“What did the cheese say when it looked in the mirror?”
Georgina Hayden poses that question in her fourth cookbook, “Greekish: Everyday Recipes with Greek Roots” (Bloomsbury, $35), then describes in detail the “whole salt-fat-melty experience” of one of her all-time favorite ingredients.
Several paragraphs later, she gives us the punchline: “Hallou-mi!”
Within these pages, the London-based food writer’s love of Cypriot halloumi, which she calls the “queen of all cheese,” reveals itself in unexpected ways: a four-ingredient grilled appetizer with honey and apricots, a breading for fried chicken cutlets, a seasoning for lamb kofta, a component on a vegetable kebab and a topping for a pasta dish with lentils.
These recipes speak to Hayden’s heritage but not to the laborious dishes she remembers from growing up above her grandparents’ Greek Cypriot taverna in London. As a busy mother, she strives to capture those taste memories without all the fuss, focusing more on ingredients than techniques. She strips back the process for making the much-loved pasta casserole called pastitsio so that it can be made using one pan instead of four. She stuffs spinach and cheese, a filling typically used for spanakopita, into baked potatoes. And she shreds yogurt-marinated chicken for a gyro riff that uses a roasting pan instead of a spit.
Sun-kissed ingredients shine in simple preparations such as Grilled Watermelon Breakfast Salad, Wine-Poached Nectarines with Anise, and Corn on the Cob with Thyme and Burnt Butter reminiscent of the ears sold from metal carts on the Cyprus beaches she visited in her youth.
Though she used to find baklava too sweet for her tastes, she gained a new appreciation for the syrupy phyllo pastries when she fashioned their flavors into new recipes, such as rosewater and cinnamon-scented semifreddo topped with crushed phyllo and nuts.
“Truth be told, when it comes to writing recipes, sometimes hiding behind tradition actually makes life easier,” she writes. “You don’t like something? Take it up with my ancestors. But these Greekish dishes are all me.”
Susan Puckett is a cookbook author and former food editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Follow her at susanpuckett.com.
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