The menu from PELION, GREECE

You can learn a lot about a place from its food. Settle into the ebb and flow of this Greek peninsula and let Pelion’s flavours guide you through the seasons

Words by Clare Hargreaves

Greece’s Pelion Peninsula is the mountainous boot that sweeps its heel into the Aegean Sea midway between Athens and Thessaloniki. It’s where bare rocky landscapes give way to lush, sweet chestnut woods that jostle for space with fruit orchards and olive groves, gurgling streams and fountains, and stone and slate villages that tumble down the flanks of mighty Mount Pelion. Recipes reflect the peninsula’s many foreign influences too, but whatever the dishes, they use local, fresh, seasonal ingredients. It’s creative, honest and delicious. Visit in spring and you’ll feast on omelettes made with wild asparagus, and spot locals perched on rocks like goats to harvest rock samphire, succulent and aniseedy, or tsitsiravla, the tender shoots of the wild pistachio tree. Both are pickled in brine, to be enjoyed throughout the year as a meze with tsipouro (a grape-distilled spirit) or a classy salad garnish. Other wild greens are gathered to be stuffed into pies, sometimes bulked out with trahana

– cracked wheat that’s been boiled with soured milk. Or they’re gently sautéed and topped with eggs, to make one of Pelion’s simplest yet most delicious dishes.

In early summer, expect cherries as large as golf balls that are celebrated at a festival in the mountain village of Agios Lavrentios. Summer is the season for juicy chin-slathering melons and figs, tomatoes, me hilopites (casseroled rooster with homemade pasta).

In autumn, Pelion’s big thing is apples. Cooks pop them into pies or simply bake them in the oven with cinnamon and honey. Meanwhile, mushrooms and chestnuts litter the floor of the chestnut forests covering the peninsula’s eastern flanks. While mushrooms are generally