Experimenting with local cuisine

The role of a food historian can be frustrating in a country that takes little pride in its eating traditions finds THEO PANAYIDES

Florentia Kythreotou photographs well, for a food historian; she seems at ease in front of the camera. Only later do I discover that becoming an expert on Cyprus food and wine was something she embarked upon later, in her mid-30s (she’s now 52); before that she spent nearly a decade as a TV journalist, writing and presenting the news on Logos – the first-ever private channel – among other accomplishments. Her face does look vaguely familiar, from TV in the 90s, though I couldn’t say for sure. It was a long time ago.

Perhaps the island’s best known food product halloumi

“I tried something new,” she tells me – speaking not of her sideways career move but the pot of greenish tea on the table between us. We’re sitting on a quiet verandah in a house in Latsia which is still (more or less) surrounded by fields, 18 years after she and her family moved in – and the tea, she explains, is a mixture of rose, ginger, mastic and mint, a blend of flavours that sounds almost cacophonous (it actually works quite well, though the ginger tends to overpower). This particular cuppa is a bit of an experiment – and her mid-30s move was also an experiment, leaving a field in which she was well-established (though the hours were unsuitable for raising kids) to become a freelancer in a subject which, like her tea, may sound slightly odd to many people.

How exactly do you study food? What does she do? The answer, I suppose, is ‘everything’, for the simple reason that a freelancer can’t afford to be picky – but her main roles include doing research for the Cyprus Virtual Food Museum (foodmuseum.cs.ucy.ac.cy/), where you’ll find hundreds of recipes for local edibles arranged by historical period, geographical area or alphabetically, and writing books like her latest effort, a slim volume on the “ceremonial breads” of Paphos. The book displays the likes of ‘pentastrin’ (a star-shaped bread from the village of Stroumbi, typically baked on New Year’s Day) and ‘galena’ (Easter cookies made with milk, butter and sugar) – and it’s worth pointing out that it was written in collaboration with Zorbas Bakeries, whom Florentia approached (seeking sponsorship, basically) as part of her association with Paphos 2017: European Capital of Culture. She likes “synergies,” she reports brightly – which is also a nice way of saying that she has to initiate projects, trying to bring people together, or nothing would ever get done.

Why should it be so hard to promote local cuisine? Don’t Cypriots claim to be food-lovers? Maybe they do, sighs Florentia, but “we Cypriots have a bit of a complex when it comes to the traditional, we’re a bit ashamed of the traditional”. I point out – and she readily agrees – that creative Cypriot cuisine doesn’t really exist at the moment. There are no local chefs taking traditional food and adding a modern twist, as happens in France or Spain; indeed, there are hardly any chef-owned restaurants at all. Chefs are invariably employees, usually hired to provide easily-palatable international (or, at best, ‘Mediterranean’) cuisine – or, if we’re talking tavernas, to recycle the usual array of greatest hits for the benefit of visitors.

“In the end, it’s just for tourists,” admits Florentia. “All that’s left, you might say, is the touristy version of the Cypriot taverna, where you’ll eat the usual. Tahini from the bucket, ready-made tzatziki from the bucket, and so on.”
Shouldn’t we be more proud of our culinary heritage?

Absolutely, but “we’re not proud of it. Shall I tell you something? Up to 1974, when the invasion happened, I think something like 70 per cent of GDP came from agriculture. We were a nation of farmers. Overnight, this social fabric changed completely. So we entered the modern age very suddenly, and we’ve never really assimilated this progress – in fact, we became ‘progressive’ in a very bad sense. I remember it was in the 70s and 80s that households first started eating corned beef and tinned ham – and corn oil! So we rejected all things traditional, because they were ‘horiatiko’ [village-style] and bad.”

It’s like we’re embarrassed by our local products – or else, when we try to promote them, we invariably do so in a folksy way (a “dead” way, she says scathingly), as if presenting some quaint country custom that we embrace in the name of Tradition though of course we’re far too sophisticated to do it ourselves.

Condescension is the name of the game, a domain inhabited by the black-clad village granny and the old man with the moustache and vraka. “If we’re going to move forward in gastronomy, and in tourism, it has to happen through organised professional units,” protests Florentia. “I mean yes, the old lady who goes to the market to sell vegetables from her garden and halloumi that she makes herself is very nice and picturesque – but that’s not how Cyprus is going to go forward. It won’t be through the casual economy, with no certifications and so forth. No, I don’t agree with that. I mean, I like it – I’m a romantic too, I like to go the market looking for small village apples or whatever. But we have to get away from this folksiness”.

This may be a good time to point out that Florentia has a BSc in Economics and a Master’s in Business Administration – and also that she “had the audacity to ask my parents to send me to study in the US”, even though the family were by no means rich (Dad was a salesman, Mum a housewife). She grew up “in a very simple neighbourhood,” as she puts it, “where all the houses were packed together, and we spent our time playing in the street with the other kids”; her brother studied in Greece, her sister didn’t go to university at all. It’s a modest, unexceptional background, nor was food and wine particularly prominent in her childhood – but she’s always been a proactive, can-do person, a trait she now brings to her sometimes diffuse role as culinary historian.

People’s teenage years often tend to mark them, and Florentia (though shy as a teen, or at least shyer than she is now) was a star athlete, playing volleyball for the Apoel women’s team and breaking records in the high-jump (she was national girls’ champion, and held the record for many years after she retired); that kind of confidence is bound to persist into adulthood. She remains very active, exercising regularly and enjoying Nature at every opportunity: it may not be apparent from her elegantly coiffed appearance on the quiet verandah, flanked by tea and carob-honey cookies, but she’s happy to snorkel for hours in the summer and goes at least twice a week to pick mushrooms and wild asparagus (the so-called agrelia) with her husband George in the winter.

She’s a woman of obsessions, though she balks at that particular word (“maybe a kind of neurosis,” she corrects, which doesn’t necessarily sound better but whatever). “I get passionate about certain things, like cooking, gastronomy, wine, everything that has to do with Nature and the sea… Fish!” she adds, seemingly out of nowhere. “I can tell you all about the fish of Cyprus. I can list them for you, I can identify them”. She doesn’t just pick mushrooms but also knows their names, the white oyster mushrooms of the Pleurotus family or the mountain reds (a.k.a. Lactarius deliciosus) that grow in the shade of pine trees. She’s in some ways an intellectual – and a book-reader in general, currently immersed in Amin Maalouf – having studied widely in gastronomic theory, but her new career was actually sparked by something more direct and obsessive: 20 years ago, while pregnant with her son (she also has a daughter, now 18), she experienced a sudden craving to start kneading dough and baking bread – and the rest followed naturally. Her drive, in other words, didn’t come from reading books, but from literally getting her hands dirty.

It’s a useful personality to have if you’re trying to promote something that many locals find quaint at best, vaguely embarrassing at worst. There’s no real food culture here. “When you’re eating corn on the cob with Nutella,” she points out – this delicacy is apparently on offer at all good food stands – “this has to mean something”. The CTO pays lip-service to the idea of ‘alternative tourism’, but does precious little in terms of planning and infrastructure. There’s no doubt gastronomy could be a money-maker as well as a cultural boon: Florentia recalls taking traditional Cypriot products – carob honey, grape-based kiofteria, the dried goat’s-meat ham known as tsamarella – to the Salone del Gusto in Torino, one of the biggest gastronomic exhibitions in the world, “and the Italians, with all their culture, went nuts for these things – which nowadays we make fun of!”.

How to change this mentality? Simply put, she gets her hands dirty. She’s made food documentaries, and wrote a newspaper column (in Politis) for a number of years. Last year she worked on the ‘Cyprus Breakfast’ scheme – aimed at adding the likes of anari and rizogalo to hotel breakfast buffets – as gastronomic consultant and food stylist, and also wrote a booklet called The Art of Breakfast in Cyprus and Greece, this one in collaboration with Louis Hotels who’ve been valued partners in the scheme (supported by the CTO, to its credit). This year there’s another project, this one spearheaded by the Food Museum itself – a trio of ‘culinary walks’ related to wheat, wine and oil, the “Holy Trinity of the Mediterranean diet”. ‘Wheat’ took place yesterday, with ‘Wine’ coming up on the 22nd and ‘Oil’ on November 12 – a series of visits to traditional bakeries, wineries and oil mills, with Florentia giving guided tours and leading a couple of workshops.

It all adds up – not exactly a living wage, I suspect (George is a civil servant, which must come in handy), but certainly a vocation. Besides, things are changing. We now have a Protected Designation of Origin product in kolokasi (taro) from Sotira, with halloumi bound to follow soon, while three other products – Paphos sausage, Agros rose preserve and loukoumi of Geroskipou – have qualified for the slightly lesser Protected Geographical Indication status. Bit by bit, a nascent food culture may be emerging. All that’s really left is for a new generation to stop associating traditional products with a village life they never knew, for some talented young chef to open a modern Cypriot restaurant – preferably one that specifies each food’s origin and producer, like they do abroad – and for the chattering classes to come around to the joys of little-known treats like kaloirka (Cypriot tortellini, mostly made in the Skarinou area) and halitzia, the sour-salty cheese – somewhere between halloumi and feta – from the Tillyria region.

And what of Florentia Kythreotou? Her kids are grown up now, her daughter about to flee the nest. It may be time to start another chapter – a new obsession (but don’t call it that), following the sports in her teens, TV in her 20s and food and wine in her 30s and 40s. Maybe she’ll do a PhD, she suggests, then apply to teach a university course in gastronomy; or maybe she’ll combine two obsessions and present a food show – though her opinion of today’s TV channels is low, to put it mildly.

Food is so central to our lives, and so abused – yet life keeps surprising you. A few weeks ago, she and some friends were passing through Kampos (surely one of the most remote villages in Cyprus) and happened upon a roadside restaurant. The six of them were the only customers. “Mr Melis cooked especially for us,” she recalls. He made lamb souvla, adding some excellent halloumi from the village of Inia to the charcoal, plus stuffed courgette flowers and “courgettes from his garden mixed with eggs from his hens. And he cut grapes from his vines, and gave us pallouze made from his grapes”. You can still find good food, concludes Florentia – but Mr Melis is old, and didn’t actually cook the food himself. (“You know who cooked all this great food?” she asks by way of punchline: “A Vietnamese lady!”) In fact, it’s quite likely that he seldom has many customers, and no longer runs the place as a business. Things are changing, indeed – but can our traditional cuisine re-emerge before it dies off completely? Hopefully.