Hello my friends! I would like to wish to all of you a very Happy and Prosperous New Year full of happy moments and lots of love. How were your holidays? Did you have fun? Did you meet with family or friends or both? We went on a trip to the northern part of Greece...
Apples have been growing in this corner of the world since ancient years. Greek mythology is full of tales that, at some point, involve an apple somewhere by someone. I have already mentioned the myth of Atalante and Hippomenes and there is also the famous story of Eris who threw an apple saying “To the...
Pasticcio in Italian means “mess” and indeed Pastitsio is a dish that combines pasta, ground meat and bechamel. The name was established during 17th century in Italy. There are several variations of pastitsio that include dough, pasta and meat ragù. Pasticcio alla Ferrarese is a type of calzone which is stuffed with pasta, meat, mushrooms...
One of the most popular stories (likely false) is that a man named Juan Mendez from Chihuahua, Mexico used a donkey to carry around his supplies for his food cart. To keep the food warm, he would wrap it up in a big homemade flour tortilla. First appearing in the early 1900s, right around the...
Zucchini, like all squash, has its ancestry in the Americas. However, the varieties of green, cylindrical squash harvested immature and typically called “zucchini” were developed in northern Italy, long after the introduction of cucurbits from the Americas. It appears that this occurred in the second half of the 19th century, though the first description of...
Dill is very well known from ancient years. In ancient Greece dill plant was a sign of wealth and burnt dill oil to aromatize their homes. Soldiers placed burnt dill seeds on their wounds to heal. For ancient Egyptians dill was a medical plant that was used as an ingredient in the production of pain...
A fermented fish sauce called garum was a staple of Greco-Roman cuisine and of the Mediterranean economy of the Roman Empire, as the first-century encyclopedist Pliny the Elder writes in his Historia Naturalis and the fourth/fifth-century Roman culinary text Apicius includes garum in its recipes. The use of similar fermented anchovy sauces in Europe can...
The name basil is derived from Greek basileus “king”, because of the royal fragrance of this herb. Basileus “king” means essentially “people’s leader. Basil belongs to the family of Lamiaceae. Its leaves show an intense green color on the upper side and a green-gray color in the bottom side. Today, basil is cultivated in many...
Garlic and onion have a common history, similar usage and common properties. Botanically speaking they are a short of brothers as they both belong to the allium category. Although garlic comes from central Asia, it was very well known in ancient Greece and Egypt as well. Herodotus mentions in his writings, that the slaves who...
The story of thyme goes back to Sumerians some 5,500 years ago. As far as we know, they were the first to use it as a condiment and medicine. In ancient Egypt it was among the ingredients they used to mummify the dead. In ancient Greece, since Homer years thyme apart from condiment it was...
