Every family has one—that delicious, much-loved dish that their mom, uncle, or third cousin twice removed makes the best. My boyfriend’s grandma is known for her strudel; my friend’s dad, his scrambled eggs. And, in my family, my mom is famous for her baklava.
My mom’s baklava-making process is a complicated, time-consuming effort that takes like 3½ hours to complete.
It goes something like this:
She butters up sheets of phyllo dough, stacks them, then sprinkles each layer with a sugar, cinnamon, and walnut mixture. This layering process goes on for about an hour. Then she bakes the batch for another hour and a half, removes it from the oven, lets it cool slightly; and finally drenches it all in a sea of honey syrup.
Nutritious? No. But everyone loves the stuff. During the holidays, we bake batches and batches because family, friends, and neighbors eagerly await the honey-soaked goodness. They always rave about it, how it’s the best, most delicious baklava ever.
But why is my mom’s baklava so good? Recently I’ve formed a theory: It’s half-Greek, half-Hillbilly.
My dad is Greek. And baklava is Greek (although the Turks also claim ownership). But my mom is not Greek. She’s from Zanesville, Ohio, and her parents were born in Kentucky.
When she and my dad started dating, she knew nothing about Greek food, but knew everything about hillbilly food. For instance, on one of their early dates, she made my dad dinner: a tomato sandwich. Just a tomato sandwich. Then on another date, she made dinner again: corn on the cob. Just corn on the cob.
Finally they had a heart-to-heart. (This was the 1970s; please excuse my dad’s slightly sexist attitude.) He comes from a big Greek family, he gently explained to my mom, where dinner means Greek lasagna called patitsio or chicken pilafi or yemista (stuffed peppers packed with meat)—not tomato sandwiches or corn on the cob. My mom must’ve taken that conversation to heart; before long she was in the kitchen baking up pilafi and patitsio and her now famous baklava. So, I suspect, given her Kentucky roots, the reason my mom’s baklava is so good is because she has hillbilly-ized it in some incomprehensible but delicious way.
The hillbilly-ization of my mom’s baklava might have something to do with butter. If you stacked every stick of butter that goes into one batch of baklava, that stack would rival the tallest peak of Mount Olympus. During baklava season (November through December), I nickname my mom The Butter Berserker. Normally a nice, easy-going person, my mom becomes a thousand percent ruthless about butter.
She peers into my pan and gives a simple, but stern command:
“More. Butter.”
I try to protest. “This year, let’s make it healthier,” I suggest.
But she silences me with a scorching glare that could hush a hive of honeybees. She leans in and looks at me with narrowed eyes. “Do it,” she says, “Or I’ll do it for you.”
I sigh. There’s no getting around it. I melt yet another stick of butter, and, somewhere, an artery cries.
My mom learned to make not only delicious baklava, but also delicious pilafi and pititsio, yemista and spanakopita. Until recently, I knew these dishes by their hillbilly names only: chicken and rice, Greek lasagna, stuffed peppers, and spinach pies. When I once brought spinach pies to work for a potluck, my manager oohed and ahhed and started asking me questions about the “spanakopita.”
“The spanka-whata?” I asked. I didn’t know what she was talking about. I thought they were spinach pies. Just spinach pies.
My mom has hillbilly-ized not only the names of Greek food, but also their ingredients so much that I can’t even enjoy real, authentic Greek cuisine. Maybe it’s the licorice or mint, the dill or fennel (my mom despises these ingredients and would never include them) but whatever it is—real Greek food is too Greeky, and not enough hillbilly, for me.
