The Odyssey: Greek Mezes

By Emma Hawkins | August 5, 2018 | Comments 0 Comment

So, to continue with book-themed month, this week is going to be a meze-a-day inspired by the Odyssey! I read this book back in June as a bit of research for a piece of playwriting I’m doing, and I enjoyed it way more than I expected. I think books like the Odyssey and the Iliad have become stereotyped as boring, old Greek things that only scholars or nerds read. Well you may be right there, as I am a bit of a nerd, but it’s a much easier read than you’d think, and whilst I wouldn’t call it a page turner it does have an exciting and interesting plot line.

So, back into the land of food. I couldn’t think of a particularly interesting way of re-imagining the plot line of the Odyssey into a single dish (those who’ve read it will sympathise) so I decided to do more of a banquet-style thing. In the book there’s a lot of talk of hospitality and food, and a lot of big food celebrations whenever someone new came over to someone’s house (which was pretty much all the time). There’s also a lot of travelling, and the book looks at the whole of Greece, (or the islands that make up Greece if you want to be picky about when the Greek Islands became ‘Greece’), so I thought a selection of Greek mezes (or tapas) would be appropriate celebration of all this.

This is going to be the intro page to the banquet, but over the next week I’ll post a recipe a day of each of the individual mezes, so by the end of the week you’ll have 7 meze dishes you can mix and match! I’ll also post the links to each of these on this mother-post page so you can find all the recipes here.

First one up is this delicious, warm aubergine bake!