Constantin Ziulkas, holding her daughter Anastasia as a baby.
Courtesy of Anastasia Tsioulcas
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Courtesy of Anastasia Tsioulcas
Constantin Ziulkas, holding her daughter Anastasia as a baby.
Courtesy of Anastasia Tsioulcas
My dad gave me strict instructions: your single-minded goal should be to pamper a paper-thin, almost transparent Philo fabric. To use it as a mild Philo blanket, you’ll need a sufficient amount of melted butter and a clean, moist kitchen towel hidden next to it.Make sure your stuffing is already prepared and you squeezed all Drain the spinach with another towel, or a few. (There is more water than the plants think. You will run out of many kitchen towels.) Work as soon as possible, but don’t be afraid.
That’s how my dad, Konstantin Ziulkas, taught me to make SpanakopitaA spinach pie that was eaten and raised in Alexandria, Egypt, the city where he was born and raised.
Our family’s recipes need individually wrapped triangles that are passed down from Greece to Egypt and back again for generations, showing off the diverse layers of crisp, flaky pastries. It is said that. There are no greenish sludge bricks. In contrast, the stuffing is very simple: spinach, some good sharp feta cheese, some freshly ground nutmeg, some lightly fried garlic, a little salt and some healthy ground pepper. Of things, and their fragile dough leaves and their filthy amount of butter. that’s it. (Technically, this dish should be called Spanako Ciropita – spinach When Cheese pie — But as even my dad reluctantly admits, it’s a lot of syllables for Americans. )
Daddy guided me to lay out one large rectangular sheet of Philo, brush it with butter, and then quickly put another sheet on top. “Hurry up and cover the rest of the Philo with a towel,” he said, remembering that if the dough wasn’t covered again, the dough would dry and crack almost instantly.
Cut the sheet into three long strips, polish each ribbon of the Philo dough with melted butter, and then add a little padding to the bottom corner of the dough. Then fold the pie into a tightly wound triangle over and over again, much like a soldier ritually folds a flag.
Whenever Dad mixed a batch of spanakopita stuffing, he always told me, “There are no eggs! It’s not a quiche.”But I could hear how he tasted the word Quiche Even when he ridiculed the egg-like, earth-bound weight. French was his third language. English, his fourth. He loved French.He called himself me Daddy, Not according to the French way Baba As in Greek or Arabic.
An American mother happened to meet him in Athens. She was a tourist in her thirties. He was barely past his teens. He was an ambitious painter who worked as a waiter to help his struggling family. They were deported and recently settled in the Greek capital, as are many minority communities in Egypt. This place belonged to them, not to them.
A facility with my father’s language became his destiny. The day he met my mother, Dad was the only English-speaking waiter on duty, so he was assigned to her table. He quickly fell in love with her and informed her, “I might think I’m just a waiter, but I’m an artist.” For some reason-really, mysteriously-the pickup line worked. She agreed to a simple coffee date before leaving the city. After that, she responded with postcards and letters. Not too long, her mother flew back to Athens, and she married him this time.
Immediately after the wedding, they broke up for months. She returned to America without him. During a postal courtship, the military dictatorship seized power in Greece and was unable to leave the country without permission. He was at the mercy of the larger political tides of the country where he thought he could safely claim to be his own. He was finally able to bring her back to her icy fragile Boston. There, the cold, gray Atlantic wasn’t like the glorious coast he left twice.
Their original idea was to live in the United States for a short time, wait for the junta to land in Greece just a few months before their wedding, and then return to Athens. It didn’t happen. I was born as an only child a few months before the colonel’s rule collapsed, and they decided to stay in this country for the time being. It was a temporary decision that would last for the rest of his life.
Daddy never fell in love with most Greek-Americans, a community that theoretically had a lot in common.They weren’t Egyptian Like him: Cosmopolitan, fluent, well-read in several languages, imposing, more than just a little talkative. (“These are goats and villagers,” he would say negatively.) He was an expatriate who was anxious to return to a house that no longer existed. He tried to hide his loneliness. While waiting for the canvas paint to dry, he took a long walk alone along the rocky, monochromatic coastline, which is very different from the blue of the Mediterranean in Alexandria’s Cornish.
“”Then peirazei“It doesn’t matter,” he said.
Daddy died of a heart attack while sleeping shortly after I turned 14. He was 41 years old. Her mother, who was always suffering from mental health, fell apart completely after her death and made a big retreat into her own world.
After my dad’s death, I hardly remembered him, but I had some of his recipes in my memory and fingers. A few years later, when I got married, I gave the catering company a recipe for Spanakopita so that I could serve it as part of my wedding meal. It was almost a secret word of family love and one of the few reminders of my father that I sewed that day.
Wedding guests thought they wouldn’t want to sweat or stink sticky on what was expected to be a hot and sultry night in June, so they put garlic on when serving the recipe. I omitted it. The caterer told me he was a little worried about dealing with Philo, a material he hadn’t mastered yet. This was before Philo became such an hors d’oeuvre cliché.
No problem, I told them. Just in case, I needed a little confidence, some tricks, and some additional butter at hand. I taught them how to make the dough a baby. I explained in detail how to fold a small parcel of spinach and cheese into an exact triangle. This is the ideal size to turn. When baked, the individual pitas are flaky, bronze, and shattered, thanks to the generous lashing. Of melted butter. On our wedding day, I missed the garlic, but Spanakopita looked beautiful. I heard guests praise the caterers for their food.
A few months later, our recipe for Spanakopita Gourmand magazine. Philo, butter, spinach, feta cheese, nutmeg, salt, pepper, etc. were all there in the proportion I passed. There is no garlic. Really, there’s too much butter, but there’s a lot of extra in case of a Philo emergency. And there were my exact instructions on how to fold the spanakopita into beautiful little parcels, wrapped neatly like a flag. Daddy’s recipes are now out there, but like my dad did, they burst from their roots.
Its Spanakopita recipe can still be found online, with gorgeous shots of bronze flaky triangles and a completely appetizing photo.
Who knows what happened? Maybe someone gave it to the magazine or sold it, or someone on the caterer’s team worked there as well. Maybe someone made it for a friend or party, and the recipe has taken that path to someone else, just as a beloved recipe does. I never know.
While dozens of recipes have been acclaimed online, many cooks cloud eggs, lemon juice, dill, parsley, onions, or delicious and culturally appropriate, but pure and light. He wrote that he added almost all other ingredients to this particular, most emphasized, non-quiche element of spanakopita.
Others have stated that they have added all sorts of heretics, such as: Panagia Memorandum, Cheddar cheese or raisins. Raisins! Daddy often splattered when Americans just discovered Mediterranean cuisine. “What are these foreigners and why do you put raisins in every dish to make them exotic?”
He liked mixing multiple languages in one sentence, completely hoping that I would follow like a proper Alexandrian. His American-born daughter sometimes used Greek when he provided me with an opinion about such a “foreigner”: Frankie. Sometimes he will say instead ifrang -Arabic, and almost the same word: literally “Frank”, its innate Westernness made them a complete mystery. In both languages he was able to describe “alien” in much more violent and common language, but he worshiped medieval overtones and high-choice drama of his language, and of ours. Re-pitched the ancient East-West battle in a crouching little kitchen. And to him, Greek and Arabic were dizygotic twins, one was a playmate, but he had to be left behind at the sudden end of his childhood.
Then peirazi.. His Alexandria disappeared decades ago, and my dad has been away for much longer than I knew he was alive. The recipe I received as a rare and valuable legacy is just one of the millions of recipes online. Anyone who happens to find it can’t hear Dad complaining about the Franks and their raisins. Also, such cooks don’t necessarily care. People do whatever they want to do.
My hope is that those who try the recipe will enjoy the process of applying butter to the dough and folding the Philo over and over again. Hopefully they will taste the simple interaction of spinach and feta cheese with their shattered layers of crispy phyllo when they bite into pieces. Daddy’s Spanakopita doesn’t mean the same as me, but it’s still delicious.
