If you’re lucky to venture off the beaten track on Crete you can still see women on hillsides collecting wild greens for a family meal. The greens, or horta, are a staple of Crete’s healthful bounty and help explain why the Greek island is considered a showcase for the Mediterranean diet.
“It’s no accident that some of the earliest studies of that diet were done in Crete back in the 1960s, when a group of American scientists came here to investigate the relationship between diet and disease,” Mediterranean food guru Nancy Harmon Jenkins writes in the latest issue of Saveur.
“It was a population that lived, it seemed, on olive oil, lots and lots of olive oil, not just drizzled but downright inundating salads, greens, and other foods. And that remains the case today.”
The dish featured here shows how greens are prepared on the island of Crete. Paula Wolfert, another Mediterranean food guru, created this dish, which comes to us via the food think tank Oldways.
The mix of greens in this dish — including beet greens, baby spinach, Swiss chard, miner’s lettuce, pea shoots, and mache — comes close to the complex flavors of the bitter greens found on hillsides in Crete.
The dish also includes another staple of Greek cuisine: black-eyed peas. In this case, you reconstitute dried blacked-eyed peas through water and some easy cooking.
To begin, chopped onions, scallions and fennel are sautéed in extra virgin olive oil until soft. The greens are added to the saucepan along with cilantro, tomatoes, fennel seed and salt and pepper and cooked for 10 minutes.
The reconstituted black-eyed peas are added and the dish is then simmered for 10 minutes or so. Adjust the seasoning, if need be.
Bon appétit,
Claude S. Weiller
Vice President of Sales & Marketing
California Olive Ranch
