Sunday, July 26, 2009

Ikaria III: Potato Salad


In recent years Ikaria’s cuisine has drawn this obscure island a little closer to the limelight. Diane Kochilas, America’s Greek cooking maven, is Ikarian-American. Her people are from the village of Christos in the Raches area of Ikaria, and Kochilas writes frequently about food remembered from her childhood summers on the island. Now she has opened a cooking school that operates in Christos during the summer months. The interest generated by all this has a downside for the traditionalists who appreciate Ikaria’s off-the-beaten-track idiosyncracies. For generations, the people of isolated, mountainous Raches have (for reasons only partly understood) been in the habit of sleeping most of the afternoon and staying up most of the night. I’m not just talking about discos and bars… I mean the baker, the hardware store, and the bicycle repair shop - along with every other business in town - opened shop at 9 pm and closed at 3 am. This was still true when we visited in 2002 but a look at a recent guidebook mentions how the people of Christos “used to keep late hours”. Ah well, the price of fame. Next time we go there will probably be a Wal-Mart superstore in the plaka.

By the way, our visit to Raches that summer coincided with that of a team of photographers. They were there to shoot the pictures for an article on Ikarian cooking in the premiere issue of Eating Well magazine, authored by (of course) Diane Kochilas. The proprietress of the taverna where we enjoyed our midnight meal proudly informed us that the moussaka on my plate was the very same one that had been photographed a little earlier in the evening for “the American cooking magazine.”

So here I am this week in sunny southern California, having just returned from the annual picnic of the Oinoe Chapter of the Pan-Icanian Brotherhood in Pasadena. We were there to celebrate friends, family, Agias Marinas day, and the anniversary of Ikarian independence. As it does every year, the picnic featured barbecued hamburgers and Polish dogs (with guys named Demosthenes and Nikolas manning the grill), accompanied by a big potluck spread of homemade Ikarian specialties: soufiko (a vegetable stew similar to ratatouille), spanakopita, stuffed tomatoes and squash, Greek salad, and Ikarian potato salad, with – like always on the island in the summertime – karpouzi (watermelon) for dessert.

My husband's Aunt Koula is the San Gabriel Valley’s recognized authority on Ikarian potato salad, and unless she happens to be visiting the island on the picnic weekend she is invariably called upon to provide this dish for the celebration. I plan to do a lot of cooking with Aunt Koula this week (it’s a big part of the reason I made the trip) because the only way to get one of Aunt Koula’s coveted recipes is to cook it alongside Aunt Koula. She doesn’t measure, and she doesn’t have it written down, so you just have to let her show you how big a handful, how big a pinch or shake or whatever. Sadly, I didn’t arrive in town soon enough to see how she puts this particular salad together, but I have made Diane Kochilas’s version (linked here) and I will vouch for it as very similar, and almost as delicious.

There is one essential ingredient in the recipe that is likely to sound unfamiliar, though if you have a garden you have probably seen plenty of it. Greek glistrida – purslane in English – is a prolific and persistent weed with red stems and roundish, soft, almost succulent-like leaves. It grows close to the ground in abundance in our vegetable garden. I have never seen it for sale but if you ask around you can probably find a backyard gardener who would be thrilled to have you remove it. Diane Kochilas says you can substitute watercress if you can’t find purslane, but I say don’t – it wouldn’t be Ikarian potato salad without it. Instead, come over to my house and I’ll show you where you can get some.

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