Greek Salad: A Dionysian Travelogue [Paperback]

Miles Lambert-Gocs (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 2004

Miles Lambert, author of Greek Salad: A Dionysian Travelogue, published by The Wine Appreciation Guild and due out in July explores Greece via its tavernas "with the utility of a travel guide and the tone of a novel," says publisher Elliott Mackey. "Greek Salad is like no other book I've seen. Miles brings out the native personality of Greece through its tavernas, where distinct drinks and foods, and even the fellow sitting at the next table, have their own personal folklore. It's perfect preparatory reading for those heading to this year's summer Olympics." Lambert begins the book with a light brunch of "flaky bougasta filled with sweetened semolina" aboard a ferry headed for the island of Tinos, a member of the Aegean Islands, and once there, he's dragged on an impromptu expedition into "prehistory" lead by a tavern proprietor and his dog. From Tinos and "prehistory," Lambert then travels through the islands, onto the mainland, and then west to the lonians, ending the final chapter in a lower-class quarter of Corfu, drinking wine out of tumblers with his cab driver. "Greece can be a highly amusing place to navigate about in." says the author, "and I wanted to portray that neglected side of the country and people as I've found them over the years. I've often been looking through the prism of taverna wine glasses, but it's a vantage point with a lot to recommend it, not least of all because of our recent fascination with the food and folkways of Mediterranean Europe. We shouldn't stop at Provence and Tuscany when so much in those cultures originated in the age-old Aegean world."

Editorial Reviews

Review

"As if mirroring the very essence of Greece, Lambert-Gocs moves effortlessly between antiquity and the present, studding his beautifully written narrative with rare depth of knowledge, crisscrossing fluidly over millennia with the stroke of his pen." -- Gastronomica, Fall 2005

About the Author

From 1974 to 2003, Miles Lambert worked with the USDA, spending much of his professional career in Eastern Europe and Greece, and most of his free time drinking and writing about their wines. Mr Lambert has been published widely as a journalist and is the best selling author of The Wines of Greece.

Product Details

• Paperback: 283 pages
• Publisher: Ambell Press/The Wine Appreciation Guild; 1st edition (June 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1891267825
• ISBN-13: 978-1891267826
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,306,665 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #88 in Books > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Regional & International > European > Greek

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Let's All Have a Great Time in Greece!, October 12, 2004

By 

Henry Noland (Arlington, Virginia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Greek Salad: A Dionysian Travelogue (Paperback)

In "Greek Salad," Miles Lambert provides some of the expert commentary enjoyed previously in his first book, "The Wines of Greece," but in this volume lets us join him, personally, in his quest for great Greek wines in the classical and modern traditions. His witty insights and delightful references to ancient and more recent writers, from the likes of Aristophanes and Homer, through travelers on "the Grand Tour," such as Lord Byron and others, will no doubt bring a sense of keen recognition and delight to most of his readers. Authored by a master of English with a considerable command of Greek language and culture, "Greek Salad" makes me want to jump on a plane, and then catch a boat, to seek out "tavernas" of my own and experience some of the Greek places, wines, and foods our "Odysseus of the Wine Jars" so deliciously and entertainingly describes.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Dionysian Travelogue Indeed, September 14, 2004

By 

Henry Floyd (Bay Area, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Greek Salad: A Dionysian Travelogue (Paperback)

From the Aegean Islands to the Ionian Islands, with mainland Greece in between, Miles Lambert shares his travels and reveals a land where the regional food, wines, and its tavernas are all rooted and bound in the rich histories and lore of Greece.

The simple yet evocative prose made me envision the dog-eared journal pages stained by a hearty red, or the sun-baked vistas and salty villages the author describes.

While France and Italy have all been the backdrop for other travel diaries, it is time that Greece recieves its due recognition. This book is a wonderful exploration of a place that has so much to offer at every turn of a page.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars All the ingredients mix, March 25, 2005

By 

Elliot Essman (Larchmont, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Greek Salad: A Dionysian Travelogue (Paperback)

A satisfying chunk of black volcanic rock never leaves my desk. I picked it up personally on the Greek island of Santorini, where steam still percolates from the ground some twenty-five hundred years after the island exploded, upending the Aegean world. You can believe my powerful paperweight is the match of even the most truculent culinary book. It has certainly helped me plumb the depths of Greek Salad, a "Dionysian Travelogue" by American wine writer Miles Lambert-Gócs. Lambert roams Greece-the Aegean islands, the mainland, the Ionian islands-in an attempt to transmit, even amplify, a taste of Greece into accessible English prose. The result-even if you can taste Greece only vicariously-is the stuff of persistent reverie.

Taken individually, Lambert's 26 vignettes could only succeed in generating dramatic tension, unless, like me, you retain taste memory of a challenging retsina from Rhodes, or the best yogurt you have ever ingested. The whole of Greek Salad, though by rights it should be at least a coffee-table book (it is a tight small-format paperback), succeeds as it satisfies. I read just yesterday that recent surveys found Greeks, both male and female, to be on average even heavier than Americans. Evidently, Greeks do a lot of eating and drinking. The way Lambert tells it, the food, the wine, the soul of Greece do not spring fully-formed from a laminated restaurant menu; they are animated by earth, sea and sky. If you find yourself in Greece, you might as well eat, and wash it down with wine that originates just a stone's throw from your table. You can work it all off in the gym on your return.

Lambert has the imagination and scope to extol both the obscure and the predictable. Nearly every American "Greek diner" I have ever turned to as refuge from the night has offered a credible mousaka, a hybrid dish Lambert examines lightheartedly in his chapter on Larissa, on the Greek mainland in Thessaly. "Mousaka," Lambert writes, "certainly cannot lay with the en croute delicacies; but on the other hand it does not sink with the fluid casseroles either. Sometimes it seems to slide in between the terrines and pâtés...However, the rarer low-built mousaka, with its slim strata, cuts nicely on the bias and, if highly flavored with sweet spices, can for all the world seem a soft, non-stick baklava." If detail is delicious, Lambert serves up a feast, even if we want to pardon the author's French.

Or ferry-hop to the Aegean island of Syros, which Lambert visits for a second, longer look after having guiltily given the island short shrift in a previous incarnation. Here Lambert is hosted by shipping magnate John Vatis, who, after having acquired a taste for chardonnay in California, has fostered a wine-culture on the island. Vatis cultivates his vines "under Israeli conditions-no water and very bad land," using elaborate drip irrigation systems combined with the best technology money can buy. At the outset, a California enologist had informed Vatis that the "official" temperatures on the island were far too hot for chardonnay. But that was before the enologist visited the island and "found himself needing a jacket on the veranda in the evening-and before John discovered that the temperature readings were taken in the daytime in a stuffy nook downtown." At lunch, John's wife Helen prepares that other food I find on Greek diner menus: "pastitsio of a quality above what even an inveterately hopeful fan of Greek dishes might imagine that pastitsio has in it" (and a far cry from my own pale experience in American eateries).

Greek Salad handily transcends the American notion of "Greek food and wine," and yet I find a strong Greco-American thread throughout the book. Lambert sweeps through Greece not only as a journalist but also as a representative of the United States Department of Agriculture, a role that forces him on occasion to visit food processing plants, consume their output, and say nice things about it. We Americans love foreign references to our homeland, and Lambert provides them, from the Greek sailors who wax fondly over their visits to US ports, to Lambert's own habitual pilgrimage from his home in Virginia to a Greek wine shop in Astoria, New York, where he crams his car trunk with viniferous products he simply cannot live without. Writers always have a choice of perspective, voice and personal character; Lambert's is one of honest immediacy. The writing is unapologetically personal, vivid, experiential; therein lies the problem, since the only meal we really get to eat is composed of words rather than olive oil and lamb. Those of us who can't quite swing a leisurely voyage to Greece had better hope PBS drafts Lambert to host a thirteen-part series soon.

Food writer Elliot Essman's other reviews and food articles are available at www.stylegourmet.com