When was the last time you saw a book on Greek Orthodoxy with encomiums from Jamie Oliver and Claudia Roden on the cover? Well, this is what you get with Georgina Hayden’s Nistisima. It’s a book about fasting food – which is what the title means – from a Greek Orthodox (Cypriot) perspective; and the author comes from the Jamie Oliver stable. So we’re straddling here the interesting divide between religion and food – or rather, the overlap between them.
Feasting and fasting is what marks the passage of the Church’s year and in the case of the Orthodox Churches, they hold to standards that the Catholic Church once had and has since abandoned. That is to say, they go vegan-plus-fish for easy-going fasting; for hard nistisima you can forget the fish and indeed wine and olive oil – a long time ago, oil was stored in sheepskins, which for the most purist monks disqualified it as a fasting food.
The nearest a Catholic gets to that is a measly twice a year when we’re back to no meat, one meal and two collations for Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. There’s a folk memory of how things used to be on Shrove Tuesday, when families used up the eggs and milk prior to Lent, but by and large, we consider we’re doing well if we give up sweets.
Georgina Hayden gives an account here not just of fasting food, but of the calendar that governs it. As she observes, Orthodox Christians can spend up to 200 days of the year fasting – and that means plant-based food. You think veganism or almond milk are new fads? The Orthodox Churches have been doing it forever.
As she observes: “While there isn’t a huge appreciation for veganism, or even vegetarianism in Cyprus, if you were to explain your diet as nistisimo (Lenten/fasting food) people would know exactly what you meant.” And while she declares that this is not a religious or diet book, she explains the rationale behind fasting.
Hayden notes that when she is eating in this way, she feels lighter. The practice of intermittent fasting is backed by contemporary science; indeed we know that if you eat less your longevity increases: Cardinal Newman’s observation that those ascetic saints who lived on the top of pillars with barely enough food to sustain them were remarkably long-lived is borne out by the evidence.
Hayden seeks fasting recipes from across the Orthodox world, from Mount Athos to Egypt, and each has its own take on the discipline of cooking without animal products. The poignant exception is Ukraine: since the Soviet-imposed famine there in the 1930s, fasting isn’t so much of a thing.
As you’d expect, the monks of Mount Athos are expert at it: Hayden quotes one monk, the late Father Epiphanios, who describes lyrically the patience needed to fry an onion. We learn that the Mount Athos monks eat at 9am; their day starts at midnight, so 9am is effectively lunch.
She takes us through the calendar of the Orthodox Church, with its fasts and its exceptions. Catholics will be chastened to be reminded that Advent is, properly, a fasting season too, and in the Orthodox Church it goes on for 40 days, with the final week before Christmas particularly severe. On feast days like the Assumption (the Repose of the Theotokos) you can eat fish if it falls on Wednesday or Friday.
The great thing is, you can have sweet things during the soft fasting season, though not every day. So we get recipes for halva which is on every Greek table during Lent, and it’s amazing what you can do without dairy products. There’s a nice recipe for little cherry pies made with bread dough; I substituted tinned apricot and it was very good. Milk puddings can be made with almond milk. Middle Eastern sweets with semolina soaked in syrup don’t feel like fasting food, but there’s no dairy or eggs.
There are good bread recipes, some with oil in the dough and sesame seeds on top. Some recipes are complex, like the dish made from wheat grains and almonds, with dried fruit, that is served in Orthodox churches to commemorate the dead. Most are simple. Obviously lots of vegetable dishes, especially beans; flatulence must be an inescapable aspect of Lent.
But if we want to do Lent properly – and being Catholic, can I just say that Sundays don’t count? – this book is a terrific place to start.
Georgina Hayden’s Nistisima (Ebury Press, £26) is out now
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