Spanakopita without the spinach = tyro or tiropita

"It is quite easy to put together and the key to a good tiropita is using good feta and if you are using the thin phyllo, to use enough olive oil." Elena Paraventes - Olive Tomato

This is a lucky dip post and the book that the recipe for tyropita comes from is Greek Cooking by Robin Howe. It dates from 1972 when I was spreading my wings around the world as far as cooking was concerned. I also have a book called German Cooking by her - yes it's a her. In fact she wrote at least thirteen books, but I can find no photograph of her anywhere. Back in the day they did not put author photographs in books, not even any information about the author. And of course, there are no pictures at all in this book - not even line drawings. I cannot find any information about the author either. All I can glean from her introduction is that she was married and that she travelled a lot, collecting recipes. So take that, all the people who think you can find anything on the net. You can't.

I guess I haven't used the book a whole lot unless I am trying to make something classic and then I tend to combine its recipe with others. But I do use her recipe for a fish stew which is one of those deceptively simple, 'that won't taste of much' recipes that is truly delicious. When I get to make it again I'll do a post on it. Maybe we should be grateful if we glean one favourite recipe from a cookbook.

I am not a huge, huge fan of Greek cooking and yet, when I think about it I do make or eat lots of Greek food. Spanakopita is one of course, baklava another and simple kebabs. As Robin Howe says in her introduction there is an ongoing argument between the Greeks and the Turks about whose food came first. I think she comes down on the side of the Greeks because there were many classical Greeks who were passionately interested in food and inventing things like white sauce, when the Turks were just grilling meat from their saddle bags. The Romans took from the Greeks and the Byzantine empire took from the Romans - well they were sort of Romans. Then came the Turks and the two cuisines sort of merged. I mean it really is hard to tell the difference between them isn't it? And the Middle East also has very similar dishes, almost identical dishes to the one I am talking about here.

Wikipedia seems to ascribe it to the Romans:

"It has been suggested that it descends from the Byzantine dish called plakountas tetyromenous and en tyritas plakountas (Byzantine Greek: εν τυρίτας πλακούντας) "cheesy placenta," itself a descendant of the food placenta, a baked layered cheese dish in Roman cuisine. Cato included a recipe for placenta in his De Agri Cultura:

"Shape the placenta as follows: place a single row of tracta along the whole length of the base dough. This is then covered with the mixture [cheese and honey] from the mortar. Place another row of tracta on top and go on doing so until all the cheese and honey have been used up. Finish with a layer of tracta...place the placenta in the oven and put a preheated lid on top of it."

So it's certainly an ancient dish anyway. Tracta by the way:

"was a kind of drawn out or rolled-out pastry dough in Roman and Greek cuisines."

And Cato's version included honey so a sort of sweet/savoury dish. But then I also gather that tiropita is a popular breakfast snack and is often eaten with a drizzle of honey.

Anyway let's do tiropita or tyropita. Tiro means cheese and pita means pie - simple. And it is indeed a simple dish cheese sandwiched between filo pastry and apparently Greece's most popular snack food.

But there the simplicity ends. It comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes from little individual pies of varied shape, to a square or round pie, or a spiral. The filling varies even more with feta being the only consistent ingredient. Others might be yoghurt, ricotta, parmesan, other Greek cheeses even cheddar and gruyère, dill, mint, eggs even white sauce. Of course you can add other things like zucchini but then it becomes something else. Keep it simple seems to be the thing - the recipe from Greek Cooking is just feta, myzithra or cottage cheese, cream, eggs, flour, parsley and nutmeg. Well not that simple I suppose. The quantities of the cheeses varies enormously too - and the kind of cheese - though, once again, as long as you have feta. Maybe it would be a good thing to make with all the bits of leftover cheese you have in the fridge, blended with feta as the main taste. And all of these variations result in differing consistencies of the fillings.

Oh and you don't have to use filo either, there was one Greek lady who swore by puff pastry, and others who recommended shortcrust. But these are probably not very authentic.

"During one period about 60-70 years ago, the tiropita that contained béchamel and made with puff pastry (instead of phyllo) became popular. These variations were not only unhealthier but did not taste as good as the real thing, they were a somewhat westernized version influenced by French cuisine, but did not compare to the authentic version." Elena Paraventes - Olive Tomato

Anyway here are a few examples of what they can look like.

That last one looks too runny to be authentic, and the pastry is probably short crust, but the makers do call it tyropita so what can I say?

I will finish with an actual recipe for a tiropita that looked more like a cake than a pie which the Greek chef called Fluffiest Cheese Pie

It was a bit weird in that the filo pastry was shredded, then chopped and blended with the cheese. So all the ingredients for tiropita were there, but not the method. So does that make it 'genuine' or an abomination or just plain interesting. Looks nice doesn't it? And intriguing. I might try it sometime.

All the recipes have a few layers of filo at the bottom and then some at the top with the filling in between, but I guess you could also do it like I do baklava with several layers of cheese and pastry. A fun dish to experiment with anyway.