Ingredients
Cheese:
- 225 g halloumi
- olive oil
Leek and pilaf:
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- 250 g cleaned leek, thickly sliced
- 100 g bulgur
- 300 ml tomato juice
- salt, pepper
- spearmint
You can visit museums to learn about the history of a country, but you can also sit down for a meal. Take Cyprus, already speaking Greek in the Bronze Age, later indebted to Assyria, Egypt and Persia. All this before the Ottomans took the island in 1571. After their flirtation with the Nazis, they had to give it up again under English rule, but have occupied a third of Cyprus since 1974.
The pourgouri pilaff is Turkish. And Amaranth Sitas writes in Kopiaste (1983) prassa (leek)? that’s what the English eat. The halloumi, on the other hand, is Cypriot: a folded rectangle of sheep/goat cheese, which has been in brine for 40 days. Can be kept for a year without refrigeration. The name is a point of contention. Charles Perry (The Oxford Companion to Food) sees it as Coptic ialom, but I follow an Ugarit expert (Ugarit is an ancient site in Syria): the origin is halab (milk/cheese: m and b are interchangeable). Halloum is also a product of Syria and Lebanon.
- Soak the cheese in plenty of cold water for an hour or two. Refresh once.
- Heat a tablespoon of olive oil in a small pan. Gently fry the leek (reserve 1 tablespoon), stirring occasionally, until translucent and done.
- Bring the tomato juice to the boil.
- Heat the second tablespoon of olive oil in a large frying pan. Chop and fry the reserved leek, let the bulgur participate briefly, then pour over the boiling juice with some salt and pepper; cover and leave on very low heat for 10-12 minutes until all the liquid has been absorbed. Scoop to the edge of the pan, placing the thickly sliced leek in the middle. Cover and keep warm.
- Cut the dried cheese into 6 oblong slices and brush with olive oil. Brown on one side under a hot grill. Serve onto the leek, garnish with spearmint.
Menu suggestion:
- Starter: Garlic dip (skordalia); Soak 50 g stale white bread without crust in 125 ml water for 5 minutes; grind 40 g almond shavings in the bowl of the hand blender. Mix almond flour and squeezed out bread with 2 cloves of squeezed fresh garlic, 2 tablespoons of olive oil, salt and some water into a creamy sauce. Serve with black sun-ripened olives and strips of cucumber, zucchini and celery for dippingo
- Dessert: watermelon segments.