Stuffed goat, the pure taste of Easter in the Aegean
“ARCHODES TRON’ AND PINUSI, on marble board”… You really feel like a lord when you have sat at the table of the family of Papa Giannis in Olympos of Karpathos on Easter day and you have had your fill of hours of roasting in the traditional wood-fired oven “byzanti”, lamb or goat that has not yet been cut from its mother’s tit. We can say it another way: you feel like a lord because the whole stuffed boob is at the center of the table.
All tables in the Aegean around which people, cares, cares, shares and loves are entwined are small feasts, but on these precise days, where the whole stuffed goat or lamb appears, it is a big feast. On the empty plates-which had with great pleasure been emptied of the meat and stuffing that had just before been filled-the joy is echoed with the rhythmic clanging of forks, and the feast becomes a song:
And all eat and drink, and all rejoice
and little Constantine, though he may be sunbathing.
of Andronicus, the invincible, the young man of the bountiful.
You are black, you wear black, you ride black.
you teach him to whore, you teach him to reap.
you learn to take, the rabble of war
teach him to fight on land and sea.
The manifestation of excitement with the rhythmic tapping of the fork on the plate as well as the song of the tabla “Of Microconstantinos” descend from the Byzantine tradition, which appears so vividly in our modern times on Olympus. We imagine that from the same period, perhaps even earlier, comes the recipe for Byzanti, which finds the most suitable environment to preserve its authenticity. Olympos is, perhaps, the only village in Greece where there is no public oven, and families ensure their bread by themselves, kneading and baking the loaves in the traditional outdoor oven of the neighbourhood, which is fired with wood from the surrounding hills that they collect themselves and scented with fragrant sage boughs. These ovens have room to roast whole lambs or goats, which they roast on Holy Saturday afternoon and bring out on Easter Sunday for the lunch table.
The closer you get to the primordial food, the more its thurible is more revealing of its origin. The way the lamb lies whole, lying in the pan, leaves you in no doubt as to what it was before it was a sacrifice at the feast; and you must be prepared to face it. For people who live in congruence with their food, this assumption has been a given since the greatest revolution inspired by man, the cultivation of plants and the domestication of animals and their breeding to become carcasses to fill their plates.
Marina is familiar with this, and her only concern is to marinate the whole lamb well with a mixture of dry mash, a little olive oil, salt and spices (pepper, cumin, very little cinnamon) and use a lemon broom to rub the body. In the meantime, prepare the filling. Sauté in olive oil the chopped dried onion and livers, seasoned with salt, pepper, cumin, very little cinnamon, and seasoned with a bunch of chopped dill, a fennel, two mint leaves, celery, a couple of tablespoons of tomato paste and fresh tomato. All of this is simmered and at some point the rice is added to it, so that it too can take on the long smell (that’s the affectionate name for cumin in Carpathos) and the fragrance of the other aromatics. When it’s full, he sews it up and lays it on the large baking tray on the vines.
Over on the other side of the Carpathian Sea, at noon on Easter Sunday, the “offo” takes center stage at the festive banquet. Ofto is an ancient word, one of the many that continue to live on in the dialectal variety of Kassos, next to the native Cretan idiom. But, while in Crete, offto is used to describe opton, roast in general (they also say potatoes roasted in ashes are called offtes), in Kassos they refer to stuffed goat or lamb in the outside, traditional oven. Although branch-fired ovens are becoming increasingly rare, ‘offoto’ is still alive and well, especially in the high season, in electric ovens in domestic kitchens. Except that you can’t fit a whole carcass in there, so the ‘buttocks’ have to be removed, leaving the large cavity created by the ‘fronts’.
It is to this size that Calliope’s recipe is adapted. This, the largest part of the riffle, she washes thoroughly and rubs it with lemon peel and coarse, authentic, sea salt. In the old days, they say, it was passed through the brine. And while that draws out flavours, Calliope busies herself preparing the “passpara”, the stuffing, that is, of the carcass.
On the island, because the liver (liver, lungs, heart, minus the spleen) and offal (intestines, legs, head that go together) are involved in festive dishes – the passpara, mostly, but also in “bustias” and “derbillet”, the indigenous stew), you have to order a whole animal to secure them. Calliope chops this coveted liver in the traditional way, with two crossed knives. She then tortures it in the pot until it has lost its liquid and when this phase is complete, she adds the olive oil. He turns them a little and adds two large old onions, salt, pepper and a little tomato juice, so that the pasta doesn’t get too red, two glasses of rice and two glasses of water. As soon as all this has come to the boil, he lowers the pot and fills the contents of the pot into the cavity of the brochettes, the opening of which he sews with a needle and thread. Brush the goat with tomato paste dissolved in water, pepper and a little butter, just enough to make it smell good, and place it in the oven, which burns at 200 °C. When browned, he puts in three glasses of water, and in the six hours it takes to cook, he will have to add, regularly, more. Two hours before the roasting is finished, he puts in the potatoes, cut into large pieces, which accompany the natto. If the goat is whole and intended for the wood-fired oven, you need to factor in a third extra ingredient. The great pleasure of the natto is the finger-pulling of the dry-cooked skin before the formal serving and the delectable revelation of the pungent passata, which is the housewife cook’s main goal.
And from there, at the far end of the Aegean, the grace of the stuffed lamb or goat spreads throughout the Archipelago and displays its most glorious version at Easter. And yet, if we were to look for the most emblematic delicacy of the cradle of our modern culture (and gastronomy, of course), it would not be the nurture of our great sea but of the small landmasses. For the goat that practically lives on the rocks, balancing like the inhabitants in the wild as well as fascinating native landscape of the Little Homeland, is the official food of the feast in Archipelagos, often accompanied by rice, which is not only symbolic, but also and above all supports the traditional economy of austerity. The infinite pimples of rice enclosed in the belly of the carcass, along with the potatoes, are a sign of wealth, which will not only be cooked with its delicious juices, but will also multiply the mouths that will be filled. For in the islands the goat, and even the whole, is much scarcer than it is on the grassy great mainland, and when it is roasted on the spit there will be half of it left, and mouths will be deprived.
Even on islands like Kalymnos, where the sea lives and breathes, the festive dish of Labri is the “mouroi”, the stuffed carcass baked in the oven whole, twenty-four to twenty-six hours, in the special clay pot called a “mouroi”, from which it takes its name, traditionally unstuffed inside, sealed with dough. The filling, apart from the classics – liver, rice and herbs – contains minced beef, grated headcheese, two eggs, pine nuts and rosemary.
As the “labriano” of Astypalea creates, like its homeland itself, a bridge between the South Sporades and the Cycladic Islands, the characteristic fragrance of rosemary spreads as the Amorgian lamb or goat roasts in the wood-fired oven. This brings us to the long mainland of Naxos, with its rich interior world of ravines and mountains, where the “patoudo” – the stuffed carcass with “seyklla” (chard), koutsounades (poppies), wild fennel, spring onions, dill, dill, blond raisins, along with rice and liver, except for the spleen that blackens everything – is an ode to good food and spring. And so we end up with Andros’s “lampreys”, stuffed with greens (chard, lettuce, dill, dill, spring onions, mint), lots of cheese and thirty-three eggs – as many as the years of the risen Christ – lightly beaten to bind the filling, which is cut into pieces like an omelette. The imagination of traditional societies rules even the most glorious table of the year.
