Spanakorizo

by Luca Demetriadi

Otherwise known as spinach with rice. It’s a dish that his dad makes and his yiayia makes. They use the same recipe book but cook it differently. His dad’s is always more lemony and wet. It may not sound great, really, to you. It’s just spinach and rice after all. But trust him when he thinks that it’s delicious, that it tastes like the house that he grew up in, that it tastes like his yiayia smoking a cigarette on her veranda on his summer holiday. Cooking it makes him feel better than swimming does. He marks his own copy of the book in pencil like his dad and his yiayia do. 

The book is Joyce M. Stubbs’s The Home Book of Greek Cookery, published by Faber & Faber in 1963. The epigraph is from Athenaeus and warns that 

In other words, this is a very good cookbook. Its appendix lists the London shops that are best supplied with Greek ingredients, as of 1963. There are only eight though, and he lives in Melbourne. His dad has stocked up on second hand copies from eBay and bestows them on those dinner guests who have appreciated his cooking well. For better or worse his dad jokes that he’ll give a hardback copy to his daughter’s future husband as a dowry. 

Stubbs often makes fun of Brits. In the introduction to her chapter on vegetable dishes, she writes that ‘in England vegetables are apt to be thought of as “veg”, one of the few diminutives with a dense atmosphere of gloom’, whereas thankfully his dad’s side of the family are largely Greek, and his mum’s side are Australian, so he can avoid Stubbs’s charges.

So then: one pint of rice; good quality Greek olive oil; heaps of spinach because it shrinks; brown onions; enough dill that, were it tobacco, it could be rolled into a cigarette; oregano; lemon juice; salt and pepper to taste but more of the former because he’s a smoker; one longneck of mid-strength lager for himself because he’s trying to cut down.

He chops the onions with tears in his eyes and sautés them in an obscene amount of olive oil until they’re mostly cooked but not yet coloured. His housemates say that it smells good. Everything smells like onions.

He washes the spinach well and throws it in along with the rice and water. He adds powdered chicken stock to the water which his dad and yiayia don’t add but he thinks that vegetarian dishes are often lacking that meaty flavour. He squeezes in the lemons. He stirs it once well with a wooden spoon and sips his beer that tastes like water and is delicious.

Last summer, he goes to Greece with his dad to visit his yiayia. His dad picks oregano from the side of the road, dries it, rubs it, and gives it to him in a mason jar that looks like weed when he passes through security. He adds a pinch.

Dill isn’t a sexy herb, and he always struggles to source it unless he goes to the Polish deli near the public pool that never gets deeper than his nipples. He doesn’t use dill for anything else, so he adds way too much. 

He lets the pot simmer for as long as it takes for him to respond to all the messages on his phone that he’s been ignoring, except for the most important one, which he leaves unread.

He turns off the heat. He covers it with a clean tea towel and lets it rest for half an hour. He watches football clips on YouTube but then gets bored. Back to the kitchen and he serves and sends a photo to his dad, but not to his yiayia, who’s been getting quite horrible about immigration recently, and she’s more pointed when waving her cigarette on her veranda, so he leaves her alone. 

He eats and then leaves the pot to soak until tomorrow, which is fine, because his housemates rarely bother with their own washing-up, anyway. He doesn’t offer any to his housemates because he portions it into Tupperware to microwave for lunches. 

The typical Greek vegetable dish, Stubbs writes in her book, uses some variety of spinach or else other ‘wild greenstuffs known to the Greeks as horta and to the British largely as weeds’, which is classic Brit behaviour, he thinks. Brits aren’t usually resourceful. 

He hasn’t been feeling well recently, but he does right now, bloated with rice.

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Luca Demetriadi is a writer and graduate researcher living in Naarm (Melbourne). His fiction has appeared in The Stinging Fly and been nominated for the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize.