Our Day in Santorini

Cycladic figurines from Bronze-Age Santorini. (2800-2700 BCE).
These are from the ancient city of Akrotiri, which was destroyed by volcanic eruption in the 16th century BCE.

Towards the end of our visit to Greece, we spet a day on the very well-known island of Santorini, visiting a farm in the morning, and touring the ruins of Akrotiri of Thera, site of an ancient city, in the afternoon. A walk around one of the small villages was on the schedule after the museum, but the overwhelming heat of the afternoon discouraged us, and we simply sat in a cafe. In the evening, all the passengers from the ship gathered for dinner and some music at a party venue on a hilltop with a glorious view of the sunset.

A Farm in Santorini

The farm has its own chapel.

Several of the agricultural products of the farm are represented here.
The grindstone in the foreground is for removing the husks of small beans:
these are called fava beans in Greece, but are actually a type of lentil.

At the end of the farm tour, we tasted tomatoes, capers, olives, and pistachios that were grown there.

The fields are incredibly dry, but the small tough-skinned tomatoes keep growing!
Though we tasted them raw, they are actually dried before they are sold.

Akrotiri of Thera

The ancient city Akroteri in ancient Thera (the classical name for Santorini) was important in early trade in the Eastern Mediterranean, as it was on the sailing route between Cyprus and Minoan Crete. The site was discovered around 50 years ago. Inscriptions found in the buildings have not been deciphered yet. Many beautiful murals decorated the walls of the city, and many pottery vessels and other goods were found as the site was excavated. These are now in the nearby museum. 

The inhabitants seem to have realized that the volcano was about to erupt. Some of the houses had the furniture stacked up, as if the owners were expecting to return as they fled with their small valuables — this is indicated by the fact that no human remains and no gold objects (except one small item) have been discovered in the ruins so far. Archaeologists are continuing to dig at the site, as only part of the city has been excavated.

After the volcano destroyed the city, the island was uninhabited for some time, and then repopulated.

Some beautiful artifacts from the museum

Blue monkeys in one of the frescoes on the walls.

Blog post and all photos © 2025 mae sander

Rural and Urban

Another quiet week has gone by. We took a few photos of some not-far-away places that we visited, including a country ride where we saw barns and a market, and a brief expedition to Detroit.

A Country Market

Here’s what I did with some of the tomatoes! Basil grows in my herb garden.

We’ve shopped at Fusilier’s Family Farm Market a number of times.
From our house, it’s around a 45 minute drive through a beautiful farming area.

Southwest of Ann Arbor

Downtown Detroit Murals

The John R. King Used and Rare Book Store.

I wondered why a giant glove was painted on the side of this bookstore. The bookstore’s website explains that it was “formerly the Advance Glove Factory, which operated from the 1940s to the 1970s. After the factory was shut down, it sat vacant until Mr. King purchased it in 1983.”  (link)

Architectural details resemble murals on this building.
This area is around 45 minutes of driving in the opposite direction from the barns and farmland.

In Our Neighborhood

As we took a walk we heard some classic rock music. This Co-op was having a concert on the porch.

I feel as if my life this week has been in two places: one at the Olympics and also at home in Michigan.

So I have two posts to share with Deb’s Sunday Salon, this one today, and one Friday.

Also shared with Sami’s Murals.

Photos © 2024 mae sander.

A Quiet Week

In my quiet garden.

A Lunch at Ikea

We are fond of the meatball plate and of the smoked salmon plate.
My inner 4-year-old selected the rainbow cake which was ok.

There is always a Mona Lisa reproduction in the decorator department.

We didn’t buy much…A Godis is a drinking glass. We needed some new ones — they are always breaking.
The lingonberry preserves served with the meatballs are great — now I have some at home.

Aftonsparv is a teddy bear in an astronaut costume. I thought they were cute.
I love stuffed animals and keep promising myself NOT TO BUY THEM. (I didn’t)
But I’m sharing this with Eileen’s Critters.

Italian Food: Reading about Tomatoes

Pomodoro! A History of the Tomato in Italy by David Gentilcore isn’t as good as some of the food history books in the same series, which is titled “Arts and Traditions of the Table: Perspectives on Culinary History.” In my opinion, this author had a few problems with focusing on the topic — besides tomatoes in Italy, he covers tomato history elsewhere, the development of tomato consumption by Italian immigrants in the US and South America, the history of pasta (especially with tomato sauce), and other generally related topics. 

These heirloom tomatoes at my local produce market resemble the tomatoes that were grown in Italy several
hundred years ago. At that time, the tomato was always formed in deep folds like these.

In reading this book, I learned a lot, especially about the early history from the time tomatoes began to be introduced from the New World to Europe. My previous impression was that tomatoes were generally rejected as food until at least the late 19th century, but the author shows evidence that they were actually introduced much more slowly and much earlier. Specific details about many things are interesting, such as the history of pizza, the history of canned tomatoes, and the history of imports and exports of tomatoes and tomato products and their adoption in many places. My favorite quote: 

“The sight of GIs opening cans of tomato spaghetti must have been a strange one to southern Italian peasants as the Allied forces made their way up the peninsula in the latter stages of World War II.” (p. 172)

On the whole, the author seems to try to include too much, and I would have liked a bit more discipline in the range of topics!

Tomatoes in Art

I enjoyed the selection of various art works that were evidence of the development of eating tomatoes, especially in Italy. Here are some of the most intriguing ones:

Carlo Magini (1720-1806), “Still Life,” showing tomatoes and eggplants. In the early years, these two 
foods were seen as closely related, as they are members of the same botanical family.

“The Angels’ Kitchen”

The Angels' Kitchen (1646) by Spanish painter Bartolomé Esteban Murillo interested me very much. It’s hard to see, but the little angels on the right have a basket of tomatoes. In Spain, tomatoes began to be eaten quite early in history. Sicily, which at the time was ruled by Spain, followed their example, so this is an early suggestion that tomatoes were beginning to be eaten in Italy. (The painting is currently in the Louvre, though I don’t remember ever noticing it among the 7,500 paintings usually on display there.)

Above: Two lithographs showing ordinary people eating macaroni, not necessarily with tomatoes. Artist: Gaetano Dura (1805-1878), who lived in Naples and illustrated the lives of the people there.A fascinating look at the food and the kitchens of ordinary people around 200 years ago.

A vintage Italian advertisement for tomato paste, wine, and pasta.

Still Watching the Beautiful Olympic Games!

Windsurfing!

Blog post © 2024 mae sander

Shared with Deb’s Sunday Salon.

Pasta Puttanesca and a Book About Pasta

“Is it possible to sit down to a plate of spaghetti with tomato sauce and reflect on the meaning of roots, identities, and origins? That is what I have tried to do in these pages” (A Short History of Spaghetti with Tomato Sauce, p. 9)

Reading Massimo Montanari’s book A Short History of Spaghetti with Tomato Sauce (first published in Italian in 2019, translation in 2021) I was delighted with his brief histories of all the key ingredients and how they came to Italy: pasta, tomatoes, cheese, olive oil, capsicum peppers, garlic, onions, basil leaves. Although I have read about these ingredients before, I enjoyed Montanari’s perspective on how the dish, which is seen as so quintessentially Italian, took a long time to become the iconic symbol of Italian food. He reminds the reader who thinks she knows it all: “in the history of cooking there is very little that is obvious, or maybe nothing.” (p. 35)

I enjoyed Montanri’s descriptions of the components of this dish to look for insights into culture and history, not only of food, but of the relationships among peoples and cultures over centuries and even millennia. Starting with a discussion of the long history of pasta, Montanari writes: 

“The Italian pasta tradition has been influenced by other histories, other ‘roots,’ which evoke other cultures and other regions of the world. The search for ‘origins,’ in this case, takes us to the Fertile Crescent, the Middle Eastern regions to the east of the Mediterranean, where, ten to twelve thousand years ago, the agricultural revolution began, and with it, the culture of wheat and its derivatives—first among them, bread, which became the symbol of that revolution.” (p. 19)

Tomatoes, too have a long history: 

“Original to the western coasts of South America, where it still grows wild, the tomato enjoyed an extraordinary success among the Maya and the Aztecs. It was in Mexico that it met up with the Spaniards of Hernán Cortés, when they occupied the country between 1519 and 1521. It was immediately taken to Spain and that’s how the tomato came to be grafted onto the gastronomic culture of Italy. Naturalists and botanists are the first to mention it, starting with Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1544) who cites it in his commentary on the pharmacological text of Pedacio Dioscoride. … In 1548, Cosimo de’ Medici received a basket of tomatoes from the Florentine gardens of Torre del Gallo, and this is the first evidence from the ‘field’ of an Italian interest for the new plant.”  (pp. 55 & 57)

The Aztecs invented tomato sauce, among other things. A traveler to the New World was one Francisco Hernández, physician at the court of Philip II of Spain. During his travels from 1570-77, he wrote sixteen volumes concerning American plants and their uses. He wrote about a Mexican dish: “a delicious sauce or intinctus (dip) that ‘is prepared from sliced tomatoes and chili pepper, which enriches the flavor or almost all dishes and almost all foods, and reawakens the appetite.’” (p. 60)

However, tomato sauce took a long time to become the classic accompaniment to the highly traditional pastas of Italy. Author Ippolito Cavalcanti finally mentioned pasta with tomato sauce in the 1839 edition of his influential cookbook: a first! “The sauce is made from crushed ripe and deseeded tomatoes, placed to cook in a casserole together with their juice (acquiccia) and stirred continuously until, once cooked, they will be milled and cooked down ncoppa a lo fuoco (over the fire). At the end, salt and pepper are added and the sauce is ready, very simple and truly ‘popular.’” (p. 64)

Pellegrino Artusi, author of the most important 19th century Italian cookbook, provided a recipe for tomato sauce “seasoned with onion, garlic, celery, basil, parsley, olive oil, salt, and pepper.” He wrote that it would “lend itself ‘to innumerable uses’… It will be good with boiled meat,… but above all it will be ‘excellent when served with cheese and butter on pasta.’” Artusi’s recipe is also the first instance of using onion and garlic in the tomato sauce! (pp. 66 and 76)

Going onward to other ingredients, Montanari describes how peppers quickly became a staple ingredient of European food after their import from the New World. He explains that olive oil has been made since early antiquity, but its use in pasta is startlingly recent: “Dressing pasta or tomato sauce with olive oil became ‘normal’ only in the second half of the XX century.” (p. 75)

Similarly basil was long considered to be inedible; it became accepted as a culinary herb in the 16th or 17th century. Along with other herbs, it was included in the 19th century recipes cited above. “Over time, basil has become an inevitable ingredient of our dish, an identifying element, to the point of acquiring in the iconography of the media an immediately understandable symbolic value.” (p. 79)

In his conclusion, Montanari summarizes how the iconic plate of spaghetti that seems to represent Italy and the Italian identity actually has a variety of multi-cultural roots. “The history of our plate of spaghetti, the search for its origins and its roots—economic, social, political, cultural—has forced us to travel to multiple lands and to come to terms with eating habits, ways of production, and culinary procedures distant from each other in time and space. A long series of innovations, developed in different times and places, have contributed to creating this tradition so typically Italian.” (p. 82)

Our Pasta Dinner

Obviously reading about the history of spaghetti with tomato sauce made me wish to eat some. So I followed a recipe for a particular variety of pasta with tomato sauce: that is, Pasta Puttanesca, which includes the classic ingredients along with anchovies, olives, and capers. This dish does not include the cheese that’s a traditional part of the more usual version, probably because it’s not customary to include both fish and cheese at the same time. Note that the name Pasta Puttanesca means prostitutes’ pasta. There are many explanations for this interesting nomenclature.

These are the basics for Puttanesca tomato sauce along with canned tomatoes as well as fresh.
Note that the wine is to be drunk with the meal, not used in the dish.

Pasta, garlic, tomatoes, anchovies, olive oil, pepper flakes, olives, capers, and basil for a garnish.
I mainly followed the New York Times recipe by Mark Bittman (link), adding the fresh tomatoes.

Review and photos © 2024 mae sander