Introducing Greek Cuisine and Culture to Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
Thanks to Detroit’s large Greek population, I learned about Greek culture beginning at the age of 9.
My mother and I would go to
Greektown with my high school buddy on the weekends and order Greek village
salads that had no lettuce – that is an authentic village salad.
The village salads in
Greektown had ringlets of green, yellow, and red peppers; black, salty olives;
tomato quarters; ringlets of purple onion; and feta cheese. We ate this salad with thick slices of Greek
bread.
Greeks allow soaking up salad
of dressing with a piece of bread; it is not considered bad etiquette in a
restaurant as it is in France. The
Greeks use red wine vinegar, olive oil, and rigani – an herb like oregano in
their salad dressing. I think it is the
purple onion, feta cheese, and rigani trio that make it taste so good.
Next, we would have pastitio
(Greek pasta with ground lamb, tomatoes, and béchamel sauce), moussaka
(eggplant casserole with béchamel sauce and melted grated cheese), spanakopita
(spinach and onion with melted feta cheese baked in a buttered phyllo dough),
and cheese (Greek halumi cheese) phyllo pies.
Of course, I ate a big piece of baklava for dessert. I could eat like this, because I walked all
the time.
In the sixth grade, my social
studies project was all about Greece and the products the US could export to
Greece to earn money (cars and sewage systems) and what the US could import
from Greece (olives and cruise packages to the Greek Isles).
When I was in high school, I
wrote about the Byzantine Empire of Greece for National History when I was at
Cass Technical High School.
In a nutshell this is what I
concluded in my paper, the Byzantine Empire survived for so long, because food
was organized and distributed in an organized manner.
My paper placed in the top
five for the Detroit Metropolitan Area, but I considered myself the winner when
my peers were asking me to read it over and over at lunch in Greektown.
When I went to college at the
University of Chicago, my roommate was a Greek-American, who lived in the
Chicago suburbs. In addition to my
coursework at UChicago, I would go to go to my Greek roommate’s house on the
weekends. I ate Greek lemon chicken
there and melamakarona cookies (butter cookies dunked with grated walnuts on
top) while I drew Japanese characters over and over.
I did other Greek activities
with my roommate. I went dancing at
Maids of Athena and Sons of Pericles parties at the height of Michael Jackson’s
and Prince’s fame.
My roommate’s mother also ran
dances for immigrants from her village in Crete. I learned traditional Greek dances with the
Greek yia-yias (grandmothers).
I went to Easter masses at
the Greek Orthodox Church and the midnight dinner after that. During spring break, I went to Greek
Independence Day and was able to talk with Greek-American writer Harry Mark
Petrakis about writing. He told me to
just keep writing to develop my storytelling skills.
Other “Things Greek” I have
done include going to a Greek icon exhibit at the Detroit Institute of the
Arts. Icons are painted using strict
outline forms. Variation can only happen
with subtle color changes, but that is it.
Also, each side of an icon’s face is either the good eye or the “evil”
eye.
I studied Byzantine
manuscript illumination, my senior year of college at UChicago. Byzantine manuscripts are small and frenzied
images in text. They contain a lot of
Biblical code language that is not always in the text.
When I went home to Detroit
for Christmas vacation from the UChicago one year, I went to see a performance
of Oedipus Rex performed in ancient Greek on a round stage. I read the play before I went in English and
like the chanting and minimal movements that convey what is happening.
This is non-verbal
communication. Non-verbal communication
is not the same in all countries, but I understood what was happening in
ancient Greek theatre.
Later in life, when I lived
in France, we took a vacation to Greece for two weeks. We hiked up to the Acropolis from the Plaka
in Athens. We visited the Parthenon and
the Erechthyion with its caryatids of female figures holding up the roof of their
temple – Hestia’s Temple?
From Athens, my husband and I
went to Crete and visited the entire island.
The highlights of our time there were visits to the ruins of Heraklion
and the Archaeological Museum that depict Minoan Culture with its dancers
leaping over charging bulls, goddesses wielding snakes, and symmetrically
designed necklaces.
In California, my husband
Laurent and I took our daughter Florence to Epsilon Restaurant a few times in
downtown Monterey, but mostly we do our Greek outing at the Greek Festival in
downtown Monterey on the Wharf. We buy
food, participate in the Greek dances, and pretend we are on a cruise in the
Greek Isles in the Pacific Northwest.
By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
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