“The two festivals of Vangelismus and Vagione, bring the Christians the permission to eat the fish. A stifled appetite is a slave in chains. As soon as the permission to eat is given, the Christians run to Markato. The grocers then have a Great Exhibition of codfish and stokofisia, both religious and non-religious, and salumi of all kinds, all of which are exposed to the religious appetite of Christians.”
This is what Andreas Laskaratos said in 1856 in his book The Mysteries of Kefalonia shortly before he was excommunicated from the church for his heretical views. Despite the turmoil that his writings brought, he nevertheless gave us information about the daily life of his fellow citizens. So we learn that since then the cod, either wet (musked) as we are used to eating it or air-dried cod (stokofisi) as preferred in the Eptan Islands, was the main food of the Evangelism and the Vaios.
These two days are the only days during Lent that eating fish is allowed. Poor people as we were, fresh fish hardly entered most homes. We’re talking about such poverty that anyone who couldn’t buy fish, had to put a fish bone in their mouth, for good measure. But cod was cheap as the seas of the North Atlantic were full of cod, and moreover it was preserved for a long time, In this way, landlocked inhabitants could have access to it. Salted cod arrived everywhere, preserved in its salt and regularly layered in grocer’s paper boxes. But even in places close to the sea, because often, due to bad weather or due to the phase of the moon, there was not always enough fresh fish in the market, they chose the cod which is always available. After all, this is a favorite dish, so many people prefer it anyway even if they can find fresh fish. Somehow the “poor man’s fish” or “poor man’s fish” became the established food of these two days accompanied by skordalia or aliada as they call it in the Ionian Islands and which, according to Leonidas Zois in the Lexicon Historikon and Folklore of Zakynthos, is a dish consisting of “garlic subtrimma after boiled potatoes, lemon juice, oil, sometimes also almonds well ground in ygion, skoldalmi”. Of course, this has been happening for the last two centuries.
Because while in Ionia the cod, stokofisi or stokofisi, has been known since the time of the Venetians in the early Middle Ages, it arrived in the rest of Greece a little later. Apparently it came from the English after the Revolution. At that time, the Peloponnesian sailors carried the raisin cargo for the English from the ports of Patras and Kalamata and were paid in salted cod. This is why we have so many recipes for this fish in the Peloponnese. Slowly, slowly, its dominance spread to the rest of Greece and it settled all year round as the main dish in the Athenian taverns, where with a carafe of wine it accompanied the groups of those who drank to wash down the drugs of everyday life, as Varnalis told the Moiraios and . Something common connected the petty philosophizing day laborers who analyzed “how great suffering, the suffering is of life” with the great philosopher Kant. It is said that his favorite food was salt cod. Even when he was full, the philosopher thought he could eat another large plate of it with great appetite. As do we.
Excerpt from the book by Melissa Stoilis “And telling the… to eat, stories and recipes”, Kichli publications, 1st edition: November 2015