Written by Diane Farr Louis and June Marinos, "Prospero's Kitchen: Mediterranean Cooking of the Ionian Islands from Corfu to Kythera" is still the only cookbook devoted exclusively to the cuisine and culture of Greece’s Ionian Islands. "Emerald baubles in the wine dark sea between Greece and Italy," the islands were prized from antiquity onward for their fertile soil, mild climate and key location on the shipping routes to the eastern and southern Mediterranean. More than four hundred years of Italian, primarily Venetian, rule left lilting rhythms in speech and song as well as new accents in the food. The Corfiot kitchen in particular is peppered with Italian-sounding names, such as bourdetto, bianco, sofrito and polpettone, but you will also find a whole repertoire of "English puddings", a legacy of 50 years of British rule in the 19th century.
No matter what you call them, Ionian dishes are quintessentially Mediterranean: laced with sweet extra virgin olive oil balanced by the acidity of tomatoes and lemon juice, heady with garlic and reliant on herbs rather than piquant spices for taste. Nevertheless, each island has its idiosyncrasies, with some Corfiot recipes calling for generous sprinklings of cayenne pepper and paprika, while Zakynthian stews and stuffings are often enriched by cheese.
Many of the recipes in "Prospero’s Kitchen" come from family notebooks handed down through the generations; others were gleaned from local cooks who filled the authors with traditional lore and stories as they took notes in island homes. What emerges is more than a collection of recipes but rather a portrait of Ionian life through the ages, both in the sophisticated, westernized towns of the larger islands and in the resolutely Greek farmers’ and shepherds’ communities on all of them.
This version of the Ionian is wonderfully different from that experienced by the hordes of tourists who visit the area every year. In these pages you will not find the ubiquitous peasant salads, souvlakis and baked beans that nourish them, nor even many of the mainland dishes most people associate with Greek cooking. For a start, try the cheese pie without trousers (pastry) from Cephalonia, the fish stew with two kinds of onions from Paxos, Zakynthos beef stew (saltsa) rich with tomatoes, garlic and cheese, eggplant smothered in garlic from the same island, Corfiot baked vegetables and a dessert like Elly’s orange cream from Ithaca or Kytheran almond cake, and you’ll get an idea of the delightful variety in store.
If, as Lawrence Durrell and his cronies imagined so compellingly in Prospero’s Cell, Corfu really was the island of Shakespeare’s sorceror, these are the dishes his spirits would have cooked. It’s not difficult to envisage them as inspiring the chefs in the whole Ionian chain as well.
