TASTES FROM THE EDGE
“I like to think of the cities of Venice and Istanbul as two large books propping up a shelf full of stories about the cooking of the eastern Mediterranean. Tales like a Greek pie maker and her daughter in a Zagorian village in the Pindus mountains north of Ioannina, whose chicken pie caused me to shake their hands in earnest congratulation; or a pilgrimage to the Mani in the Pelopponese to visit the house of the late travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor and discover a recipe for moussaka, which he claimed not to like; or the morning spent high above the city of Split in Croatia with eyes streaming, watching the cooking of a whole sheep on a spit over a wood fire in a smoke-filled room, then the guilty delight in the tenderness of the slow-cooked meat...”