A House in Corfu by Emma Tennant

Author:Emma Tennant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2002-11-08T05:00:00+00:00

Delicious smells are wafting from the kitchen at Rovinia, and we’re drawn in to see the table almost covered by a huge baking tray with slices of melanzane (eggplant or aubergine) awaiting the next stage of one of Maria’s magnificent moussakas. There are several dishes in preparation at once: chicken xoriatiki (as made in the village), which I’ve tried again and again at home but without ever achieving the taste of this apparently simple chicken-baked-with-herbs-and-potatoes concoction of Maria’s; keftedes, the thyme-and-sage-packed meatballs, to be eaten with a tomato sauce freshly squeezed from the red fruit, and sprinkled with the short-leafed basil that we now grow in pots on the balustrade of the terrace outside the kitchen door.

My mother and Maria exchange recipes, and Maria, who is a natural cook, takes as readily to exotic suggestions like Floating Islands—sweet yellow custard dotted with blobs of fluffy white meringue—as she does to lentil soup or stew. Today we’re embarking on a courgette soufflé. I own that my preference is for kolokithaki (courgette) as it is mostly eaten in Greece: boiled, cut into long yellowish-green strips and eaten tepid with olive oil and lemon juice. Something in the vegetable, as odd and idiosyncratic as, say, globe artichoke when eaten with an accompaniment of a glass of plain water, comes out when (frying and baking avoided) it is simply immersed in boiling water for five minutes, the oil and lemon imparting a flavour straight from Heaven. But the soufflé is delicious, of course, and Maria enjoys our efforts with it, pleased when it rises and philosophical when a stodgy base remains just that.

Maria is telling us about Dassia’s musical gifts, as we stand in the appetising fug of the kitchen. It’s agreeable to reflect that it takes only an opening of the back door—but one hundred wild cats and their kittens rush in if we do open it: they’re fed later in the day and can seriously impede the art of cooking—to plunge us straight into a dream that every holiday brochure attempts to capture: sun; a young vine trained from the back door right along the pebbled path to Maria and Thodoros’s house; geraniums that lift the heart with their wildly spreading profusion. Such a simple picture, which includes a chair on the tiles outside, a rush seat, the back and legs painted the ubiquitous Greek blue—but we’re suckers for it, like so many millions of others.

So I can’t resist going to open the door, to feel the blast of the heat, and to sniff, my first savouring of the day of the wild-herb smell from the mountains. This is the Greek Experience, we say, laughing at the ‘Cousin Justin’ attitude that adheres to Maurice Bowra, Cambridge dons and long earnest discussions of philhellenism. It’s simple—though we know we’d be considered philistines—as simple as a blue chair and a bright-red geranium bush. And, here it comes: a black cat so perfect against whitewashed wall and red flower that it can only be found in the Greek islands.

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