Greek vs mediterranean food
Standout differences are often complemented by overlapping similarities. Trying to understand the unique differences of Mediterranean cuisine is somewhat like examining the influence of Jazz, Rock and Roll, Classical, or any other genre — they feed and build off one another and those before. And you would be hard pressed to find an area of the world where there is more of a mixing and fusion of flavors, styles, and ingredients than the Mediterranean — a vibrant region currently made up of 21 countries with a wide and varied history of mercantile trade and hostile clashes of empires and conquerors. This group they invented the alphabet actually thrived through their manufacture of prized goods and maritime trade across the Mediterranean sea. Because they were highly skilled shipbuilders and traders, the Phoenicians facilitated the sharing and transfer of spices and ingredients from across the ancient world, spreading once solitary ingredients abroad into the greater world. Fast forward through Alexander the Great, Rome, and many more, one of the largests influences has come from….
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Greek Mediterranean Diet
Mediterranean cuisine is the food and methods of preparation used by the people of the Mediterranean Basin. The idea of a Mediterranean cuisine originates with the cookery writer Elizabeth David 's book, A Book of Mediterranean Food and was amplified by other writers working in English. Many writers define the three core elements of the cuisine as the olive, wheat , and the grape , yielding olive oil , bread and pasta , and wine ; other writers deny that the widely varied foods of the Mediterranean basin constitute a cuisine at all.
A common definition of the geographical area covered, proposed by David, follows the distribution of the olive tree. Portuguese cuisine , in particular, is partly Mediterranean in character.
Spirits based on anise are drunk in many countries around the Mediterranean. The cooking of the area is not to be confused with the Mediterranean diet , made popular because of the apparent health benefits of a diet rich in olive oil, wheat and other grains, fruits , vegetables , and a certain amount of seafood , but low in meat and dairy products.
Mediterranean cuisine encompasses the ways that these and other ingredients, including meat, are dealt with in the kitchen, whether they are health-giving or not. Various authors have defined the scope of Mediterranean cooking either by geography or by its core ingredients.
Elizabeth David , in her A Book of Mediterranean Food , defines her scope as "the cooking of the Mediterranean shores" and sketches out the geographical limits: [2]. She defines this region as coextensive with the range of the olive tree : "those blessed lands of sun and sea and olive trees".
It is therefore constrained to a more or less narrow zone around the Mediterranean Sea , except in the Maghreb and in Spain , where it is distributed more widely, and on the islands of the Mediterranean, where it is widespread. The Tunisian historian Mohamed Yassine Essid similarly defines the region by the olive's presence, along with bread, wheat , and the grape as the "basic products of Mediterranean folk cuisine": [6]. Mediterranean cuisine is defined by the presence of fundamental elements which are said to play a more important role than others, reflecting a community of beliefs and practices which transcend religions, languages and even societies.
The olive tree, the emblematic tree on more than one account, traces the bounds of a frontier of landscapes and lives on either side of which the Mediterranean begins or ends. Above Montelimar , nicknamed "Gates of Provence", is the limit of the olive. The belief in a common core, emerging from a claim to authority over that kernel of "Mediterranean-ness," is what underlies writing describing the culinary Mediterranean, yet it seems that only from far away does a unified Mediterranean exist.
The closer one gets to that common core, the less it is visible, until the food of Umbria comes to seem entirely different from the food of Tuscany, and to compare either to the food of Greece would be absurd. The very idea of a Mediterranean ensemble—be it onions and olive oil and tomatoes or some other combination entirely—presupposes not only a shared history but a unified history, an imagined moment in which the Mediterranean presented a single culture that over time has, like a language, split and branched and flowered into the wild variety of contemporary cuisine.
Some writers include the cuisines of the eastern Adriatic coast of Dalmatia — Albanian , Montenegrin , and Croatian , while most do not mention them. Some writers also include areas not touching the Mediterranean Sea or supporting olive cultivation, including Serbian , Macedonian , and Portuguese cuisine.
Essid identifies the "trinity" of basic ingredients of traditional Mediterranean cuisine as the olive, wheat, and the grape, yielding oil, bread, and wine respectively.
The olive appears to come from the region of Persia and Mesopotamia , at least 6, years ago. The olive yields bitter fruits, made edible by curing and fermentation , and olive oil. Wheat was domesticated in the Fertile Crescent , in and near the Levant some 10, years ago.
Its ancestors include wild emmer wheat ; this was hybridised , harvested and sown to create domestic strains with larger grains, in ears that shatter less readily than wild forms. Wheat is a staple food in the Mediterranean region. Wheat bread was already critically important in the empire of Ancient Rome , which included the entire region; at that time, around 2, years ago, North Africa was the "breadbasket" of the empire.
The grape was domesticated between 7, and 4, BC between the Black Sea and Persia ; archaeological evidence shows that wine was being made there by 6, BC, reaching Greece and Crete in the fifth millennium BC and Spain by the last millennium BC.
Grapes are mostly grown for making wine and vinegar as basic components of the Mediterranean diet, as well for drying as raisins or for eating as table grapes. Raisins and table grape varieties are chosen for their flavour. In , Italy produced 6. The concept of a Mediterranean cuisine is very recent, probably dating from the publication of David's A Book of Mediterranean Food Carol Helstosky, author of the book Food Culture in the Mediterranean , is among the authors who use "Mediterranean cuisine" interchangeably with "Mediterranean food".
In the preface to her book she writes: [27]. Mediterranean food is incredibly popular: pasta, pizza , sausage , wine , gyros , [b] kebab , and falafel can be found just about everywhere.
Food experts and cookbook authors adore Mediterranean cuisine Essid acknowledges that "geographical differences and the vicissitudes of history" have affected the food of different Mediterranean lands, but nonetheless asserts that: [28]. Rules for the preparation and consumption of food are common to the lands that border the Mediterranean. They offer both stability, continuity and reproduction of a specific pattern of eating which resists conquest, invasion, colonisation, social change, industrialisation and urbanisation.
Consequently, wherever you go, in southern Europe or the lands bordering the southern Mediterranean, you will find a cuisine and gastronomic ritual which is always familiar. The idea of the "standard Mediterranean" Their colleagues in Mediterranean countries are only too willing to perpetuate this myth. The fact of the matter is that the Mediterranean contains varied cultures. The cookery author Clifford A. Wright wrote in "There really is no such thing as 'Mediterranean cuisine'.
At the same time, we seem to know what we mean when we use the expression Since David's time, a variety of books on Mediterranean cuisine have been written, including Abu Shihab's book of that name; [32] Helstosky's book; books by other cookery writers include S.
Ullman's on the cooking of Tunisia, [36] Spain [37] and Italy, [38] each one subtitled "Mediterranean Cuisine". The ingredients of Mediterranean cuisine are to an extent different from those of the cuisine of Northern Europe , with olive oil instead of butter , wine instead of beer.
The list of available ingredients has changed over the centuries. Another major change was the arrival of foods from the Americas in Early Modern times around the sixteenth century , notably the incorporation of the potato into Northern European cuisine, [c] and the eager adoption of the tomato into Mediterranean cuisine.
The tomato, so central now to that cuisine, was first described in print by Pietro Andrea Mattioli in Similarly, many of the species of Phaseolus beans now used around the Mediterranean, including P. David's introduction to her book characterises the cooking of the Mediterranean countries as "conditioned naturally by variations in climate and soil and the relative industry or indolence of the inhabitants.
David identifies "the ever recurring elements" in the food of this extensive region as olive oil, saffron , garlic , "pungent" local wines, as well as the "aromatic perfume" of herbs, especially rosemary , wild marjoram , and basil , and the bright colours of fresh foods in the markets, " pimentos , aubergines , tomatoes , olives , melons , figs " and "shiny fish, silver, vermilion , or tiger-striped". She includes cheeses of "sheep's or goat's milk", " figs from Smyrna on long strings" and "sheets of apricot paste which is dissolved in water to make a cooling drink.
With common ingredients including the olive, wheat, and grape; a shared climate; and a long period for cultural exchange, it might be expected that a single, pan-Mediterranean cuisine would have developed. Each of those, in turn, has national and provincial variations.
Maghrebi cuisine includes the cuisines of Algeria , Libya , Morocco , and Tunisia. One of the most characteristic dishes of the region is couscous , a steamed, small-grained wheat semolina , served with a stew.
The dish is ancient, mentioned by the Medieval traveller Ibn Battuta , [52] and found for example also in the Western Sicilian cuisine , especially in the province of Trapani , where it was re-introduced after One stew that may be served with couscous is the Moroccan tagine , a hearty, somewhat dry dish of meat and vegetables, cooked slowly in a pot called a tagine with a tall conical lid.
Dishes from the Maghreb region of North Africa are often coloured and flavoured with the hot spice mixtures harissa and ras el hanout containing such spices as cumin, coriander, saffron, cinnamon, cloves, chillies, and paprika.
Other characteristic flavourings of the region are preserved lemons and dried apricots and raisins. Egyptian cuisine has ancient roots, with evidence that, for example, cheese has been made in Egypt since at least 3, BC. Levantine cuisine is the cooking of the Levant including the Middle Eastern Mediterranean coast, east of Egypt.
Among the most distinctive foods of this cuisine are traditional small meze dishes such as tabbouleh , hummus , and baba ghanoush. The dish is popular across the whole of the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa. Ful medames , originally from Egypt and still a national dish there, consists of fava beans with oil and cumin; it is popular throughout the Levant.
Ottoman cuisine has given rise to the cuisines of modern Turkey , parts of the Balkans , Cyprus , and Greece. These are popular and widespread across the Eastern Mediterranean region, and date as far back as ancient Roman times.
Greek cookery makes wide use of vegetables, olive oil, grains, fish, wine and meat white and red, including lamb , poultry , rabbit and pork. Other important ingredients include olives, cheese, aubergine, courgette, lemon juice, vegetables, herbs, bread and yoghurt. Lakerda pickled fish , mizithra cheese and desserts like diples , koulourakia , moustokouloura and melomakarono also date back to the Byzantine period, while the variety of different pitas probably dates back to ancient times.
Much of Greek cuisine is part of the larger tradition of Ottoman cuisine, the names of the dishes revealing Arabic, Persian or Turkish roots: moussaka , tzatziki , yuvarlakia , keftes and so on.
Many dishes' names probably entered the Greek vocabulary during Ottoman times, or earlier in contact with the Persians and the Arabs. However, some dishes may be pre-Ottoman, only taking Turkish names later; the historians of food John Ash and Andrew Dalby , for example, speculate that grape-leaf dolmadhes were made by the early Byzantine period , while Alan Davidson traces trahana to the ancient Greek tragos and skordalia to the ancient Athenian skorothalmi.
David barely mentioned the non-Greek Balkans , stating only that yoghurt and moussaka are widespread in the region. Albena Shkodrova notes that the cuisines of the coastal provinces of Istria and Dalmatia were influenced by Venice.
She adds that cuisines labelled as "Italian" and "Mediterranean" are becoming popular in the Balkans, which she calls "a historical crossroads of Oriental, Mediterranean and Central-European influences". Mediterranean Italian cuisine includes much of Italy outside the north and the mountainous inland regions.
It is a diverse cuisine, but among its best-known and most characteristic foods are risotto , pizza in Neapolitan and Sicilian styles , and pasta dishes such as spaghetti. Risotto is a dish made using Italian short-grain rice, which is both highly absorbent and resistant to turning into a pudding when cooked with stock and flavoured with onions and garlic, cooked in butter.
In San Remo it is onions cooked in olive oil, with salted sardines. Spaghetti dishes also vary. It may be eaten as David says "simply with olive oil and garlic", without cheese, or with a sauce of "very red and ripe peeled tomatoes", cooked briefly and flavoured with garlic and either basil or parsley.
One Sicilian variant includes pieces of bacon, onions fried in fat, garlic, stoned olives, and anchovies, served with olive oil and grated Parmesan cheese.
Mediterranean French cuisine includes the cooking styles of Provence , Occitania , and the island of Corsica. Bouillabaisse is a substantial dish from the French port of Marseille , capital of Provence. It is a stew for at least eight people, because it should contain many kinds of fish such as crayfish , gurnard , weever , John Dory , monkfish , conger eel , whiting , sea bass , and crab.
These are cooked with Mediterranean vegetables and herbs, namely onions, garlic, tomatoes, thyme , fennel , parsley , bay, and orange peel. Spain's varied Mediterranean cuisines includes the cooking of Andalusia , Murcia , Catalonia , Valencia , and the Balearic islands.
The dish may be varied with artichoke hearts , peas , sweet peppers, lima beans , string beans , or sausages. Portugal lies on the Atlantic , not the Mediterranean, but it is in the Mediterranean basin, characterised by olive groves and a Mediterranean climate, though the Atlantic coast is wetter.
There are, equally, many meat dishes, using chicken, pork, and rabbit. Portuguese vegetables include the tomatoes common in Mediterranean cuisine, but also kale, carrots, and broad beans.
The country produces red wines such as Alentejo. Anise is used around the Mediterranean to flavour various traditional spirits , including:.
Greek cuisine
The words are often used interchangeably by restaurants specializing in either cuisine—but there are a couple of differences. One of the things that confuses some people is the fact that Greece lies on the Ionian, Aegean, and Mediterranean seas. Its geography makes it a Mediterranean country, but its food is uniquely Greek. And these are a few of the distinctions.
Italian vs Greek cuisine
Are you really eating Greek food? Maybe not. Is this positive? Yes and no. On the one hand it is wonderful that diners consider Greek food healthy, on the other hand they consider it less healthy than Mediterranean? Ok, so hopefully now it is clear that the Greek Diet is absolutely related to the Mediterranean diet. Westernized Greek Food?
5 Things Most People Get Wrong About Greek Food
Others see the cuisine as being characterized by those ingredients fitting into the Mediterranean Diet, which showcases vegetables and olive oil. More than a few chefs and operators view Mediterranean fare with an almost Zen-like approach, wherein the food is a sense of being. Ted Xenohristos, founding partner of Washington, D. We wanted to portray that we could provide bold flavors.
The Beginner's Guide to Mediterranean Cuisines
Mediterranean cuisine is the food and methods of preparation used by the people of the Mediterranean Basin. The idea of a Mediterranean cuisine originates with the cookery writer Elizabeth David 's book, A Book of Mediterranean Food and was amplified by other writers working in English. Many writers define the three core elements of the cuisine as the olive, wheat , and the grape , yielding olive oil , bread and pasta , and wine ; other writers deny that the widely varied foods of the Mediterranean basin constitute a cuisine at all. A common definition of the geographical area covered, proposed by David, follows the distribution of the olive tree. Portuguese cuisine , in particular, is partly Mediterranean in character. Spirits based on anise are drunk in many countries around the Mediterranean.
The Difference Between a Greek and Mediterranean Restaurant
Globalization has brought far-flung dishes to our dinner table so I was already familiar with popular Greek dishes like gyros, saganaki, dolmadakia, and moussaka. But like any serious food lover, I wanted to experience each and every one of those dishes in Greece. As expected, my love for Greek food grew exponentially after visiting Athens and Santorini. If you want to experience the best of Greek cuisine, then this article will show you twenty of the most delicious Greek foods to look out for. No time to read this article on the best food in Greece? Click on the save button and pin it for later! These staple crops formed the foundation of traditional Greek food. Olives and wine are central to the cuisine while wheat is the basic grain.
Is it the ever-popular Greek dish, moussaka? From breads to vegetables to oils, there are so many ingredients and dishes that are uniquely and iconically Mediterranean. While many dishes are recognizably Mediterranean, actual Mediterranean cuisine encompasses the Mediterranean basin, which covers several vastly different geographical areas including Spain, Italy, Greece, Egypt, Turkey and Syria, among many others.
The Greek Mediterranean Diet is one of the healthiest diets. It is characterized by a nutritional model that has remained constant over time and space, consisting mainly of olive oil, cereals, fresh or dried fruit and vegetables, a moderate amount of fish, dairy and meat, as well as a variety of condiments and spices, all accompanied by wine or infusions. According to research carried out in the last 50 years in parts of the Mediterranean, including Crete and southern Italy, the Mediterranean diet model is responsible for the longevity of its inhabitants and the absence of heart diseases or diseases of the digestive system. However, the Greek Mediterranean die t is not merely a diet, but rather a way of life: it constitutes a set of skills, knowledge and practices, promoting social interaction, since communal meals are the cornerstone of social customs and festive events. Saturday 13 November Greek Mediterranean Diet.
Travellers are advised to read the FCO travel advice at gov. Greece has long been a family holiday favourite with its beautiful blue waters, child-friendly beaches and an abundance of delicious food made with fresh ingredients. Make sure you sample all the country has to offer with our pick of traditional dishes…. But the delectable taramasalata fish roe dip is a must. This creamy blend of pink or white fish roe, with either a potato or bread base, is best with a drizzle of virgin olive oil or a squeeze of lemon. Try our spin on this classic Greek dip — smoked salmon taramasalata. Try making your own rosemary-flavoured olives and put that jar to good use with our top 10 ideas for using up olives.
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