Bon Appetite
with 
Gael Arthur

Adventures in Food – Cyprus Style

Food – while every country has something interesting about its food, what the people who live there love and what you end up tasting and loving may not be the same thing.  And, let’s face it, for some of us, the look of the food counts for a lot.  That’s why I was a bit reluctant to taste soutzouko, even when I knew what it was. 

 I had seen it on the first day in Cyprus, strung up at a little stall outside a monastery that we found by accident (I was navigating, leading us on the first of many happy diversions).  Strung up may not sound appetizing, but, really, it sounds more appetizing that it looked.   

I didn’t even want to go close to it, thinking it might be closely related to some type of innard, treated in some strange way to give it a shiny beeswax coloured bumpy rubbery exterior.  No, no, I must be wrong, they must be large candles to accompany special requests (I had not yet seen the wax images of body parts that adorn certain icons, so didn’t start my trip to Cyprus with concerns about the number of people suffering from intestinal problems).

 Now that I have thoroughly destroyed your desire to taste (or even look at it!), fast forward a few days to Lania, one of the villages known for making this delicacy.  When one visits people in order to learn about their culture and cuisine, an unspoken part of the bargain is that one tastes the products.  

Normally, this is the best part of the visit, but I admit to approaching soutzouko with some trepidation.  I stalled, by asking our host, Christos Karayiannis, how it is made.  The basic ingredients made me feel better immediately – seeing almonds (one of my preferred nuts) strung in lengths of string a metre long helped allay my fears.   

“We start with grapes (ah, a good start!), press them, then cook the juice for an hour and a half the first day, then again bring the liquid to simmering the next day.  Then we add flour to thicken it.”

 Sounds fine, but I am still waiting – will they add some weird ingredient that will throw off the flavours that I am now anticipating? 

 “Once the juice is thick enough, we start to dip the almonds in the juice.  We must dip them in, let then dry, then dip them again, and again, and again – it takes two days to make our soutzouko.”

 “That’s it?” I ask.  I am particularly fond of foods with few ingredients, and three is a good number. 

 “Yes, yes, but now you must try it.” 

 I am prepared, and can now confess to having in the back of my mind that we would be tasting some of Christos’ wine afterwards, guaranteed to erase any possible ill effects of the soutzouko with both dry and sweet red wines that would be sure to overshadow any less than pleasant food flavours.

 Of course, predictably, none of this was necessary:  Soutzouko is as good as it sounds, and far, far (infinitely, in my view) better than it looks.  The thick layer of cooked grape juice is sweet and, well, a bit rubbery, but not in a bad way.  It gives into the crunchy almonds, offering a good textural and flavour combination.  The juice reminds me vaguely of some kind of candy from my childhood, but I haven’t been able to put my finger on what it is. 

Since cheese is no longer easy to bring back to Canada in a suitcase, candy is a good substitute and when Christos tells me that it keeps forever in the freezer, well, I am up for buying a kilo or two.  Only the knowledge of my rapidly filling suitcase keeps me limited to 500 grams.

 We move to the wines.  They are good.  The dry red is straightforward and will suit the food perfectly – hmm, kleftiko for dinner tonight perhaps?  The Commanderia, a sweet red wine, has good balance and complexity.  It is sweet because the grapes are dried for several weeks before fermentation starts, so the sugar is concentrated. At 18% or so, fermentation stops naturally (the yeast finally succumbing to the alcohol), with a healthy dose of residual sugar left to balance the high alcohol. 

Commanderia takes its name from Crusaders, who adopted this wine when they came to Cyprus in the late 12^th century.  The wine is a couple of millennia older than that though, serving as the drink of choice at the Spring festivals honouring the cult of Aphrodite. 

 The history of the contributions Cyprus has made to the wine industry of the world is a whole other topic, but suffice to say here that the best part of this history is that there are now more than 30 small wineries that have sprung up looking to make higher quality wines.  Like many other wine producing areas, their success will be in establishing quality and promoting their wines to the visitors who crave that wine country experience.

 So far, I have only shared my soutzouko with a few people here in Canada, but the response had been extremely favourable – reminding me once again how dangerous it can be to judge things by their appearances.