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Greek Cooking by Vefa Alexiadou

Many years ago, realising the important role food plays in Greek daily life, Vefa Alexiadou determined to bring it to the forefront. A chemist specialising in food, she was one of the first Greek authors to give housewives the place they deserve while simultaneously promoting Greek cooking. For over thirty years now, she has systematically researched, studied and collected material from various parts of Greece and beyond, widening the horizons of good and healthy eating.

Vefa Alexiadou has demythologised many "secrets" of the kitchen, addressing her audience in simple and direct language. She wears her learning lightly, but neither does she oversimplify her recipes.

She addresses the anonymous women of town and country, and also Greeks living abroad, teaching them forgotten gastronomic traditions and adding to their knowledge. She has also boosted women's morale, making them proud of their "homely" occupation which requires modernisation, cultivation of taste and, above all, a creative outlook.

Through the many and varied recipes presented in her tasteful, informative and appropriately-illustrated books, Vefa Alexiadou has promoted and spread the traditions of various regions of Greece, helping younger generations to make them their own and pass on to their children a history of gastronomic culture which then becomes a way of life and an everyday habit of "luxury".

Her books can be used as cooking manuals because she does not see the kitchen arts as jealously-guarded trade secrets. On the contrary, she provides correct quantities and proportions or possible combinations, without deterring amateurs from experimentation. Both her books and the author herself, who has won many prizes for Greece abroad, have given a spectacular boost to the art of gastronomy. She was the first trailblazer on a path now widened into a broad avenue, and Greece owes her much.

Read more on Vefa Alexiadou and discover some of her cookery books containing Greek recipes.