Dolmades & Preserves
I was visiting a friend the other day, and as usual, we had a cup of tea, a good chat and then a stroll around her lovely garden. She has a big grapevine growing over her pergola. It’s gorgeous in autumn — see the photo on the right — but it’s spring at the moment, so it’s covered with lovely new green leaves. I didn’t take a photo of it now, sorry.
So I picked some — just the leaves, and only twenty or so, because I wanted to make dolmas (dolmathes) — stuffed grape leaves — but just enough for me. I love making (and eating) dolmathes. I first made some when I was a student living in a shared house, and I followed the recipe from Claudia Roden’s Middle Eastern Food . That’s the new version: mine is a battered and stained and well-used old Penguin paperback.
Anyway, it was quite fiddly but the final result was delicious — much nicer than the ones I bought in deli’s. I think from memory I used ground lamb in those ones, but I do recall that my housemates dived on them and devoured the entire batch in minutes. Which while nice and complimentary, was also depressing. So much work gone in a flash and none left over for the next day. Apart from all the mixing up of the filling, then the fiddly rolling of the dolmathes, they cooked on a very low heat for two hours.
The ones I made yesterday have ground chicken and herbs , toasted pine nuts, onion and a little cumin with the rice, and I have to say, they’re very nice. They don’t look very fancy, but believe me they taste fine. And I only made 20, so it wasn’t an arduous process — I quite like making fiddly stuff — and they’ll last me a few meals.
When I was collecting the leaves at my friend’s place, her husband had a Greek friend visiting, and he asked me what I was doing with the leaves. When I told him it was to make dolmathes he told me how when he was young, he’d help his mother rolling huge batches of them. I can imagine it would be a nice experience, sitting around a table with a bunch of friends or relatives, rolling up dozens of little packets. Every family seems to have a different style of rolling — as you can see, mine isn’t the most elegant, but none of them broke or unwrapped and they all cooked perfectly.
We didn’t make dolmathes when I was small — I don’t think Mum ever made them and might not even have known what they were — but there were plenty of domestic group activities we did, with kids and relatives and/or friends sitting around working on things like bottling fruit (canning for US people), making jams and pickles, etc. and performing other repetitive household chores in a group. It made a boring job go fast and the chat was lively and interesting. Even I, being the youngest, had a role to play. I wasn’t trusted with a knife – I was four — but my hands were the only ones small enough to place the fruit in the long jars Mum used for apricots, and I had to arrange them very carefully to fit them all in properly. I remember I felt very important being “in charge of” the apricots. *g* 
These days I don’t preserve fruits and I hardly ever make jam any more, but when I go to an agricultural show, I’m always in awe of the “preserving” section, and the beautiful way people arrange their fruit in jars to preserve them. The ones in the photo above are more like the ones we made.
Do you make or eat dolmathes? Do you make jam or preserve fruit? What fiddly domestic thing do you do?
