Athens

Cookie Season: Athens' Best Kourambiedes

You can’t have Christmas in Greece without melomakarona and kourambiedes, two traditional cookies that are present in every household this time of year. The former were once prepared for Christmas and the latter for New Year’s, but gradually the two treats became inseparable (because why have one when you can have both?). Kourambiedes (the singular is kourambies) are believed to originate from the Azeri Iranian city of Tabriz, where they are called qurabiya. The Greeks, it appears, borrowed the name for their cookie from the Ottomans, who called them kurabiye (kuru meaning “dry” and biye meaning “biscuit”). Besides in Greece, variations of kourambies can be found throughout the Middle East, Turkey (kurabiye), Cyprus (kurabies), Albania (kurabie) and Bulgaria (kurabiiki), as well as the Andalusian part of Spain and Mexico (polboron).

Athens

Best Bites 2015: Athens

Editor’s note: We’re celebrating another year of excellent backstreets eating by taking a look back at our favorite restaurants and dishes of 2015. In a country that can boast of very few authentic (if there can be said to be such a thing when it comes to cooking) Greek desserts, galaktoboureko remains quintessentially Greek. This semolina custard pie of cream between layers of thin phyllo doused in syrup remains a firm national favorite. Kosmikon is the undisputed king of Athenian galaktoboureko. An old-fashioned dessert shop operating since 1961, it now has five locations around Athens. The galaktoboureko here is done the traditional way, with butter from Thessaly in central Greece or Mytilene, homemade phyllo and – most importantly – no lemon or orange flavoring, just the traditional vanilla. The result is that rare thing when it comes to phyllo-based, syrup-drenched desserts: a wonderfully balanced concoction, sweet but not too sweet, with cream oozing from the sides, and the phyllo remaining thin and crisp. We recommend going to the two central locations in Agios Nikolaos and Agios Eleftherios for their charmingly retro atmosphere.

Athens

The Phyllofiles: Athens's Best Baklava

The subject of frequent arguments over who actually invented it, baklava has a history as multilayered as the flaky dessert itself. The story may actually go all the way back to the 8th century BCE and the Assyrians, who layered bread dough with chopped nuts and honey and baked the result – a kind of proto-baklava – in wood-burning ovens. Perhaps carried by the winds of trade, different versions of this ancient dessert appeared on Greece’s shores a few centuries later. The 3rd-century-CE Deipnosophistae ("Banquet of the Learned") – sometimes referred to as the oldest surviving cookbook – provides the recipe for gastrin, aka Cretan “Glutton Cake,” a sweet that also seems to presage the arrival of baklava as we know it. The instructions, attributed to Chrysippus of Tyana, one of the leading dessert experts of antiquity, calls for turning various chopped nuts, boiled honey and poppy and sesame seeds into a paste which is then spread between two sheets of thin, rectangular dough. At a certain point, ancient Greek cooks started using thinner sheets of pastry, better known as phyllo – Greek for “leaf” – getting closer to today’s baklava.

Barcelona

CB on the Road: Santa Coloma de Farners' Ratafia Festival

2015 has been a banner year for the herb-infused liqueur known as ratafia. In the little town of Santa Coloma de Farners, within the Catalan province of Girona, locals have been making this unique libation for centuries, with each family passing down their own version of the drink from one generation to the next. In 1997, within the county’s official records, came a major food discovery – written recipes for three distinct styles of ratafia dating back to 1842, which are now recognized as the oldest of their kind in Catalonia. These handwritten lists of ingredients (along with other culinary notations, savory recipes and home remedies) were discovered in the old notebooks of Francesc Rosquellas, once the proprietor of a café/restaurant in Santa Coloma de Farners whose name had long since been forgotten.

Istanbul

CB on the Road: From Blog to Table in Alaçatı

On the western coast of Turkey, the town of Alaçatı sways to the light of a thousand glowing cafés. What was once a typically beautiful and sleepy Turkish fishing village has transformed into a hub for glitzy nightlife. People swarm the seaside walkways to see and be seen, arriving in metallic SUVs and humming Italian land rockets. Throngs of bejeweled summer vacationers stream through picture-book cobbled streets and whitewashed roads, but if you can break through the crowds, a fantastic meal awaits. Babushka Restaurant offers the opposite of what Alaçatı is known for: homey seclusion. Nestled in the walled garden of the chef’s home, restaurant goers are transported away from the hum of Alaçatı to the peace of their grandmother’s backyard.

Athens

Building Blocks: The Sweet Science of Making Greek Honey

Editor's note: Our recurring feature, Building Blocks, focuses on foods and ingredients that are fundamental to the cuisines we write about. This may come as a surprise, but little Greece is Europe’s fourth most important honey producer after Spain, Germany and Hungary. Every year, between 12,000 and 17,000 tons of this liquid gold are stolen from the country’s roughly 1.5 million hives and poured into jars to satisfy the local desire for honey. And it seems Greeks can’t get enough of it. They rank high among the world’s consumers, slurping up 1.7 kg per person every year as they use it to sweeten tea, drizzle over yogurt, slather on toast and soak baklava and other desserts. By contrast, the average American ingests a mere 400 grams.

Rio

Rotisseria Sírio Libanesa: The Open Table

On a Monday at 1 p.m., private equity investor Nargilla Rodrigues and her two colleagues bring a fourth co-worker to the Rotisseria Sírio Libanesa in Rio’s Largo do Machado neighborhood to initiate him to their weekly lunch ritual. An army of diners in business attire have packed the small restaurant and clump around the to-go counter. Rodrigues grabs a standing table and fires off an order of stuffed cabbage leaves, kafta and lentil rice like they are shares in a fire sale.