Start by cleaning some spinach-armfuls of it. Spinach is sandy of course, so you will have to wash it two or three times to get it really clean. Hmmm... better make it three times. OK, now you can't cook with wet spinach, so you need to dry it. If you wait until it drips dry, it will get all wilty, so you need to wring it out by hand, like a dishrag. You'd better have Popeye-like forearms for this, because you still need to pull off all the stems.
Now chop the spinach. You might get some help with this; the guys over at the Puritan Backroom have agreed to process 90 cases or so of it for you. Mix it up with a bucketful or so of feta cheese and a lot of cottage cheese. Now, you're ready to cook.
You're going to need help with the next step-layering a giant sheet pan with phylo dough; even with arms like yours, this is a bit of a chore. Lay the pastry dough down and cover it with the spinach mixture. Get your partner to help you lay down another layer of phylo. Now another layer of spinach. And another of dough. And one more of spinach. Top it off with another pound or so of phylo, score it, slather it in butter and pop it into the oven.
Now do all that 114 more times.
The Glendi Festival is about Greek culture and the Greek language and tradition, but everyone knows what the real draw is-food. Lots of food.
Staggering, mind-boggling amounts of food. Enough Greek food to actually feed Greece. Consider the grocery list this year: Glendi will go through 500 pounds of spinach, more than 300 pounds of feta cheese, 350 pounds of phylo dough, 170 pounds of cottage cheese, 30 dozen eggs and 150 pounds of butter. And that's just for the spanakopita.
Greeks love food. Where most people like eating, Greeks love food with a double-fisted, take-life-by-the-throat intensity that makes all other groups look picky and restrained by comparison.
"Let me put it this way," says Beverly Spiro, one of Glendi's organizers, "When I was growing up and people came to your house, they ate! We celebrated any occasion by eating. Do you know about name days? On the festival of St. John the Baptist for example, you'd go to the house of everyone you knew named John and they'd feed you! (For a Greek) food is about expressing yourself, expressing joy. That's just the way it is."
Spiro knows what she's talking about. She and the other women of St. George Greek Orthodox Cathedral do the lion's share of the work for Glendi. They start cooking two months ahead to prepare all the food they'll need. Between stuffing peppers and rolling meatballs, they bake at least 10 different types of cookies-up to 8,000 of each type.
Martha Kokkinos has been cooking since July. She says that the key to preparing this mountain of food is teamwork and organization.
"Thirty to 35 girls come in to work when we start a project," she explains. "We have to make a lot in advance and freeze it; we can't do everything the week of the festival."
The most labor-intensive dish is the traditional spinach pie, spanakopita, or "pita" for short, but everything the ladies cook involves a surprising amount of complexity. Take kathaisi, for instance. This dessert has only half a dozen ingredients, but by the time the cooks shred phylo dough, mix in hand-ground nuts and spices, bake it, then bathe it in syrup, a startling amount of time has slipped by. Of course, the more kathaisi you make, the longer it takes.
"We make about 1,500 portions of that," Kokkinos says.
Manchester's Greek community has come to expect authentic Greek food each year at Glendi, returning for the pastries they remember from their youth, like finikia. Greek for "palm-tree fruit," finikia is a traditional cookie stuffed with dates and soaked in syrup. This cookie is one of the oldest desserts in existence. Expectations are high for this and it had better be up to standard. No pressure there!
A dessert with a more domestic tradition is kourambethes, a white-powdered all-butter cookie, a lot like shortbread. Almost anyone who has grown up in a Greek household has intense memories of their mother's or grandmother's kourambethes and demand for them is high. The Glendi ladies make about 5,000 of them each year, but they usually sell out in the first day or so.
"They'll definitely be gone by Sunday," says Spiro.
Koulourakia are butter cookies too, but not as sweet as kourambethes and covered with sesame seeds.
"We made 8,000 this year," says Spiro, starting to sound tired.
There are two separate Greek interpretations of fried dough at Glendi: diples, where phylo is fried, soaked in the omnipresent syrup and set aside to be served later, and loukoumades, a fried pastry from the Greek islands which must be served piping hot.
Making all these Greek foods in the proper, traditional way is important because Glendi represents the food of dozens of villages back in Greece, and Greeks from those villages, their children and grandchildren want an authentic taste of their culture.
(As a side-note, Spiro explains that this inter-village competitiveness clarifies a phenomenon that has mystified travelers for years-Greek food is wonderful, but the food in Greece is often terrible. It stems from the commercial, mass-produced glop served to tourists, she says. For the best Greek cooking, you apparently have to get away from Athens and into the countryside. "The food you get there is from people in villages," she points out. "In each village they all say, 'Mine is better; mine is better.' That's what you call Greek food!")
It's that village-like sense of tradition that Glendi tries to nail down.
According to Maria Damalas, another of the Glendi cooks, authenticity is not always easy. Damalas is from a small village in Greece called Alassona ("Right under Mount Olympus," she explains).
One of the surprising problems in recreating traditional Greek dishes, she says, is the ready availability of quality ingredients here.
"We try to keep the same food," she explains, "but there is a lot of beef here."
At home in the Greek countryside, she says, most meat dishes use lamb, or perhaps pork in the winter. But historically, she says, there is not a lot of meat in Greek peasant cooking.
"When I was a child, there was not a lot of fresh meat because there was no refrigeration," she says.
Obviously, that's not a problem here. You can find plenty of meat, and almost anything else Greek you'd like, at Glendi. The indoor cultural center features the baked goods, pastries and cookies, and the outdoor tents feature full, sit-down meals with meat, more than a ton of which is cooked in the nearby barbecue pit. As in many cultures, this is Man Country.
There is a definite division of labor along gender lines at Glendi. It goes something like this:
The women plan and prepare dozens of dishes for two months, endlessly chopping, scraping, baking, blanching, stuffing, and dousing things in syrup. They put in hundreds of hours in difficult, hot, sweaty, back-aching conditions. They attend committee meeting, coordinate sales and attend to the thousand or so miscellaneous jobs.
The men cook the meat.
Say what you will about all the great dishes that are served at Glendi, the truth is, most of it is just icing on the cake. Ninety-nine percent of the people who come to the festival come for two things-baklava and roast lamb. The women have the baklava covered. The men run the pit.
The phrase "barbecue pit" brings to mind an image of a smoky hole in the ground where sweating, soot-covered men stoke fires and roast huge racks of red, juicy meat. According to Head of Pit Dick Anagnost, that's pretty accurate.
"It's like being in the engine of a steam locomotive," he says.
The Glendi men cook approximately 2,500 pounds of lamb over three days. Lamb shanks are prepared in ovens to be served in the tent, but the real cooking takes place over the coals, where, yes, more than a ton of fresh, red meat is cut, seasoned, skewered, roasted, unskewered, and served in a continuous assembly line for the entire festival.
The meat is seasoned in basic, traditional Mediterranean spices-salt, pepper, garlic, onion, oregano-and cooked on skewers in the Greek tradition. Once the demand for shishkabobs starts, the pit crew generally has 36-42 skewers of lamb cooking at any given time. Over the three days of the festival, they will go through at least a hundred 20-pound bags of charcoal.
"We start seasoning the lamb at eight a.m. on Friday and work until somewhere around midnight," Anagnost says. "Then we come in at around seven on Saturday and go 'til midnight again, then come in the next morning at seven and work until six at night."
The men won't admit it of course, but the very fact that cooking the meat is so grueling is obviously a point of pride to them. Working the pit is a sort of rite of passage. Anagnost started cooking meat at the church 30 years ago, when he was a teenager, but it was only five years ago that he moved up to Head of Pit. "The older guys are starting to pass it on to the younger guys," he explains. "The men in their seventies and eighties are doing less and the ones in their thirties and forties are doing more; it's a sort of a passing on of the baton."
Anagnost's oldest son, 10-year-old Alexander, is already working in the pit, sweating in the ashes with the older men for three days. Tradition aside, he gets the added benefit of being able to top any of his peers' complaints about mowing the lawn, right?
