Sometimes things fall into place, just so.
I have been given a recipe for Greek Easter bread Tsourakis from a Greek lady living on the other side of the earth. Just so. A Greek lady who by normal standards is a complete stranger to me. Luckily I’ve got my own. Where she lives, tomatoes are now dangling from the branches like overfed languid birds. And the figs are ripening, oozing tiny golden bubbles of sugary juice down their deep purple skins. It is a family recipe. Family recipes are a peculiar thing, they are always much more alive than the mere list of ingredients they pretend to be. She gave it to me because a few weeks ago I have baked tresses bread for my homesick Monsieur who was lost in January dreariness bleak wind and cold and that bread looked familiar to her.
This Greek Easter bread Tsourakis is made with a peculiar mediterranean spice, rather uncommon here in rural France. Soft hearts of wild cherry seeds, dried, grounded. Mahlepi it is called. The smell of Easter in Greece, she says. I wonder what it tastes like. And because I’m a somewhat complicated person, it wouldn’t do to get it from just anywhere. It wouldn’t taste as it ought, I’m sure.
The other day the electrician brought me a tiny bottle of fig liqueur. Homemade, because, he said, he couldn’t eat them all up, the figs in his garden. Just so. The figs and the leaves and the sun. While figs taste of wild honey and sweet cream, the leaves add a rounded freshness, warm and balmy. It’s a sirupy golden soup, tasting of late summer and molten sugar right before the point it’s burnt. I made it into a teeming February cocktail, one you would drink after midnight, when the fire is slowly dying and the outside chill sneaks through the walls into your house. Fig liqueur, yellow ratafia. Almond milk, egg white. A dash of muscat, I will try with Mahlepi once it will have found the way to my kitchen. And a hint of bliss in Monsieur’s half smile.
My mother went to Cairo in Egypt to escape the iron grasp of our winter. To return to Europe in spring. A bit Demeter and Persephone except that she will be the one to bring back softer air. And Mahlepi. She will get it from the market in tawabel street, where everyone sneezes except the merchants, they must have gotten used to the spice dusted air. Where they sell powder as blue as the sky at nightfall. Colours, everywhere. An old man who looks like Hemingway but with grey eyes and a nasty smile, I wonder whether he is still there.
My mother will bring the Mahlepi in spring so that I can make Greek bread for Easter based on a recipe of a Greek lady and her mother living on the other side of earth. And a pinch on a midnight fig cocktail, smelling of warm cobblestones and stolen fruit and late summer in Greece. Sometimes things fall into place, just so.
Midnight philosykos cocktail:
- 25ml of fig liqueur
- 50ml white ratafia
- 25 ml of almond milk
- 1 whipped up egg white
- Ice
- Mahlepi or muscat
Dry shake all ingredients, add ice and shake again. Carefully pour into a nice glass through a strainer. Add a dash of Mahlepi, if you have some. Or muscat. Relish.
Les Poissonchats 