Honey, Olives, Octopus by Christopher Bakken

Author:Christopher Bakken
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520275096
Publisher: University of California Press

CHAPTER FIVE

* * *

Meat

Goats in the Ghost Towns of Chios

During the long winter months in western Pennsylvania—when it snows all day, every day, and low clouds suffocate our valley—I feel most intensely my longing for Greece. The distance is vast and painful and the offerings of the Greek table, all freshness and ripeness, seem inconceivable. By January, I'm starving for the place, having run out of supplies I brought home from the previous summer's visit: sour cherry preserves, bags of throumbes, jars of Kythirian honey, and even the precious bottles of tsipouro and olive oil, which I've rationed for months, since in them I horde reminders of the Greek sun.

When I can bear it no longer, I shovel out my driveway and skid down my town's equivalent of Main Street to Otter's Pub, a smoky dive bar with sticky floors and an irritable, redneck clientele. There, Yannis Fekos grumbles Greek to me through the thickets of his grey beard while we sip glasses of the Lesbian ouzo he keeps in stock on my behalf. I feel some relief in exercising my Greek conjugations with Yannis, and in the welcome heat of the anise, and in meandering, as our conversations always do, back to the obscure corners of Greece we remember for each other. I tell him stories about the Greco-Turkish settlements of Thrace, which I visited twenty years earlier, or of an octopus I snagged at Horefto on Pelion one year, or of a meal of paximadia, goat cheese, and raki I once shared with a polyglot priest on the southern coast of Crete. Yannis reciprocates with stories from his childhood in Pityos, on Chios, where his family still owns a house or two beneath one of the village's (now defunct) windmills. When he speaks about Chios, his eyes brighten with sad happiness and the claustrophobic atmosphere of the midwestern bar evaporates like a bad mirage.

Though I have visited Chios three times before and have always been attracted to the island's fascinating history and excellent food, somehow I've failed to visit its most important destination: Taverna Makellos, an outpost of artisanal Greek cuisine in Yannis's own village. He's reminded me of this each time we've spoken for several years, one caterpillar eyebrow raised incredulously. “How could you expect to know the food of my island unless you visit Pityos?” he asked again last winter.

“Listen. You will go into the center of the village and utter the name Fekos and you will be greeted everywhere you go. Take some photos of my family there. They will remember me. And you must bring me back some hourmades—oh, Panayia mou, the olives!—and also a portion of kopanisti, the cheese they ferment for forty days. It will make hair grow on your feet. Then sit for a while and eat goat and makaronia at Makellos. Then you will know.”

I'd be happy to visit Chios on an ambassadorial mission for Yannis Fekos, but I also have my own reasons for going. First, I'm obsessed with handmade pasta; I have been since my raids upon the kitchens of Tuscany and Umbria decades ago.

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