By Joel Denker
I have a salad-making ritual. After putting the lettuce, cucumbers, tomato, and red onion in the bowl and dressing them with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, I top the mix with slices of feta cheese and sprinkle oregano over it. For me, a salad just isn’t complete without crumbly, tangy feta.
I don’t know when this habit started. It may have begun when I started buying regular allotments of feta and kalamata olives from the late Dino Skenderis, who presided over the tiny upstairs Dupont Circle grocery. (Zorba’s Café, which Dino started, occupies the space below the old grocery; 1612 20th Street, NW; 387-8555.) Every inch of the shop was crammed with lentils, honeys, dates, wines, coffees, pistachios, and pinenuts. Dino, who once taught dancing at Arthur Murray’s Washington studio, was a natural salesman with a gift for gab and a penchant for braggadocio. He regaled me with stories of the importing trade and of his own journey from untutored greenhorn to retail magnate.
Skenderis’ was not your supermarket packaged feta. It was moist cheese that oozed brine. I imagined the barrels of marinating cheese that his suppliers in New York City imported.
Not long after, I discovered the Greek Port, a mom and pop restaurant that became a haven for me. Despina Nomikos, a woman of boundless energy, who ran the business with her phlegmatic husband, Moskos, served me many a salad of tomatoes, sliced onions, and slices of feta. I loved her simpler lettuce salad, which she sprinkled with fresh dill. Despina’s spanakopita, a flaky pie filled with spinach and savory with feta, was another treat.
Skenderis closed and the Greek Port shut down and I was heartbroken. Where I would get my feta fix? I turned to an outlet in the suburbs to which I made monthly pilgrimages.
These memories came flooding back when I heard about a fierce debate in Europe over feta. The Greeks, ardent nationalists as well as traditionalists, insisted that their cheeses have the sole claim to the name “feta.” Counterfeit cheeses were devaluing their product, Greek merchants said. The Danes were pushing a cow’s milk cheese as “feta.” True feta was supposed to be made from goat’s or sheep’s milk and was white, not yellow.
Greece won the fight in the European Union. Only Greek sheep or goat feta or a combination of the two manufactured in a specific region could carry the name. Feta joined roquefort and parmigiana, which had also been awarded a label of “protected origin.” The Danes were irate. “It’s absolutely absurd,” said Hans Bender, director of the Danish Dairy Board. “We might have to find a new name for feta cheese in Denmark.”
The Greeks venerated cheese and feta—which means slice—in particular. The tradition of cheese-making went back centuries in the craggy and mountainous land. Because livestock were scarce, the Hellenes husbanded milk by converting it to cheese. They relied on cheese, not meat, for protein. Meat was a luxury reserved for weekends and special occasions.
The ancient Greeks, who took their cheese with bread, olives, honey, and figs, gave it mythic significance. Offerings of cheese were made to the Gods at Mount Olympus. This “gift of everlasting value,” as cheesemaking was described in Greek mythology, was depicted in Homer’s Odyssey. Odysseus was captivated by the dairying done by Polyphemus, the Cyclops: “We went inside the cave and admired everything inside it. Baskets were there, heavy with cheeses, and pens crowded with lambs and kids. And all his vessels, milk pails and pans, that he used for milking into, were running over with whey.”
Everything about feta reflects its rugged roots. Shepherds, it is said, milked sheep and goats who fed on grasses, leaves, and herbs on the mountains. Their milk, already acidic, got additional bite from their diet.
Greek cheese-making probably developed accidentally when herdsmen carried milk in pouches made from the stomach lining of unweaned cows or sheep. The enzyme in the lining solidified the milk, separating large clumps or curds from the liquid whey.
Even today, stomach tissues soaked in a salt solution are used to make rennet, the milk coagulator. They also imbue the curd with their sharp fragrance.
The curd is heavily salted and cut into large slices or blocks. Suffused in brine or whey, the cheese pickles in barrels, ripening naturally.
Unlike French cheeses, feta is eaten throughout the day. It can be a breakfast repast or an appetizer, sprinkled with olive oil and oregano, for lunch. George Donas, the owner of Dupont Circle’s Legends Restaurant (2157 P Street, 296-2333), remembers feta as a constant in his family in Greece. “Every time I was sitting at the table, my mother made sure feta was there, olives were there.”
To fend off hunger during the day, Greeks snack on pies made with feta and other cheeses. It might be a tyropita, a triangular, flaky filo pastry, or a spanakopita, the spinach pie flavored with dill. The custom began when farmers took a pie lunch to the fields.
The quintessential Greek salad, unimaginable without feta, has a rustic flavor. The horiatiki salata, or village salad, is packed with green peppers, cucumbers, onions, capers, and kalamata olives. It is topped with wedges of feta.
The Greek salad has been popularized by Greek American restaurant owners in all manner of outlets—restaurants, diners, luncheonettes, and steak houses. Some years ago, I poked my head into a pizza shop in Rockport, Massachusetts and noticed that Greek salad was listed on the menu. A clear sign that the ethnics had carved out a niche in this New England business.
The Donas’ Legends Restaurant offers a menu that combines feta-based dishes along with burgers, subs, sandwiches, kabob platters, and seafood. You can order feta and olives, a Greek omelette (tomato, feta, and basil), penne pasta with feta, a spanakopita platter, and, of course, Greek salad. But it won’t be a classical Greek salad. It will come with lettuce, an American adaptation, George Donas says.
Greek immigrants inherited a long tradition of commerce in feta. In the late fifteenth century, according to food historian Andrew Dalby, Pietro Cascolo, an Italian pilgrim visiting Crete, spotted warehouses overflowing with feta: “They make a great many cheeses; it is a pity they are so salty. I saw great warehouses full of them, some in which the brine . . . was two feet deep and the large cheeses were floating in it..They sell a great quantity to the ships that call there: it was astonishing to see the number of cheeses taken on board our galley.”
As I investigated the Greek feta fetish, I discovered facsimiles of the mountain cheese in other Washington restaurants. Cafe Sofia (1817 Columbia Road, 387-5656), a Bulgarian restaurant, makes a “shepard salad” with a creamy feta-like cheese they call “Bulgarian cheese.” I savored a Central Asian salad at the Afghan Grill (2309 Calvert Street, N.W., 234-5095) of sliced tomatoes covered with mint leaves and a cheese that looked very much like feta. The Afghanis, like the Persians, call the white cheese “paneer.”
My head aswirl in confusion, I uncovered another puzzling piece of information. Feta, food scholar Clifford Wright argues, isn’t even originally a Greek word. It derives from the Italian “fetta,” the word for slice of food. Will the real feta please stand up?
Originally published in The Intowner: http://intowner.com/food-in-the-hood/
