the outer edge were dishes like beet salad, carrot salad, radishes in sour cream with scallions, and glass dishes of black and orange-colored caviar.

Carafes of plain and flavored vodka sat in the center of the table with shot glasses surrounded by baskets of black rye and white bread.

My college buddy, who was Polish and Lithuanian on one side of her family, knew about vodka.  She poured us some of the innocent looking potato-based fluid.

“You’re supposed to drink it down in one swallow,” she said.  “The fumes are what make you drunk.”

The vodka burned my throat as I contemplated the caviars in their glass bowls on ice. “I’m not bothering with the potato salad,” I said.  “I’m just going to eat the caviar, because it’s the most expensive thing here.”

“Have you ever eaten caviar before?” my college buddy asked.

“No, I wonder what you’re supposed to do with it?” I asked.

“We can just drink a bit until we see what everyone else does,” my college buddy suggested.

After a few more shots of vodka, a few more people did come and eat the caviar, which had its nuances.  The small, black caviar got eaten with white bread.  The orange-hued salmon caviar got eaten with dark rye bread.  

Some people added chopped raw onions and lemon juice to the orange caviar.  I tried both kinds of caviar and liked the salty squirts of liquid they left on the tongue. 

We both continued to generously serve ourselves with regular vodka.  My college buddy finally asked, “Don’t you think it’s time for our dessert vodkas?”  We had a choice of apricot, cherry, and lemon flavored ones to choose from.

We could hardly keep up with the serious drinkers around us, though.  I only discovered the historical saying “Drinking is the Joy of Rus” years later when I worked in a gallery selling Russian icons among other art objects.  

In the tenth century, the Grand Prince Vladimir unified Russia and wanted to confer a religion on his subjects.  He was ready to accept Islam as the state religion until he found out that it forbade alcohol consumption.

I thought it was quite neat that I had been able to attend a glasnost cocktail party without being asked my opinion of glasnost.  Towards the end of the evening, though, one of Chicago’s consul generals (the Greeks do moocher patrol in the Windy City) came up to us and asked if we were journalists, which made us laugh.  

I told him that we had recently graduated from college, and then asked, “Do you think glasnost is going to have a lasting effect on politics in the Soviet Union?”

He gave what I am sure was an intelligent response, but I was having a hard time paying attention.  My college buddy had choked on her vodka, and I was trying not to laugh at her.

By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Learning about Scandinavian Culture in Door County (Wisconsin) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Learning about Scandinavian Culture in Door County (Wisconsin) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

I had the chance to visit Wisconsin’s Door County, located northeast of Milwaukee on a peninsula that juts out into Lake Michigan with my family when I lived in Wisconsin.  Door County is famous for the fall colors of its trees, and since it was September I naturally wanted to visit.

When my daughter would want to join the conversation, I would say, “Tell me when you see cows, too,” so our talk was interspersed with cow sightings along the way.  As for me, I did not want to miss anything related to gastronomy and worried that I would miss the fish boil as we passed all the secondary roads we had to take between Madison and Door County to get there.

We arrived an hour before the fish boil, but that was not much time to get dressed for dinner.  I got my hotel room key and went to my room in the sprawling complex that made up the resort.  I arrived at the room, inserted my key, and broke it in half, leaving a piece in the lock.  My daughter started crying, because we would not be able to get into our room.

I called from a hallway courtesy phone and explained my predicament.  The hotel staff person arrived promptly and told me that I was trying to get into the wrong room.  He took me to the right room without lecturing me.  Time to get to the fish boil was slipping away.

I met my long-suffering car companion downstairs, and we drove to the restaurant where we met our spouses.  The telephone book in our room had a good explanation of this culinary specialty that put all the essentials in a nutshell.  I have paraphrased and supplemented the information as follows:

The Legendary Fish Boil

Scandinavian settlers and lumberjacks in Door County prepared fish steaks with potatoes and onions.  They threw it all in a pot and boiled it over an open fire.  Just before serving the fish boil, you throw gasoline over the fire and let the flames cause some of the stew to boil over .  You eat the fish with plenty of melted butter, a favorite beverage, and cherry pie.  Door County is famous for its cherries. 

The next morning my husband, daughter, and I went to the hotel restaurant for breakfast.  We sat by a window and looked out over the tops of trees that were already turning orange, red, and golden yellows.  I castigated myself for being such a city girl and not knowing the names of the trees.  I could not take my eyes off the scenery.  I felt very fortunate to see this spot and understood why so many people from Chicago came here to escape the big city.

When my daughter and I came back to the room, I made plans to go into Egg Harbor.  Egg Harbor I discovered is trendy with many of shops selling clothing, crafts, and souvenirs.  There was no historical museum in town, or maybe I just could not find it.  I did get a small brochure at the information center that described how the town got its name in 1825 in one sentence, which basically said that there was a fight with eggs between six men on a trading flotilla. 

I was on a quest to buy a guide book about Door County and its history.  I went to a fabulous market on Main Street.  I only had a few minutes to look around, but a few items caught my eye – big city newspapers in the doorway, roasted chicken, anchovy paste, a great selection of wines from Europe and California, freshly baked muffins and breads, and vegetables carefully displayed in woven baskets.  I bought some postcards of Door County for my journal.

After that I went to several trendy shops.  I bought a great, inexpensive book at a store about the wood stave churches of the world.  Most of these churches are found in Norway, and I hoped I would visit them someday.  Until then, I would soak up what I could from the little book.  I walked down to the harbor through Harbor View Park.  The yachts would soon be stored I thought as I felt a slight chill in the autumn air.  We returned to the hotel to discuss lunch plans.

I told my husband how great the market was that I found, and we decided to go buy our lunch there.  We bought a roasted chicken, a pound of pasta salad, a bag of freshly baked wheat rolls, and a dozen apples.  We ordered dishes for our room from housekeeping and had a feast.  My daughter loved the chicken and was delighted to get the big piece of the wishbone when we pulled it.

After lunch my family took naps while I wrote.  When they woke up, we drove to Gill’s Rock.  My daughter played at the rock beach with her dad.  I checked out the tourist spots.  You know you are in tourist territory in Wisconsin when you can buy plaques with Chicago Bears insignia on them less than fifty miles from where the Green Bay Packers rule. 

On our return home, we concentrated on playing “Find the Barn” and “Count the Cows” with my daughter through a forest of blazing fall colors dotted with farms.My husband left before me to go to a meeting and arranged for the spouse of one of his colleagues to drive me and my daughter to Door County.  I chatted about raising children and the fish boil that we were supposed to attend once we arrived. 

By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Learning about Norwegian Culture in Minnesota with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Learning about Norwegian Culture in Minnesota with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget 

Fall colors convinced me to go along with my husband on a business trip to Minneapolis, Minnesota one weekend when we lived in Wisconsin.

While my husband worked, I drove around Lake Mille Lacs outside Minneapolis and visited all the small towns.  “Lake Mille Lacs” means “Lake One Thousand Lakes” and “Isle” means “Island.” 

The name Lake Mille Lacs refers to all the lakes in Minnesota that were created when the last glaciers retreated.   The license plates all said that there were 10,000 lakes in the state.  The mosquito was jokingly called the state bird on postcards.

A state park dedicated to Father Hennepin further attested to French exploration of this area.  The largest group of Europeans, though, who settled Minnesota are from the Scandinavian countries of Norway and Sweden.  The Objibway are the original inhabitants.

When I arrived in one small town, I immediately saw a little craft store that sold Norwegian items like tablecloths.  I decided to start my souvenir shopping at the hardware store, though, because that was the only place that was open.  I bought some fishing tackle for the fishermen in the family and started to look for some old-fashioned toys for my daughter.

The toys I found for my daughter included dominoes, white chalk, a pick-up sticks game, and a little handheld pinball game.  I loved getting things like this as a child and looked forward to sharing them with my little one.  

I would dole them out in two-week intervals so that each item would get her full attention.  I bought my mother a pretty flowered tablecloth for her kitchen table; small town hardware stores carry just about everything.

The Norwegian crafts store was now open, and I proceeded across the street.  I walked into a party happening at 10:00 am in this crafts store.  About fifteen Norwegian matrons were gathered around a “Congratulations” cake.  The elderly owner of the store was signing copies of her first book, which detailed her romance with the American who had brought her to Minnesota.

She invited me to have some cake and tea and asked where I was from.  I told her about my wanderings that had led me to Wisconsin.  She told me, “You should write a book, too!  Everyone’s life has drama in it.”

“I’ll try to keep that in mind,” I said.

She knew I was buying souvenirs for a child and let me purchase a book for my daughter.  I found a Scandinavian fairy tale called The Tomten and the Fox.  The tomtem looked like a Norwegian leprechaun, but instead of tricking people the tomtem helped them. 

 

In this story, the tomten protected the chickens from a wily fox for a family, who did not realize how hard the tomten worked.

The visit to the Norwegian craft store left me in high spirits.  The scenery was beautiful with the leaves turning golden, red, and brown as I drove back to the hotel.  I did want to write, but mostly I wanted to participate in wonderful moments in life like going to a 10 am book signing for a romance book.

By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Trying Norwegian Food with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Learning about Norwegian Food with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget 

"How do Norwegians make any money from their fundraising dinner when no one wants to eat the main dish?” I asked my mother during my first Wisconsin winter.  My question concerned lutefisk, dried salt cod reconstituted in lye that is boiled and steamed to make it palatable…supposedly. 

 

I knew that in its Italian form as codfish, you could fetch top dollar for this delicacy.  I wanted to see what the Norwegians did with codfish.

Lutefisk dinners are no small time affair.  One of our Lutheran churches in town served 2,500 meals in one day in well orchestrated shifts.  My great-aunt bought the family tickets to attend one of these events, because she was 104 and “not feeling like cooking this week.”  On the appointed day, we arrived at church.  Smiling ladies in starched white frocks with flower embroidery led us to our tables and served us.

The pale, white lutefisk flaked away and did not have much flavor; it tasted better with butter.  The Norwegians cook the fish outside in a hut, so the church will not have a fishy aroma.  I discovered that the older generation of Norwegians did eat lutefisk and enjoy it just like little my daughter.

We supplemented our token lutefisk portion with Swedish, or rather Norwegian, meatballs made from ground beef, pork, and veal and seasoned with meat sauce.  The pan gravy from the meatballs covered the boiled potatoes and went under the green beans.  Homemade, flat, tortilla-like sheets of potato bread called lefse accompanied our meal.

The lefse tasted good with cinnamon and sugar, but was merely a prelude to dessert.  We started out with a warm pudding called rommergrot made from cooking heavy cream, milk, and a little flour together.  Brown sugar tops off the rommergrot, but that is not the end of the Norwegian dessert fare we sampled.

Bonde Pike sounds like you should be eating another fish dish, but it is another delectable sweetie.  The church ladies make a crushed graham cracker shell for this dish, add a thickened cherry filling, and top it all off with whipping cream.

 
You do tend to put on a little weight during a Wisconsin winter supporting all the church fundraising efforts, but supporting the community in small town America certainly is tasty.

Lutefisk dinners form the backbone of winter entertainment small town Wisconsin.  Our little town newspaper had just run an article about the Sons of Norway going to net the year’s catch of lutefisk in the local river.  The spoof article heralded the new season of Lutefisk dinners organized by the local Lutheran Churches.

By Ruth Pennington Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Celebrating German Christmas in Small Town Wisconsin with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Learning about German Christmas in Small Town Wisconsin with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Once I took my daughter to our town’s local history society in Wisconsin.   The history society was holding a German Christmas party, since many of our town’s settlers were German.  The only thing I knew about German culture in our town despite my attempts to find out about it was that the local supermarket had a German name.  

This market had a large selection of marinated hareng, brats (sausage), and locally brewed beers.  We did not have a bakery in our town, but several towns over they had German bakeries with rye bread and pumpernickel bread.  I found those flavors to be too strong, but thought they would be good with Wisconsin cheese selections.

This resulted in a mini quest by me to find what was German about German culture.  When I begin an anthropological search mission, I go to cookbooks.  I read The Cooking of Germany by Nika Standen Hazelton (Time-Life Books, 1969), who led the life of a diplomat’s daughter.  

She wrote about what women in 1969 and what women of today most probably sought to do for guests – make them feel like royalty with the quality of the food and service surrounding it.  She wrote that German women all practice schően decken (to set a table beautifully).  I could certainly see that at the German Christmas party.

Red, ironed tablecloths displayed glass dishes of Christmas cookies, Kaffe (coffee), and napkins with bells and holly on them.  German coffee I discovered was strong yet smooth.  My daughter was more interested in the cookies offered to her by ladies with newly coiffed hair and Christmas pins on their dresses with belts at the waist.  Each cookie tasted of the Middle Ages with flavorings such as allspice, cloves, mace, black pepper, and anise in cookies such lebkuchen and pfeffernüsse.

There were many photos of the early German settlers, but there was no sheet describing German settlement in our town.  German culture is somewhat hidden in the United States, but I am sure it is protected.  The German grandparents in town could probably tell you who everyone was in the photographs on the walls and in some cases what was happening in the agricultural cycle depicted.  As a city girl, I felt removed from “the land,” especially after reading books on organic gardening. 

We left the photo exhibit to join the Christmas carol singers.  We sang in English and in German – Silent Night (Stille Nacht) and O Christmas Tree (O Tannenbaum) to organ music.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Learning about Moroccan Culture through its Cuisine by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Learning about Moroccan Culture through its Cuisine by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget 

Raymond A. Sokolov coined the word “gastroethnography” to describe a method of examining a society in his book Why We Eat What We Eat: How Columbus Changed the Way the World Eats.  

Gastroethnography proposes the study of another culture through the preparation of its food, food items that are worthy to be eaten, table etiquette, geography, and historical events.

Who prepares meals and in what situation gives us ideas about social organization.  In the article “Une Odeur de Sainteté” by Mohammed Kacimi El-Hassani, readers can see that traditionally in wealthy Moroccan families, it was always the female family members who prepared meals and not servants.  Female family members ensured that that foods were made with fresh ingredients to prevent food poisoning.  Cooking allows many women to express creativity as well.

This creativity comes after a long apprenticeship in the kitchen that begins early.  Moroccan cuisine requires many hands to reduce spices and nuts into powder, for example.  The wealth of able hands challenges the need for food processors, and purists say that ingredients prepared by hand taste better.  Measuring cups and recipe books are rare in the traditional Moroccan kitchen.  

Ingredients for meals come from Morocco’s Saharan climate up to its sea coasts.  Moroccans traditionally like to mix different flavors in their dishes, and it is easy to see this tendency in their national dishes described by Claudia Roden in her book Mediterranean Cookery:  Moroccon tagines are stews cooked with meat and fruits usually; Couscous features a tagine with steamed small pasta; and Bisteeya, a pigeon pie decorated with patterns made by cinnamon.

The etiquette around a Moroccan meal is characterized by hospitality.  Visitors are offered many dishes that must demonstrate shaban, or abundance.  Diners who eat in the traditional manner use the three first fingers of the right hand along with bread to bring food to their mouths.  At the end of the meal, Claudia Roden writes in Mediterranean Cookery that diners drink three glasses of mint tea.

This refined cuisine and its meal ritual are born out of the combination of geography and history.  Morocco only lacks arctic regions and tropical rain forests to offer its inhabitants a wide range of food products.  From a historical standpoint, Moroccan cuisine has benefitted from three important periods – the Arab immigrations in the seventh century; the Kingdom of Andalusia in what is today’s Spain, and the Columbian Exchange that brought New World products to the Mediterranean and beyond such as peppers and tomatoes.

Good cookbooks can be a first foray into a foreign cuisine, if you cannot learn from cooks of a particular culture like that of Morocco.  The best cookbooks tend to be information packed, contain photos of processes not only finished products if they are included, and attempt to provide recipes for people from all levels of society.  Some of the best cookbooks around, by the way, have no photos or images in them.  These seem to be the kind of cookbooks that home cooks cherish.

By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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