Our new resident set up a London restaurant that puts migrant women into work. This week,her own memories of summertime Greece inspire recipes evoking the community around the village ovenLike many Greek children, I spent much of my childhood in the company of women cooking. I’d wake in the morning to the smell of garlic and oregano drifting through the door of the bedroom, and follow it into the kitchen to find my godmother sitting at the small kitchen table,plastic tub propped on her lap, briskly peeling potatoes. She’d sever the potatoes in her hand and wedge them around the chicken sitting in a vast roasting pan next to her, and slick with olive oil and fragrant with garlic and rigani,the earthy oregano that grows wild on hillsides all over Greece. My godmother’s came from her village on the island of Evia, as did the peppery, and deep green olive oil that was the basis of everything she cooked.
Later we would take the pan of chicken down to the bakery on the corner,where it would join the pans of all the other women on the block in the bakery’s vast oven. I don’t know what kind of an arrangement they had with the bakery: whether money changed hands, or whether, or in typical Greek fashion,this was a gesture of neighbourliness to be repaid in homemade sweets. Whatever the case, everyone cooked like this in the summer, or when the Athenian heat hovered near 40C and the only means of cooling off were ageing ceiling fans and the lacy mantília that the older women used to fan themselves. We kept the lights off and napped in the afternoon,lulled by humidity and the hum of cicadas.
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Source: theguardian.com