America in the Aegean
– Amy Hackney Blackwell
Wherever we go in Greece, we order the old standby horiatiki, the classic Greek village salad – a bowl of sliced tomatoes, cucumbers, olives, and feta, and these days often sliced peppers and onions as well. Often it comes sprinkled with the oregano that grows here in such abundance. If you get one in the country in summer or fall, the tomatoes have the sunkissed tang that can only come from fruits just picked and never refrigerated. All it needs is a little salt, a little olive oil, and maybe vinegar, and you have salad heaven.
This is an American salad. A pre-Columbian Greek village salad would’ve contained olives, feta, onion, and oregano – fun times. The tomatoes and cucumbers – the business ingredients that make a horiatiki a horiatiki – are both the fruits of plants native to the Americas. Just as Italian cuisine and Irish history would be completely different without Columbus, so too does Greece have trans-Atlantic plant transfers to thank for its modern cuisine.
And let’s not forget that staple of the Mediterranean diet: french fries! That is, patates, the inevitable side-dish that accompanies most meat entries.
And it’s not just food. Venture into the southern reaches of Greece – around Nafplio, down into Sparti, dotting the hillsides of Rhodes – and you might think you’d wandered into Texas. Aside from the dessicated, rocky hillsides and dry riverbeds, these landscapes are dotted with prickly pears. The locals call them Indian figs, but they’re not figs and they’re not Indian, except in the “West Indies” sense.
The prickly pear cactus, Opuntia humifusa, is native to the eastern United States and northeast Mexico. It grows all over West Texas, where I went to summer camp. (Never step on a prickly pear pad in running shoes. The pad will fold up around your shoe, the spines will go right through the nylon, and then you will have to sit down, remove shoe and sock, and pick out every single spine before you can go many steps further.)
This cactus caught the eye of Columbus (or his colleagues), who brought it back to Spain. The Venetians reportedly thought the prickly plant would make a great garden fence to keep out raiding critters (and humans?) and started planting them in Crete. The plant liked the climate (must’ve reminded it of home), and now prickly pears are as much a part of the Mediterranean as they are of Texas. People here eat the fruit and make them into marmalades or wines; fichi d’india is a common component of marzipan fruit assortments in Sicily. I don’t know if anyone in Europe eats the pads, called nopales in Mexico.
