How we sun-dry the octopus, why we salt-bake rather than grill a dentex, and Aphrodite’s karydopita as her grandmother wrote it. Nothing here that we have not cooked fifty times.
Two days on the line, the reason it must be sun in the morning and shade at midday, and the exact point at which it stops being rubber. Seven sentences, because it does not need more.
The recipe as Garyfallia wrote it, in cups and by feel, with Aphrodite’s notes in the margin about what to do when the walnuts are dry. Untranslated where translation would ruin it.
Why bream and dentex go under salt and red mullet never does, how much egg white, and how to tell it is done without cracking it open in front of the table.
If a fish is turned twice it went on too early. That is Yannis’ rule and he applies it to the sardines, which take four minutes, exactly as strictly as to a two-kilo dentex.
Nikos disagrees about the dentex. The dentex still gets turned once.
Ceviche here uses sour orange rather than lime, and the fish comes out at fifteen minutes whatever else is happening on the pass. Longer and it stops being fish and starts being a texture.
This one nobody argues about.