Nikitas wrote:Bucksboy has a point. You get the same scene her in Greece too, especially around tourist areas where cooking is sort of industrial.
The other day I went to a seminar organised by the Cyprus embassy in Athens and a lady, Marilena Ioannidou, lectured on traditional Cyprus food. As I suspected, back in the "old days" ie before 1965, beef was never eaten, and animals the size of lamb or pig were slaughtered once or twice a year. The rest of the year people ate chicken, fish and lots of vegetables. Yet today wherever you go the first thing offered is either lamb kleftiko or pork.
Whatever happened to the places called "mageireia" or "maeirka"? Dont they exist anymore in Cyprus? They were working peoples eateries and served one or two dishes per day, usually some kind of bean. There was one near the Pantjaros Hani in Nicosia and I remember seeing the largest serving of boiled beans served as a salad there. It was a platter of beans swimming in olive oil with fresh cut tomatoes and parsley on top served with a side dish of spring onions, olives and salty anchovies. Now that is Mediterranean cooking but I wonder how the tourists would take to it.
Nikitas,
At last! someone who doesn't think I'm toying with "food racism"!
If most of the other plonkers had read the post correctly, they would see that I was not slandering Med food here but merely suggesting that the normal things you get at local tavernas are very often prepared without much thought. Nobody has yet stated why restaurants do not change their menus according to the seasons and why you are unable generally to order dishes that are a bit different to the norm.
The food you describe above sounds like proper Med food and is the kind of thing you can still find in rural France & Italy. Now you are talking!
