Food Interlude V: Greek Salad

One of the preconditions of my then-future-wife's relocation from Milwaukee to New York City--I met her in Milwaukee and spent two long years convincing her that she would not only not die if she moved to New York but that she would in fact quickly grow to love the place--was that I abandon my place of residence in downtown Brooklyn. I couldn't really argue the point. The list of the Brooklyn apartment's assets was short: it was cheap, and it was close to Manhattan. Its drawbacks were more copious. The landlady kept a herd of cats in the basement and was not at all fastidious about them, and as a result the hallways reeked of cat piss, so much so that my friend CC aptly dubbed the place "The Elephant House." And then there was the mouse that ran across my future-ex's foot late one night when she was perched upon the commode. There's a lot more, but you get the point. It was an appropriate place for a musician, or a college student, or someone already fully sold on the concept of living in New York. My wife was none of those.

And so soon after my then-future-wife's-now-future-ex-wife's arrival in New York, we went apartment hunting. Our explorations landed us in Astoria, an affordable if somewhat-too-remote section of Queens that is home to some of the city's best-known Greek restaurants. We availed ourselves of the local grub regularly and grew to accept it as 'normal' food, a misapprehension that held through our relocation to North Carolina; imagine our dismay at our new Tar Heel friends' tepid reactions when we offered them dishes of taramasalata (fish roe salad), skordalia (garlic and potato dip), saganake (flaming cheese), and ortikia (grilled quail). We eventually won some of them over and learned to keep less exotic stuff on hand for the others.

Lately I've been jonesing for an Astoria-style Greek salad. But what, exactly, constitutes the perfect Greek salad? I posed that question to the proprietor of Mariakakis, the excellent Greek grocer in Chapel Hill (he stocks Malamatina, the official retsina of the Greek National Soccer Team; enough said), who told me that where he comes from (Greece? just a guess) a Greek salad is composed of whatever happens to be in the fridge or in the garden. And then I realized that the Greek salad I had been imagining was actually the sort one finds in Greek-American diners all across the country. Lettuce, tomatoes, feta, cucumber, green pepper, onion, anchovies, pepperoncini, dolmades, feta cheese--I'm not sure I ever saw one of those in an authentic Astorian Greek restaurant. There's nothing wrong with that salad--I make it all the time, in fact, minus the dolmades, which are too labor-intensive to prepare for a salad--but it wasn't the salad to take me back to Astoria.

"Unless, of course, you're talking about a Horiatiki," the proprietor added, and I immediately decided that this was exactly what I was talking about. "Horiatiki" derives from the Greek word for "country" or "village"; the salad is often called a "Greek Village Salad" in America. It is the perfect salad for this time of the year, as it features tomatoes prominently. It is amazingly simple. All it really needs is tomatoes, cucumbers, onion, feta cheese, and vinaigrette. I seed the tomatoes and cucumbers, then cut them into 3/4" to 1" dice (they mix nicely this way and are fun to stab with a fork), slice the onion thin (I usually use a Bermuda onion but a yellow, Spanish, or Vidalia will do in a pinch), toss, crumble some feta over it all, and dress. I like to sprinkle some dried thyme on top; Kalamata olives aren't necessary but certainly are in the spirit of the thing and should be added if desired, as should green bell pepper. Me, I prefer to keep it simple.

Funny thing is, I'm just about always ready for a culinary return to Astoria. But as for an actual return to Astoria--a place where we were daily awakened by the sound of men spitting and snotting on the sidewalk, where the natives drove as though they were dodging fire, where every line in every store seemed as though it could turn into a scrum at any moment, where female store clerks could barely make change because of their debilitating artificial fingernails, and where you never knew which "public" places of business would welcome you and which were fronts for Mafia operations... not so much, thanks.

So there you go.