Gavalochori is home to a unique collaboration between an American palaeoethnobotanist and a Greek sommelier. Christine Hastorf, an anthropology professor at the University of California—Berkeley, and Stella Diomantaraki, a sommelier at restaurants and tavernas in the Apokoronas region, have teamed up to recreate old Cretan recipes. Here’s how this happened: Christine is friends with an American woman who owns a house in Gavalochori, and when the house was purchased, Christine loaned her some money to help her buy it. As a result, Christine has an open invitation to stay in the house, so she tries to come to Gavalochori for a week or two every summer.
Christine met Stella when Stella was working as a sommelier at the Emerald taverna in Plaka. They discovered that they have a common interest in the foods of Crete, which prompted Stella to reveal that her doctor in Exopoli had found some old Cretan recipes in a trunk. This started the two women on a quest to study and actually make the 10 recipes.
Cooking up the recipes was no easy task, however, because they only contained a list of ingredients. They didn’t include the amounts to put into the dish and nothing about how to put the ingredients together. Stella, who is from Crete, used her knowledge of Cretan foods and recipes to identify what dish each recipe was designed to produce and how to prepare it. The two women have been cooking at least one recipe each summer since the project began and have just one left to make. The recipes produced, for example, a chicken dish with the ingredients of chicken or wild bird, olive oil, cheese, wild onions, honey, garlic, white pepper, raisins, coriander seeds, and cumin. Another was a leek puree made of wild leeks, cheese, olive oil, garlic, and honey. Were there any flops? “No,” explains Christine, “because Stella is a good cook!”
Christine had help from her undergraduate students to try to determine how old the recipes are. They did research on the ingredients in the recipes to determine the earliest known dates of their existence, where the plants and other items were first domesticated, and whether they are native to Crete or when they first appeared on the island. The question she asked about the recipes was, “When could this recipe have been made?” In other words, given the ingredients, could it have been made, for example, in Neolithic times? During the Bronze Age? Although the answer to this question can’t be established for sure, Christine thinks the recipes are from the 16th century or even earlier given the ingredients that are included. None of the ingredients are from the colonial era (foods such as tomatoes, chili peppers, potatoes, and cucumbers), which leads her to believe some of the recipes could even have been prepared by the first Neolithic farmers on Crete.
Christine brings a great deal of experience to the food project with Stella. She earned a B.A. in Human Biology from Stanford University and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her archaeological work has taken her to Bolivia, Peru, Italy, Denmark, Turkey, Hungary, Argentina, and Mexico, where she focuses on plants and their functions in ancient cultures. When she began in this discipline there were few paleoethnobotanists in the discipline of archaeology, in part because it is not easy to study ancient plants. She studies the remnants of plants at archaeological sites and in her laboratory and has developed new methods for studying ancient plants. Among her many books and articles are The Social Archaeology of Food: Thinking About Eating in the Past and Present and an edited volume, Current Paleoethnobotany: Analytical Methods and Cultural Interpretations of Archaeological Plant Remains. Christine plans to coauthor an essay with Stella about their recipe project and will submit it to a food-history journal.
Stella, who lives in Kokkino Chorio, is a professional sommelier (CMS certified) with certified studies on wine (WSPC level 3). She graduated from the Hellenic Open University with a degree in Greek culture. As part of her professional career, she has worked at the restaurant Tudor Hall in Athens, Badrutt’s Palace and Zermatt MX in Switzerland, and Nobu Matsuhisa in Mykonos, among others. She is currently involved in the gastropub Steria, located in the Splantzia neighborhood of Chania. She runs the pub according to the principles of sustainability, zero footprint, and recycling, and she incorporates the same principles in her small catering business Nakara Catering. Stella is now writing a cookbook because she believes one of the most important intangible heritages of Crete is its culinary art.
Even as Christine and Stella complete their forensic culinary project, there is still that amazing Cretan food to be enjoyed in the present. Στην υγεία μας!
