Christmas dinner in Crete

In December 1973 I was in a small village in Crete, several miles west of the south coast town of Ierapetra.  My lodging was an unpainted cement-block cube which I shared with a couple of New Yorkers called Beth and Ira.  Ira was a champion snorer.

The social center for the travelers (we certainly did not call ourselves hippies!) was a couple of blocks away, where someone had rented an honest-to-goodness house, with a two-burner hotplate, a fireplace, and a table big enough to seat ten.  At least half the group were Jewish, but with what strikes me now as a certain lack of cultural sensitivity, the rest of us decided we needed to celebrate Christmas dinner.  Duncan, a Scot with a motorcycle, held out for Hogmanay, on which occasion he promised to supply a beautiful haggis, made, as is correct, from sheep's innards and oatmeal stewed in the stomach of the unfortunate sheep.

The Christmas menu, however, was to be a roast of lamb, matched with mugs of the turpentine-flavoured Greek wine, retsina.

The best part of any celebratory meal is the stuffing.  Having no idea how to stuff a roast of lamb, I volunteered to make a pot of stovetop stuffing. The baker had no shortage of day-old bread, which we aged another day or two for good measure. Onions were plentiful, and so was the olive oil in which to saute them.  PEI stuffing is made with summer savory, but my Greek phrasebook seemed to be unfamiliar with this ingredient.  However, a narrow track just outside town was lined with some promising aromatic bushes :  I pulled off a couple of sprigs and took them to the waterside restaurant.

"Origani?" I asked the kyria.  I knew it wasn't, but she got the idea and said, "Thema."  Figuring it was probably thyme and not some noxious weed, I added several handfuls to my stock of ingredients.  The grocery carried a variety of Knorr soup packets, including one plainly depicting a chicken. That would do to moisten the dish. I was ready to start chopping.

Meanwhile the meat chef set off to buy the lamb.  Here we met with disaster. The meat truck came to the village only once a week - two or three days ago. We had missed it.  Chicken?  No.  Pork?  We could hardly cook roast pork for Jews, and anyway there was no pork either.  There were fishermen, so there must have been fish, but either we did not know where to find it, or we did not know how to cook it. Send Duncan to Ierapetra for lamb?  He and his motorcycle had already departed to the mountain villages in search of sheep innards, and might not return until Christmas morning.

The canned goods at the little grocery were not very varied - mostly beans and sardines. But wait - what's in that big can? Mackerel?

So that was our Christmas dinner :  olives for appetizers, Greek salad (of course!), and stovetop dressing with mackerel sauce, washed down with retsina.  "Melli kallimakali," we toasted each other, having been coached in this seasonal greeting by a native Hawaiian traveler.

Duncan got back a couple of days later, well fed by the mountain farmers, but unsuccessful in his search for sheep innards. Maybe "innard" was not in the phrasebook, either.  At Hogmanay we went to the restaurant.