Holy Trinity Church holds its Greek fest
By John Fladd
jfladd@hippopress.com
In the pastry tent at Holy Trinity Church’s Greek Food Festival in Concord, if you look carefully, between the kourabiedes and the baklava, tucked away over by the loukoumades, you will find the pasta flora.
“Actually, I make some of the pasta flora myself,” said Constantine Newman, Holy Trinity’s priest. “Basically, it’s a dough crust — sort of a cookie-type crust — covered with jam, usually strawberry or apricot or something like that. And then it has a latticework in pastry over the top of it.”
The pastries — and more broadly, the Festival itself — is the Greek congregation’s big opportunity each year to reach out and connect with its community.
“It’s an effort of the whole parish,” Newman said. “It’s a way of showcasing the way our parish comes together and works together. And it’s good to get our people working together so they get to know each other better. We look forward to that.”
Holy Trinity does that through food.
“We feature traditional Greek dishes,” Newman said, “like lamb and chicken souvlaki, which is a Greek shish kebab. We have pastitsio and then moussaka. Pastitsio is like a Greek lasagna and moussaka is pretty much the same thing except with eggplants instead of noodles. We have Greek meatballs. We have loukaniko, which is a sausage, and that’s made for us by a butcher in the area.” There will also be gyros, he said, made from a mixture of lamb and pork.
Preparing such a large amount of food is a communal effort, he said, that starts weeks and even months in advance.
“The more complex [dishes] like the moussaka, we did in July,” he said, “and then we keep it frozen because it takes so long to do some of them. It’s better to get them done ahead of time. Some of it has to be very fresh, though. We’re going to be making over the next week, the baklava and the galaktoboureko, which is also a nice pastry. It’s two layers of phyllo dough, and in between is a cream of milk and eggs and butter.”
Margaret Gegas is in charge of getting many of these dishes prepared in the months leading up to the Festival.
“I buy all the ingredients,” she said, “and then I have a crew that comes in and prepares all the spinach pies, what we call spanakopitas. All the spinach pies, we had to freeze because we make 40 big pans of spinach pie. We usually work a couple of days a week and some evenings as well. It’s been a month now that we’ve been working on the spinach pies. We’re making and freezing pasticcio, which is a traditional macaroni dish with ground meat and a bechamel sauce on top. Those are baked and served in squares at the festival. We also have moussaka, which is the eggplant dish with the bechamel.”
Gegas said the recipes for the food at the festival are so old that nobody remembers when and where they came from.
“They’re traditional Greek [recipes], just a tradition for many, many years, as far back as we know,” she said.
“Also,” she added, “we have ladies baking the traditional powdered sugar cookies, which people love. And then we have a couple of cookies that are dipped in syrup — they’re a very syrupy cookie.”
Greek Food Festival
Where: Holy Trinity Church, 68 N. State St., Concord, 225-2961, holytrinitynh.org)
When: Saturday, Sept. 27, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. There will be church tours at 1 and 3 p.m.
Featured photo: Spanakopita. Photo from the Holy Trinity Church Facebook page.
