Eleni & The Fearsome Zucchini

“As Eleni calmly composed her ingredients, it was obvious that the most important was intangible. Agape or love permeated every dish, which is why they’re so difficult to replicate. As she told me, ‘You can’t just toss things into a pan and then leave and go make the beds. You must keep watch. Be attentive. Look after your food till it’s ready.’” Diana Farr Louis 

Eating Well Is The Best Revenge 

By Diana Farr Louis

SPETSES Greece—(Weekly Hubris)—6/10/2013—It’s zucchini season. Every third stand in our farmers’ market is piled high with the green tubes, in sizes ranging from finger’s length to something more provocative. If you get there early enough, their bright yellow flowers are still open horns, blaring “eat me, stuff me.” I can never resist the invitation and always—at least at the start of the season—buy far more than we could possibly eat.

I have no trouble using up the flowers. Mostly, I just dip them in a light batter and fry them quickly—a trick I learned in Italy. There and on Crete the flowers are sold separately, in bunches that you could just as nicely pop into a vase as munch. The Cretans like to stuff them, making elegant little packets filled with the same mixture of rice, chopped herbs, and a hint of tomato that they bundle into vine leaves.

The fruit—if that’s what we call it—is far more versatile, lending its rather bland flavor to dozens of preparations that can keep the cook happily inventing for weeks without repeating herself. You can make soufflés, omelets, salads (just boiled and tossed with basil, mint or parsley, and oil), grated and sautéed with the same herbs and lots of garlic, stuffed with meat or rice and lapped with avgolemono (egg-lemon) sauce, mixed with eggplant etc in a ratatouille or baked in a Greek briam, fried strips or sticks served with tzatziki or skordalia (garlic sauce), cold soup with chicken broth and cream cheese, bread, moussaka, little “boats” (with chopped meat and cheese-flavored bechamel), in phyllo-wrapped pies, quiches, or in a Chania potato and fresh cheese deep-dish pie called “boureki”—I’m sure you can add countless more.

But at some point in the summer, even the most imaginative, resourceful cook throws up her hands and cries for mercy, “Basta,” “Fthanei pia,” “enough.” Especially if you have your own zucchini patch, which keeps producing, relentlessly, day after day, week after week for months.

We who have gardens or orchards become slaves to them. All my apricots and plums on Andros (a total of just four trees) ripen at the same time, leaving me—in a good year—with a bumper crop that demands to be eaten, made into jams, compotes, pies, and given to friends. I always have a few bags of fruit in the car when I go to town, hoping to run into an unsuspecting acquaintance who will welcome a hand-out.

But the fruit season is short, whereas the humble squash doesn’t know when to stop. That’s when I feel like Maxine Kumin. Somewhere that marvelous poet, who has written exceptional prose pieces about vegetable gardens, refers to a summer plagued by zucchini on Cape Cod. Her plants are so outrageously prolific that she has run out of friends who will accept her offerings. She can’t just ignore the squash, or toss them onto the compost heap—that would be wasteful. So she finds herself engaging in semi-criminal activity: sneaking out in the dead of night and surreptitiously shoving zukes into strangers’ mailboxes. Think of the indignity of being caught! On the other hand, if you leave the zukes on the vine, they balloon into inedible submarine-sized marrows. It’s one such mammoth creature she baptized “The Fearsome Zucchini.”

For me, zucchini season also poses another challenge: to reconstruct one of our family’s favorite treats—Eleni’s kolokithokeftedes or zuke fritters. Trouble is, she never gave us the recipe. All our attempts are based on our collective memory of watching her in the Spetses kitchen and biting into them after a long morning in the sea. Crisp on the outside, creamy and minty on the inside, they added up to sheer heaven.

Eleni Plaka had been in my first husband’s family since Alexi’s birth. She was employed at age 13 as assistant nanny, joining her two sisters and mother who already worked as household help and cook. By the time I appeared, more than 40 years later, as Alexi’s child bride, she herself had graduated to cook at his sister’s summer house on Spetses. As a consequence the kitchen became the most popular spot in it.

She was my mother-in-law’s best friend, so Dodo sat there often, smoking and reminiscing. And I, eager to glean every iota of information about Alexi’s early years, perched where I could. Eleni not only told stories in Greek simple enough for me to understand, she corrected my stumbling questions gently and remains the best teacher I ever had.

Sadly, I was more interested in family lore than kitchen secrets in those days and wish I’d paid more attention as she performed her alchemy. She disdained cutting boards and used to slice onions, tomatoes, and mountains of potatoes in her palms. They were soft and mysteriously sweet-smelling. And her round face, framed by light brown curls, was always moist and cool when she kissed us good morning, with a “Chrysomou, ti kaneis?” (“My Golden One, how are you?”). Standing over her pots—she preferred the two-“eyed” gas burner on its rickety table to the big electric, erratic stove—never seemed to make her flushed or harassed even in a heat wave.

As Eleni calmly composed her ingredients, it was obvious that the most important was intangible. Agape or love permeated every dish, which is why they’re so difficult to replicate. As she told me, “You can’t just toss things into a pan and then leave and go make the beds. You must keep watch. Be attentive. Look after your food till it’s ready.”

Trying to recreate Eleni’s magic brings me closer to those golden summers in Sixties Spetses, when Greece was my brave new world.

Recipe

Here is a recipe for Eleni’s zuke patties, good even if perhaps not as fine as hers. One key difference from most versions is that she mashed cooked zukes rather than grating them raw. Do not worry about exact amounts.

1 kilo/2 lb medium zucchini, washed and trimmed

1 medium onion, grated

handful or 2 of chopped parsley

handful or 2 of chopped mint

handful of crumbled soft feta cheese, or to taste

2 eggs, beaten

salt and pepper, to taste

flour for dredging

olive oil for frying

Trim and wash the zukes and boil them until soft. Drain them in a colander and when they’re cool enough to handle, squeeze them one at a time to mash them and remove the water. To get even more water out, place the zuke bits in a dish towel and squeeze some more. Then put them in a bowl and, with your hands, knead in the onion, herbs, cheese, egg, salt, and pepper. Cover and refrigerate, overnight or several hours, to allow the mixture to firm up.

Shape into flat patties, about 2 inches/5 cm in diameter, dust lightly with flour, and then fry in hot oil on both sides until light brown. Drain on paper towels and serve hot.

Note: To hear poet Maxine Kunin read three of her poems, proceed to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzLMEv8I0-s. One of Kumin’s gardening-in-New-Hampshire essays, which makes mention of a gargantuan zucchini, and is titled “Jicama, Without Expectation,” appeared in “The Prairier Schooner,” in Spring of 1994: http://prairieschooner.unl.edu/?q=blog/creative-nonfiction-contest-2013-new-week-new-post.