Read an Excerpt

Secrets from the Greek Kitchen

Cooking, Skill, and Everyday Life on an Aegean Island

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Emplacing Cooking

This chapter provides a short background sketch of life on Kalymnos in order to set the stage for my subsequent explorations of cooking. I develop ideas about food provisioning through some of my more recent ethnographic explorations of shopping and gifting on Kalymnos, and also briefly describe some aspects of Kalymnian marriage and family life relevant to thinking about cooking. Finally, I take a look at some of the key values that frame Kalymnian cooking discourses and practices.

Kalymnos has always been known for its barrenness, which, while not inimical to agriculture entirely, made agriculture secondary to sources of livelihood from the sea. While the days of the Kalymnian sponge trade, having been in decline since the 1970s, are now almost completely a memory (a "bitter" one at that [Warn 2000]), various sorts of fishing and especially the merchant marine continue to be options for those Kalymnians (men, almost exclusively) called by the sea. During my research in the 1990s, tourism was a much smaller part of the economy than it was on many of the neighboring Dodecanese islands, yet a number of factors have increased the visibility of tourism on Kalymnos during the first decade of the twenty-first century. The completion of an airport on the island means that it no longer requires a fourteen-hour boat ride from Athens to reach Kalymnos, though flights to Kalymnos so far are only from Athens. A spectacular discovery of fifth century B.C. artifacts in 2001 and the subsequent construction of a beautiful EU-funded museum have also raised the tourist profile of the island. But perhaps the biggest impact on tourism has been the discovery of Kalymnos in the late 2000s by rock climbers, which has led to the staging of a yearly rock-climbing festival that draws renowned climbers from all over the world to the island, converting Kalymnos's legendarily arid landscape into a money-making attraction. As one Kalymnian whose wife owned a restaurant and pension noted, Kalymnos is one of the few places in the world where you can climb imposing cliffs by day and relax in the Aegean Sea in the evening. Kalymnos, which had been unknown to all but the most dedicated tourists, was getting all kinds of press from rock climbing, even an article with spectacular pictures in the in-flight magazine for Lufthansa as I flew from the United States to Athens. Kalymnians were promoting their local attractions, not only the landscape and rock-climbing opportunities offered by no other island, but also Kalymnian restaurants. I remember attending a seminar in 2008 sponsored by the Kalymnian restaurant association that encouraged restaurateurs to feature the preparations they had offered all along as "local"—like the Kalymnian version of a Greek "village salad" known as mermizeli. By 2011 Kalymnian preparations were being featured in slow-food cookbooks, and several cooking shows (both Greek and American) had devoted segments or whole programs to Kalymnian specialties.

These new tourist opportunities notwithstanding, Kalymnos was feeling the pinch of the financial crisis in 2011. The main street of Kalymnos was littered with closed stores, mainly clothing stores. Kalymnians who had always had worked in the building industry or in the mayor's office were laid off. Increasing numbers of Kalymnians were following the long-hallowed tradition of migration from the island to Australia (the United States seemed to be drying up as a migrant destination), and some suggested to me that the population had dipped to nine thousand, draining the young from the island. The main Kalymnians moving in the other direction seemed to be women moving back to the island because they had inherited property (matrilineally, see below) that could be turned into tourist accommodations. One twenty-five-year-old told me that he had lucked into a job that spring, otherwise he would have joined many of his friends in seeking work in Australia. Some older Kalymnians had acquired Australian passports, even if not seeking work, because they looked to Australia as a backup if life in Greece became intolerable.

MATRIFOCALITY AND THE KALYMNIAN KITCHEN

Kalymnos shows a pattern shared through much of the Dodecanese island chain of matrilocal residence and matrilineal inheritance, practices that I traced in my earlier research in terms of their implications for female power (Sutton 1998). And while Kalymnos does have some "public" versus "domestic" distinctions, they are extremely blurry, with women taking an active role in the religious, economic, and political life of the island. And this is not a recent phenomenon (see Sutton 1999). One ongoing puzzle in my studies of Kalymnos was to understand the origins and role of female primogeniture in island life. This inheritance system was distinctive to Kalymnos and possibly a few other neighboring islands, and always intrigued me. In my scholarly reading and talk with colleagues and specialists, I've become convinced that this may be the only place in the world with such an inheritance system, or at least the only one that has been recorded. So I was curious about how this "custom," as people referred to it on Kalymnos—the "custom of the first daughter"—might have influenced gender relations in the past. Equally intriguing was how its memory (it officially ended in 1948 after the Dodecanese became part of Greece, though with a slower diminution of the practice during the course of the second half of the twentieth century), often expressed in the claim "We used to have matriarchy on the island," might still have influences on people's practices. While such puzzles remain for me, what I found clearly was that the practice of giving the entire family inheritance to the first-born daughter (who also takes the name of the maternal grandmother) established a pattern of and a model for powerful women on Kalymnos that shaped life on the island for several centuries at least.

I realized how much things had changed, however, in 2011 when talking with a woman in her twenties with two young boys. She told me that she was done with childbearing, and that there was no need to "make the daughter." When I asked about carrying on the grandmother's name, she dismissed this idea as the thinking of "the old mind-set," noting that she and her husband were happy with two boys, and that they would try to build houses for them when they grew up but it wasn't necessary: "If you have you give, but if you don't, there's nothing wrong with renting."

While first-daughter inheritance is now a memory, certain patterns remain that distinguish the island from mainland Greece, including a more equal inheritance of names between the mother's and the father's side than in patrilineal areas, and a strong matrilocal bias in postmarital residence. Mothers and daughters ideally still live together, sharing a large living space between two (or sometimes more) separate but interconnected households. Husbands enter the family as outsiders, and grandmothers, mothers, and daughters are, in many cases, allies in family struggles against fathers or husbands in family decisions about marital, financial, or other issues (Sutton 1998, chap. 5). This can play in interesting ways into cooking practices, where cooperation, negotiation, and affection can come up against claims to authority, hierarchy, and power, not just across genders but between women in the family. The current research project, which got me observing daily cooking in a much more detailed way than I had even in my earlier book about food and memory on Kalymnos, revealed family conflicts and tensions, as well as cooperation and alliances that I hadn't noticed in my earlier studies.

A brief description of the typical Kalymnian kitchen is in order. However, it's important to be aware that this is very much an ideal-typical description; as we'll see, Kalymnians negotiate their own practice in diverse ways. Nonetheless, it's also important to note that all Kalymnians seem to be aware of typical patterns and define their own practice in relation to what "other people" do. In some cases mothers and daughters live together but cook separately; in other cases they may live at a distance but still share meals. In most cases, actual practice combines some separation and some sharing of cooking and meals. The description I give here is of cases in which mothers and daughters are living adjacent to each other, sharing some parts of the living space, while other parts remain somewhat separated (for example, the mother may very rarely enter the daughter's bedroom).

As people's economic means expanded in the period from the 1970s to the early 2000s, they may have built more elaborate living areas with more "modern" furnishings, but they did not abandon many of their previous living arrangements, in particular the shared, two-family setup. In such a shared living space, the mother's kitchen may be quite small: a space large enough for a sink, a refrigerator, a small table, a wall cabinet for plates, and a two-burner stove run off a gas bottle. It is usually a small room separated from the main living area. Alternatively, a shack outside the house might be used as a primary area for processing and cooking, or a simple covered area that opens up into a courtyard could be used. The daughter's kitchen, by contrast, can be quite large, on the first floor of the daughter's living area, and typically is not a room separated by a divider, but opens on to a larger living space. The daughter's kitchen will include a full stove and oven, and a large amount of counter space with cabinets above and below. The mother's kitchen uses wall space for storage of pots, pans, implements, and often plates. By contrast, the daughter's kitchen will have those items placed in cabinets, and will instead use wall and counter space for decorative items, or sometimes for a kind of display of the tools of past generations.

What this setup in some cases allows is for the mother's kitchen to be the primary everyday kitchen for processing and cooking heavy, full meals, and the daughter's kitchen to be much more used for lighter, occasional cooking, cooking of sweets or casseroles, which use the oven, and the making of snacks and coffee. Because the mother's kitchen tends to be outside the house proper, the smells associated with cooking or cleaning fish, and the dirt associated with processing the food, do not enter the living space, which is, therefore, easy to prepare for visitors.

Aside from kitchen spaces, many Kalymnian homes have some outdoor courtyard area that can be used for processing food—cleaning fish, cutting up potatoes, cleaning lamb entrails for Easter soup. This may be a multifunction area, used to hang sheets and other laundry, as a garden, or as a space to keep animals of various kinds (goats, sheep, chickens, or hunting dogs being the most typical). This outdoor area allows Kalymnian women to process food for cooking while engaged in other activities: socializing with family and neighbors, taking care of other tasks, or keeping an ear open for an itinerant merchant. Such spaces have also been used in recent years for the building of an outdoor oven, a topic that I explore further on.

How much time is spent on cooking activities during the course of the day? Because of the multifunctional and social spaces in which Kalymnians process and cook their food, there is no clear answer to this as there is (implicitly) in typical recipes in the United States that specify time to the minute—fifteen minutes of preparation time, twenty minutes of cooking time, and so on. A typical Kalymnian main meal may begin the night before with planning for the next day and, often enough, the soaking of dry beans overnight for cooking the next day. Preparation of ingredients goes on amid a series of other activities—cleaning, caring for elderly family members, socializing with neighbors, overseeing children's activities, or making a quick trip to the neighborhood church to tend the family graves. Also, because cooking activities may be shared among two or more family members, a woman may run off on an errand, leaving her daughter or granddaughter to tend to the pots, or a man may take fish out into his workroom outside the main house for cleaning before his wife cooks them. Coffee and snacks are also constantly being prepared throughout the day to supplement the main meal (or meals, depending on whether a smaller evening meal is prepared).

I observed that time for food preparation was the most focused when one woman was the primary cook for the household and all preparation was done in an indoor kitchen space. Here one could develop concentration on a particular activity; in such cases, cooking a meal generally took from one to two hours. However, this situation was more the exception in my observations. (I consider one such example in detail in chapter 6, in the section on Popi Galanou.) I observed one family preparing a typical Sunday meal of stewed fish, moussaka, and salad. The meat sauce for the moussaka was prepared the evening before, taking one person just under an hour. The main preparations for the meal involved the activities of a husband, wife, wife's mother, and two daughters in steady, if not constant activity for slightly under three hours (the moussaka was cooked in an outdoor oven, which required considerable preparation and tending). While Sunday is an unusual meal, everyday meals also tend to involve at least several hours of labor time if they are done by a single person. Thus the contrast seems particularly striking, for Kalymnians, between homemade food, and pre-prepared frozen food, which has recently become available in supermarkets. The latter, most Kalymnians insisted, was simply an unacceptable substitute for the main meal of the day, though it might occasionally be used for a snack or an evening meal.

The significant time invested in cooking (not to mention provisioning, discussed below) enables one to suggest the value of cooking to Kalymnians, a theme I will return to. As David Graeber, following Nancy Munn, argues: "Value emerges in action; it is the process by which a person's invisible 'potency'—their capacity to act—is transformed into concrete, perceptible forms.... One invests one's energies in those things one considers most important, or most meaningful" (Graeber 2001, 45). It is the shared sense that cooking matters to Kalymnian women and men that makes for its value and for the realization of that value in concrete, perceptible forms, in this case the synesthetically pleasing cooked meal.

THE KALYMNIAN MEAL

Kalymnian main dishes are made up of beans or meat or fish and vegetables cooked in a "red" sauce of tomatoes, garlic, onions, and parsleyor celery. These dishes are supplemented with fish prepared as a soup, fried, or grilled. These meals will always be cooked in generous amounts of olive oil and served with fresh bread (typically bought daily) to soak up the oil and sauce. Little had changed in this regard since my fieldwork in the 1990s (see Sutton 1997, 2001). Sunday is when special meals are typically prepared, and the most typical Sunday meal remains grape leaves, stuffed with rice and ground beef and covered with an egg-lemon sauce. These stuffed grape leaves—called filla—are common throughout Greece, but their centrality in the Kalymnian diet has led people to refer to them as the "Kalymnian national dish." Sunday is also a day when one might make a dish that takes more time, such as moussaka or pastitsio (pasta and meat with a béchamel sauce). This might also be the time to make a spinach, mushroom, cheese, or other filled "pie" (pita), something that was more of a rarity twenty years earlier but that had increasingly become part of the regular repertoire of Kalymnian cooks in the 2000s.

Other common meals typically found in the weekly cycle include pasta with tomato sauce (with or without meat) and various cuts of meat and sausages. This main meal of the day, taken in the early afternoon, is supplemented during the course of the day by all kinds of snacks, often based on a special find of greens from a local vendor, a catch of fish, or a snail-hunting expedition. The evening meal sometimes involves leftovers, but otherwise would be something quick to prepare like fried eggs and potatoes or an omelet. Cheese, olives, and seasonal fruit are almost always consumed throughout the day as part of meals or snacks. The Kalymnian meal would be recognizable to most non-Kalymnian Greeks as typical "Greek food," with some variations, of course. While the first decade of the 2000s hadn't brought any radical changes to this diet, there were a number of interesting shifts, which I discuss in the course of the book. However, as I argued in my earlier work, there remains the sense of a recognizable, shared Kalymnian cuisine against which variations can be evaluated and judged.

---

Excerpted from Secrets from the Greek Kitchen by David E. Sutton. Copyright © 2014 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---