When was the last time you saw a book on Greek Orthodoxy with encomiums from Jamie Oliver and Claudia Roden on the cover? Well, this is what you get with Georgina Hayden’s Nistisima. It’s a book about fasting food – which is what the title means – from a Greek Orthodox (Cypriot) perspective; and the author comes from the Jamie Oliver stable. So we’re straddling here the interesting divide between religion and food – or rather, the overlap between them.
Feasting and fasting is what marks the passage of the Church’s year and in the case of the Orthodox Churches, they hold to standards that the Catholic Church once had and has since abandoned. That is to say, they go vegan-plus-fish for easy-going fasting; for hard nistisima you can forget the fish and indeed wine and olive oil – a long time ago, oil was stored in sheepskins, which for the most purist monks disqualified it as a fasting food.
