BREAKING BREAD BREAKING FREE…

ARTON, OINON KAI THEAMATA…OF BREAD, WINE AND SPECTACLE.  It is what this nation of gods and philosophers is about and if you rub shoulders with them, you will inevitably be drawn into these pleasures of the flesh. We’ve just had…two weeks ago… `Apokries’…the last Sunday before Lent… when after the carnival of colourful floats, gaudy costumes, blaring music and dancing, we sit at tables trembling with drooling dishes of over-indulgence…chunks of red meat bubbling in sauces, grilled pork chops and lamb chops laced with frizzling fat and heavily garnished with sprigs of oregano and thyme and sizzling village sausages and wedges of chunky meat pies and salads of  traditional and modern versions with strawberries and quinoa and cheese tuiles and all… washed down with robust ruby red wine spilling from carafes. Well, we skipped the carnival and snipped off all the frills and went right to the meat of the matter…sat at a table at our favourite restaurant with Yiannis’ sister and her family and over-indulged to give us strength and courage for the morrow…KATHARI DEFTHERA…CLEAN MONDAY OR SHROVE MONDAY…which is the first day of Lent.

 Clean Monday, the beginning of abstinence and fast is more symbolic than anything else, unlike in the days of yore or in monasteries where cowled monks in robes, swished their way silently in narrow draughty corridors and subsisted on bread, water and prayers for 40 days. But in the days of now…we abstain from meat…but we are free to indulge in the harvests of the sea and imbibe from Dionysus’s urn. Now that my in-laws have passed, there’s no more sitting at the family table. Alas, I have not learnt how to make all those mouth–watering seafood dishes that my mother-in-law used to so painstakingly prepare. The fruits of the sea are just so slippery and tricky…they have to be cooked just so or those lovely pink prawns and wobbly octopus become chewy and leathery. It needs commitment in the kitchen…which I sadly lack…and the fish roe dip which is done in stages with lots of layering is…way out of my league…for a cook like me…for a quick CHOP IT UP, CHUCK IT IN AND TOSS IT ABOUT cook like me. So we broke with tradition and went to a restaurant with this other couple. She’s from foreign parts like me and I mentioned her in my last blog post…yes the two of us, partners in crime who besmirched our poor husbands the last time we had lunch together.

We scooped up generous amounts of the fish roe dip with unleavened bread and picked and chewed and relished the fried kalamari…oh oh not supposed to consume oil on this day of fast…and licked our fingers after peeling off the prawns cooked in more…forbidden oil…with chilli and garlic and gurgled down the white wine, fruity and aromatic and in…VINO VERITAS…IN WINE THERE IS TRUTH…the truth which dribbled out from the nooks of our brains and slid off our tongues. Shrove Monday is supposedly a day of absolution when you cleanse yourself of all those venial sins that have pocked your soul. But I don’t think we were looking to be absolved. She doesn’t believe in any of that stuff and I…well there are still some wispy remnants of that Catholic guilt trailing after me. But… no no… our VERITAS wasn’t a confession or seeking absolution of any kind. It was just two mature birds, who had married into traditional families, tried to conform to all those rituals and mores, cultural and religious and…got very tired seeing no resolution on the horizon…and so lost our resolve and just set ourselves free.

We started with the food that our mothers-in-law used to ply us with. In the beginning we just accepted those dishes, even found them convenient, then decided we didn’t want them anymore…that wasn’t so easy…more of it kept coming with every show of resistance…`NO NO PLEASE I’VE ALREADY COOKED’. That fell on deaf ears and so my friend just took the food home and disposed of it quietly. I however, gave it away to the cleaning lady who was ever so thankful and when she wasn’t around, I shoved it in the fridge and let it mature and then declared it had gone off and…disposed of it.

Her tale of struggle was even more dramatic than mine. Her mother in-law used to send her to church every All Souls Day with a bowl of `koliva’…boiled wheat, raisins, pomegranate seeds, almonds and a coating of caster sugar…an offering to commemorate those loved ones who had passed. So every year in those early years, she stood in the church yard like an obedient daughter-in-law at a long table with the other Greek women with their bowls of koliva and filled packets of this offering and distributed them to the congregation after the Sunday service. Everyone in the gravest  of tones murmured to each other…O THEOS NA TON ANAPAUSEI…MAY GOD GRANT HIM ETERNAL REST…O THEOS NA THN ANAPAUSEI…MAY GOD GRANT HER ETERNAL REST…and those supplications went on and on and she in turn, clasped the hands of others and murmured back and saw horror in their eyes as she wished every one of them…`O THEOS VA SAS ANAPAUSEI…MAY GOD GRANT YOU ETERNAL REST… Come to think of it, the language was all so confounding and it was all Greek to us. I myself went to a funeral service a long time ago when I was struggling with the basics… stood in the queue in the dark church… with candle flames guttering and incense smoke pouring out of the censer… and filed past the relatives shaking their hands in sympathy and having every intention of sputtering out those pinched syllables that form the word … SYLIPITIRIA …CONDOLENCES…but uttered instead, something similar sounding that rolled off the tongue much more easily and went… way off the mark…offering everyone of those grieving relatives my … SYXARITIRIA… CONGRATULATIONS… on that ponderous and solemn occasion. Coming back to my friend, after some time she got weary, still accepted the bowl of koliva with her mother-in-law shouting after her not to forget this and that and at a safe distance tipped the soul food out and didn’t go to church. When she got back with the empty bowl, she was quizzed on whom she saw and she rattled off all the names and thus kept the peace.

So there we were on CLEAN MONDAY , under the influence of VINO, laughing over our gaffes and  unburdening and setting ourselves free.

So till the next time cheers!