honey and scrambled eggs

This is a jar of honey. Our neighbours, Yorgos and Kiki, keep bees and I’m proud to say they forage in our garden (the bees, not Y and K). So while I can’t claim to have produced this rich, dark meli with its complex floral, herbal, even malty character, I do see myself as its godfather, after a fashion. I don’t remember the name of the yellow and white flowers – I call them scrambled egg flowers, for obvious reasons – but they too have played their part.

            Our son Joseph was born on this island and spent his formative years in this garden. Durrell-like, he was fascinated by the insect life – he once considered becoming a myrmecologist – but in the end archaeology and then history claimed him and he embarks on his third MA next month. Baltic rather than Balkan studies are his passion now, including a research interest in the medieval Lithuanian beeswax and honey trade. Apparently it was the European hub in those times, thanks to the busy-as-bees Hanseatic merchants. What goes around comes around. I remember hurrying him indoors one day when the neighbours’ bees were swarming – the air thick with them, thousands of frenetic bees intent on some private business, the buzzing extraordinarily loud – to me, it was like a moment from a horror film, but it made a more favourable impression on Joe. An hour or so later, order was restored and we ventured back into the bright morning.

             Honey is magical. Always has been. In the Finnish epic, The Kalevala, Lemminkäinen’s mother manages to bring her heroic but dismembered son back to life with honey’s help. She summons a bee and sends the little guy away to gather it. You remember the moment:

“Tiny bee, thou honey-birdling,
Lord of all the forest flowers,
Fly away and gather honey,
Bring to me the forest-sweetness,
Found in Metsola’s rich gardens,
And in Tapio’s fragrant meadows,
From the petals of the flowers,
From the blooming herbs and grasses,
Thus to heal my hero’s anguish,
Thus to heal his wounds of evil.”

            The bee does his best but regular honey isn’t effective. So he flies off to fetch the magic honey from the Isles of the Blessed. Even that isn’t enough. It’s only when he flies all the way to the Seventh and highest Heaven of God (Ukko/Jumala) himself and brings back the ultimate honey that gives life to every living thing that Lemminkäinen is revived. Such a noble bee.

Now the mother well anointing,
Heals her son, the magic singer,
Eyes, and ears, and tongue, and temples,
Breaks, and cuts, and seams, anointing,
Touching well the life-blood centres,
Speaks these words of magic import
To the sleeping Lemminkäinen:
“Wake, arise from out thy slumber,
From the worst of low conditions,
From thy state of dire misfortune!”

            You’ll notice she speaks in mellifluous trochaic tetrameter, every Finnish rune-singer’s preferred metre. Honey-tongued Henry W. Longfellow borrowed it for The Song of Hiawatha after spending a summer in Sweden in 1835 and picking up a bit of Finnish. Or so Joe tells me.

            The point is, honey is good for you. Around here, in ancient times, the priestesses of Artemis and Demeter were referred to as melissae – bees – while the original Melissa was a gracious nymph, one of Zeus’s nannies, who taught the first humans how to turn honey into mead. Another reason to be grateful.

            Is the honey from my neighbours’ hives the best in the world? Well, there’s some serious competition out there. I still carry a torch for a certain organic Tasmanian Leatherwood honey that some kind soul imported into Toronto, circa 2003. It was sold in colourful little tins and I haven’t seen it for years but it was as pure as thought and heady with the aroma of tropical fruit.

            Lacking that, we have this. I stir some into my thick local yoghurt at breakfast-time and then slice up a peeled, juice-gravid, flavour-bomb of a peach over it. It certainly brings me back to life. Next week, in honour of Lemminkäinen’s doting mama, I shall take the jar in the photograph back to my mother in London.

Marinatos another (more conventional) way

I’ve lost track of the mayoral race in Toronto but it can’t be sillier than an ongoing situation that pertains in our corner of the island. Across the straits of Corfu on the Albanian mainland is the town of Saranda. I have watched it, through binoculars, grow in the last 30 years from a grim-looking seaside resort for Communist party members to a substantial city. And they, I am sure have watched Corfu. Our island is green; their hills are dun-coloured and parched. Countless boats, from hired skiffs to the vast floating, Bond-movie gin palaces of the Russian oligarchs (ironic, no?), crowd the waters around our coast but until the overthrow of the Communists it was forbidden for ordinary Albanians to own boats or even live by the coast. Back in the ’80s, defectors would try to float across on inner tubes (it’s only a mile or two away) and we would watch gunboats with searchlights hunt for them in the night. The would-be refugees had seen the island so tantalizingly close on the horizon, heard tales of jobs and political freedom and liberal attitudes – had even heard the music of the Kassiopi discotheques on nights when the wind was from the west.

            All that has changed now. Now Albania encourages visitors. It also wants to be seen as part of the modern world and to teach its own population that no one needs to envy Greece any more. To do this, a discotheque has been built in Saranda with immensely powerful speakers pointing outwards across the sea directly at Corfu. Disco music plays continuously, day and night, as a gesture of independence and cultural libertarianism. You can hear it quite clearly in Kassiopi. I can even hear it now as I sit on my terrace in the peace of this breathless afternoon – just the bass drum – so quietly it’s an almost subliminal murmur, as subtle and as unrelenting as my own pulse.

            The mayor of Thinalion, the district which includes this village and Kassiopi, has complained to the mayor of Saranda. The mayor of Saranda just gave him the finger and turned up the decibels. Now western tourists who come to Corfu will know that Saranda is cool too. Albania has disco.

            I can’t imagine how loud it must be for the citizens of Saranda itself! Unbelievable. I wonder if any of them ever wish for the silent curfews of the old regime?

             In other news, I ended up using those delightful fresh anchovies in another way entirely – a different version of Marinato that is popular in Corfu Town and much more conventionally Mediterranean. They do something very similar in Spain, and I’m sure in Italy, and probably in Turkey, too, and each cuisine will claim to have invented the technique.

First, butterfly the anchovies by twisting off their heads, pulling out their guts and running a finger along the spine to loosen it from the flesh. The bone picks out quite easily and leaves you with a perfect butterflied anchovy fillet. Rinse them in water then lay them in a dish and marinate them in wine vinegar for two hours. The flesh turns as white as a rollmop’s. Two hours is plenty of time, in my opinion. Some people suggest leaving them in the vinegar overnight – or even for 24 hours – but then you are left with an anchovy that tastes of nothing but vinegar. Think of this more as a miniature ceviche.

After the two hours, drain the anchovies and, to mitigate the vinegar a little more, rinse them once in cold water and let them dry on a clean tea towel. After that, there are options. I gave mine a second marinade in olive oil that also contained a tiny amount of finely minced garlic. Then I lifted them out onto a plate (they are incredibly slippery so you need patience and a slotted spoon) and sprinkled them with chopped up Mediterranean parsley and a squeeze of lemon juice before tucking in. Scrumptious. You can taste the actual fish but the vinegar is still there, deep down in the background.

There were far too many to eat in one sitting so I covered the remainder in oil and put them in the fridge. The oil solidified overnight but melted again with an hour out of the fridge. You can keep Marinato for days that way. Today, for lunch on day three, I managed to finish them off, heaping the last of them over a salad of tomato, onion and small-leafed basil from the bush in the courtyard. A glass of very cold fino sherry would have been an ideal accompaniment but I had to make do with equally chilly retsina. It proved a surprisingly effective understudy for the sherry, the resin in the wine holding its own against the onion and the latent vinegar in the fish. All enjoyed to the very faintest throb of Albanian pride.

our rosemary hedge, now officially declared out-of-control

Just before two o’clock this afternoon, when the village was silently settling into its afternoon siesta, I heard the faint noise of a vehicle and a man shouting. It sounded like he was yelling at a bunch of badly behaved children who had thrown things at his car and were now running gleefully away, but in fact he was proclaiming to the world that he had fish to sell. I went outside (the heat hitting me as if I had leaned over a kiln) and climbed the path to the road. It was the fishmonger from the coastal town of Kassiopi in his small white refrigerated van coming to the end of his morning’s work. Normally he doesn’t drive this far – the track ends at our rosemary hedge and doing a u-turn is always tricky – but I guess business isn’t so good for him these days, with so many villas unrented.

            He climbed out of the van and pulled open the rear door.

            “Gavros,” he said in his gruff, hoarse-voiced way and pointed at a white polystyrene box of fresh anchovies – slender, handsome black and silver fish, each about as long as my middle finger. That’s all he had – everything else sold – or perhaps that was all the fish that the last remaining Kassiopi boats could find in our exhausted Ionian.

            I bought half a kilo for 2.5 euros and watched him weigh them in his scales then tip them into a plastic bag.

            Nine times out of ten, I would do what everyone around here does with gavros – toss them in flour, salt and mild red paprika and deep fry them, scrunching them whole, heads and all, with no adornment but a twist of lemon. But walking back to the house past our rosemary hedge I was stricken with guilt. Rosemary grows like topsy in this climate. You plant six-inch shoots of it about three feet apart and in a year or two you have an impenetrable, delightfully fragrant hedge, five or six feet high, that is smothered in blue flowers, come July. You also have more rosemary than you could ever need in a lifetime of cooking. I have some favourite rosemary recipes – with lamb, obviously, and also chopped up and sprinkled on a very buttery open-faced apple tart before it goes into the oven (if there’s time, I make a rosemary syrup to further gild the lily) – but it isn’t something the Greeks use very much, at least not on this island.

            They do have one old recipe, however, that evolved as a way of preserving fish before there was refrigeration. It’s known as marinato (which suggests an Italian origin) and it involves frying the fish as mentioned above and then smothering them in a sauce that is sharp and sweet, the sugar and acid acting as a preservative for up to a week. You can snack on it at any time or eat the lot for lunch – it’s a versatile treat.

Back in the ’80s, when my wife and I were writing our book, A Kitchen In Corfu, we did some serious research into the details of the recipe and found that every household had their own variation – some leaving out the tomatoes or the raisins or substituting fennel tops instead of dill. We ended up using the one we liked best in the book, though I’ve never cooked it since. Here it is – but you’ll need three times as many fresh gavros as I’m looking at right now.

To make Marinato for six, take 1½ kilos of fish (smelt would be an ideal alternative to fresh anchovies), the juice of ½ a lemon, some plain flour, salt and pepper, 75 mL of olive oil, two tomatoes, 4 cloves of garlic, 50 mL of wine vinegar, 100 mL of dry white wine, two big sprigs of rosemary, 3 bay leaves, a generous pinch of fresh dill, 10 mL of white sugar, and a scant handful of raisins.

Clean and wash the fish, let them drain. Dip them in the lemon juice, season with salt and pepper then roll them lightly in the flour. Peel and sieve the tomatoes, chop the garlic coarsely and set them aside. Put the olive oil into a pan and fry two level tablespoons of flour, stirring until it turns yellow and makes a smooth paste. Add the tomatoes, garlic and everything else except the fish, stirring away and letting it all simmer nicely for about ten minutes. Meanwhile fry the floured fish in more olive oil until they are golden and crisp. Lay them close together in a shallow bowl and drown them with the sauce.

That’s how they do marinato in these parts. Some people might gag when I say that it’s just as delicious eaten cold as hot, but if, like me, you enjoy cold pizza for breakfast, you’ll know exactly what I mean.