And so is the festival
When you cook a lot of food for a passionate food crowd, there’s always a dilemma: Do you tweak a recipe to put your own spin on it, or do you keep everything traditional? For the parishioners at St. Nicholas Orthodox Church, it isn’t really even a choice. They stand solidly on the side of tradition.
As they prepare for this weekend’s annual Lamb Barbecue and Food Festival, it is important to them to make traditional Greek foods using recipes from the generations who came before them. Spokesperson Emorfia Valkanos (Amy, for short) said that passing on traditions is one of the central points of the event.
“This is our 76th year. It [the Festival] is very much intergenerational. The recipes have been passed down from our founding fathers and mothers to us,” Valkanos said.
Take their baklava, for instance. This is a pastry made throughout the Mediterranean, from dozens of layers of phyllo dough, butter, nuts and syrup. There are countless variations of it, but the bakers at St. Nicholas have stuck with the same style from the beginning. Valkanos said that their version is made from “phyllo dough, crushed walnuts interspersed between the phyllo, and then there is a simple syrup that’s made.” She said that unlike many other recipes their baklava isn’t bathed in honey. “It’s not all honey,” she said, “just a bit.” This dials back the flavor of the honey, which can be a bit overwhelming at times, and allows for the addition of some subtle flavors like orange blossom water or rose water.
“Yes,” she said, “you absolutely could do that. We don’t.” Because that’s not the St. Nicholas tradition.
“What really captures me,” she said, “is that I feel the heart in our event. It’s coming from a lot of people who love our community, love our food, and love our traditions.” The same spirit of tradition applies to the other foods the parish prepares.
“We are really known for our lamb barbecue,” Valkanos said. “We put it on skewers and we marinate it. It’s one of those recipes that the founding fathers and mothers have passed to us. We have the pastitsio — that’s actually one of my favorites. It’s like a lasagna with a [white] bechamel sauce, layered with meat.” Presumably, lamb.
“You could make it with lamb,” she said with steel in her voice. “We’ve always made it with beef.”
The community at St. Nicholas has been preparing for this weekend’s event for three months. “We have a schedule,” Valkanos said, “where we will start with certain items that freeze well — a lot of the desserts. We make them ahead of time and then freeze. And then of course we have the week before as our very intense cooking week, where we make pita [spanakopita — a spinach and feta pastry], and we make the pastitsio, and we marinate the lamb and we marinate our chicken. That’s our intense prep week.”
While St. Nicholas is the smallest of Manchester’s Greek parishes, Valkanos said that their barbecue has a devoted fan base.
“We’ve been part of the neighborhood for 76 years, she said. “We’ve really had a following coming to our event because of the lamb and because of the food that’s been prepared for years and years and years. People want it. These recipes really do capture the heart of Greece; we’re bringing Greece here.”
As the parishioners at St. Nicholas age, they look to pass their food traditions on to younger members of their community.
“You have yia-yias 80 or 90 years old holding a lot of this together,” Valkanos observed. “Hopefully, we can light a fire under the younger generation and inspire them to learn how to do these things, to maintain the traditions of our culture. Truly, it is a good thing to know your roots.”
St. Nicholas Lamb Barbecue and Food Festival
Where: 1160 Bridge St., Manchester
When: Saturday, June 15, noon to 5 p.m
