Taramosalata- Clean Monday rings in Lent, and a Lavish Fast

Kites are emblematic of Clean Monday- perhaps to fly on the breezes of spring
that gently blow away the debauchery of the ten days of Carnival?

Truly they are on every street corner- hexagons very tricky to get aloft, and the calender is running early this year- the breezes of spring have not arrived yet and the sky was heavy and gray, better for fishing:

than for kiting:

The dog and I waited for ten minutes but it never got much higher than this.

Clean Monday in the Orthodox Christian world begins Lent- a 50 day period of fasting to bring us to Easter (this year, on April 12th). My churchless upbringing had me reliant on vicarious fasting. All my Catholic friends gave something up for lent- something they liked- this made sense. The other rules governing the fast seemed loose, and given the region's poor over-boiled cooking, no true sacrifice. 

The Orthodox fast is another matter. Not merely meatless, in this fast one abstains from all creatures with blood in their veins (fish too), and their products- milks, cheeses, and eggs. This shifts the emphasis to seafoods- the most lavish of foods-

and historically the least likely to induce thoughts of abstinence from anything at all:

Manet "Les Huitres" 1876

Pieter Claesz "Still Life with Oysters" 1633

(But they so embrace a hopefulness appropriate to the season:

“As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.”

― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast)

Clean Monday traditionally has this menu:

Our corner delicatessen stocks all the last minute necessities:
"Lagana (bread), pickled vegetables, fish roe, olives, tsicoudia"

Plus halva, popular throughout lent:

The (kind of expensive) bread made only on this day is restocked hourly- people buy two and four at a time and the bakeries cannot keep it on the shelves. There is no other kind of bread for sale on clean Monday, just Lagana.

Quickly leavened, quickly stale, and just slightly sweet, it pairs nicely with taramosalata, traditional for the Clean Monday table. This is a fish roe spread that comes, like the fish eggs themselves, in hues from ivory, to pink, to... shocking, shocking pink. There are many versions- some with potato, some with bread, some with both:

Taramosalata:

No point giving a set recipe for such a changeable, flexible thing that everyone has their own favorite version of. Here are some guidelines and the thing you like best will just make itself!

We'll need:

boiled potatoes or stale bread

some fish roe- white or pink but not too shockingly pink, and if you can find smoked roe it is fabulous.

lemon juice

finely minced onion

olive oil

Either put the potatoes through a potato ricer or soak the bread and squeeze it out to make a springy sort of mush. Add tarama gently- it is strong! Try perhaps two large spoonfuls for five potatoes or the equivalent mass of wet bread. Add the minced onion, some lemon juice (half as much as the tarama to start), then slowly start to drizzle in some olive oil, whisking it in as you go so ideally you end you with a fluffy emulsion. It may be an astonishing amount of oil by the time you are finished- my mother-in-law's five-potato version ended up wanting a full cup. Keep tasting as you go, amping up the tarama and the lemon to your taste. Given that we are going for an emulsion, I have started with something already emulsified- mayonnaise (Queen of condiments). I think thought that this is not traditional and is probably frowned on, but the time I used a springy stale ciabatta and a heap of Hellman's with some white tarama it got eaten up fast with no questions. Just finish it with a good oil- the taste comes through and that drizzle of emerald is just beautiful. 

(On Mykonos the taramosalata is sometimes white and smoky and makes you forget about your main dish.)

This spread, a handful of olives, and a slice of halva- sometimes sandwiched into a piece of lagana, make a humble and delicious meal. The tables are rounded out by the seafoods of choice- in our house, tradition strangely dictates that we have squid from the can in its own ink with lemon juice and olive oil. I'm not advocating it, but it does make for easy picnic fair, if you decide to take your feast to the seaside and try to get a kite aloft. Don't forget the cold retsina- no one else does.