Greek Salad - A Dionysian Travelogue
by Miles Lambert-Gócs
Reviewed by Elliot Essman
Full Review at www.stylegourmet.com
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. Read the Full Review at www.stylegourmet.com
Reviewed by Elliot Essman
Full Review at www.stylegourmet.com
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. Read the Full Review at www.stylegourmet.com
posted by Elliot Essman at 6:28 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home