Moussaka gets a (long overdue!) makeover
Greece’s most famous dish has a curious history that may explain why it’s not easy to find a great version. Happily, we’ve got a recipe for you.
A great Greek moussaka — the layered gratin of eggplant, potato, lamb-tomato sauce and cheesy béchamel — is about as delicious as Mediterranean-inflected comfort food gets.
“Moussaka is the urban cosmopolitan showpiece of lamb-and-eggplant combinations, a pairing as fundamental to Middle and Near Eastern cuisines as pasta and tomatoes are to Italy and potatoes and cream to the French,” wrote Anya von Bremzen in her 2004 book The Greatest Dishes: Around the World in 80 Recipes.
Yet Greece’s most famous dish has gotten weirdly short shrift in our love affair with Eastern Mediterranean cooking. It’s not easy to find great versions (stateside, anyway), whether in restaurants or as recipes.
I’m extremely excited about the makeover we’ve given the dish (here’s the recipe, in case you can’t wait.) It’s my son Wylie’s favorite recipe among everything we’ve worked on this year in the Cooks Without Borders test kitchen. “I could eat it twice a week,” he says. “When can we make it again?”
The dish has a curious history. Like butter chicken, its origin can actually be traced with some certainty, which is unusual.
First, for context, let’s take a step back and look at moussakas in general — for they’re not only Greek. The great food historian Charles Perry (my former colleague at The Los Angles Times), neatly elucidated the category in The Oxford Companion to Food. He described moussaka (or musaka, or musakka) as “a meat and vegetable stew, originally made from sliced aubergine [eggplant], meat and tomatoes, and preferably cooked in an oven.” That, he adds, is the version currently favored by Turks and Arabs.
“In the Balkans, more elaborate versions are found. The Greeks cover the stew with a layer of beaten egg or béchamel sauce. Elsewhere in the Balkans musakka has become a much more various oven-baked casserole, admitting many more vegetables than aubergines or courgette [zucchini], often dropping tomatoes and even meat. Bulgarian and Yugoslav versions emphasize eggs, and a given recipe may consist of eggs, cheese, potatoes, and spinach, or eggs, cheese, sauerkraut, and rice. In Romania, which considers musaca a national dish, the vegetables may be potatoes, celery, cabbage or cauliflower — or may be replaced by noodles.”
So there are, in fact, a whole panoply of moussakas, covering numerous cultures in several regions. It seems worth adding that the word moussaka derives from the Arabic word musaqqâ, which means “moistened,” apparently referring to the tomato juices.
But we are concerned, at the moment, with Greek moussaka — which long baffled food historians because of its béchamel topping. How did such a quintessentially French sauce — made with flour, butter and milk — make its way on top of a Greek dish?
Von Bremzen, in researching Greek moussaka’s origins for her 2004 book, turned to her friend, the renowned Greek food writer Aglaia Kremezi, for intelligence. Kremezi had long believed — as did a number of Turkish food writers — that moussaka was probably created toward the end of the Ottoman empire by a Francophile chef working at Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. But upon digging deeper, Kremezi concluded that the Greek dish we know as moussaka is in fact much younger: It was created in the 1920 by Nikolaos Tselementes, author of a legendary 500-page Greek cookbook.
Kremezi went on to write about the dish’s origin at some length in an excellent story for The Atlantic 10 years ago, “‘Classic’ Greek Cuisine: Not So Classic.” The story is a must-read that not only elucidates moussaka’s origin-story, but also helps us understand why Greek cuisine tends to be less attention-grabbing this century than that of its Levantine neighbors Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, Syria and Palestine.
Tselementes, who was hugely influential early last century — not just on home cooks, but on restaurant chefs and therefore on the Athens dining landscape — aimed to Westernize Greek cooking by returning it to what he believed were its roots. Curious as it would seem, he believed French cooking had its roots in ancient Greek cooking. Under Turkish rule, he believed, Greek cooking had become unacceptably eastern, and his goal was to re-Europeanize it, emphasize cream and butter. (Béchamel!) The rising Athenian middle and upper classes of the 1920s ate it up.
Kremezi didn’t. In the Atlantic story, she wrote, of Tselementes’ influence:
“He revised — and in my opinion, destroyed — many Greek recipes….The exclusion of spices and even herbs from the spicy and fragrant traditional foods resulted in the almost insipid dishes many Greek restaurants still serve. Tselementes went as far as to omit thyme and bay leaves from Escoffier’s recipe for sauce Espagnole, in his Greek translation. He also despised garlic, which he very seldom uses in his recipes!”
So Tselementes created the modern iteration of the dish, which was based on layered lamb-and-eggplant, moistened with tomato, and topped with béchamel. Did he leave out spices and garlic? I have not yet been unable to turn up Tselementes’ original recipe, though I am still working on it, and have reached out to Kremezi for further clarification.
If we can get our hands on that original recipe — and I’m optimistic we will — perhaps that will shed light on why there are not better recipes for Greek moussaka out there in the world. Perhaps the recipe, as Kremezi seems to suggest, was just not as great as it might have been had he not extracted all the spices and garlic from it.
Meanwhile, I remain convinced that made thoughtfully, it is one of the world’s greatest dishes. (And Von Bremzen, an immensely well traveled food writer with a great palate, did include it among her 80 greatest in the world!)
Kremezi’s recipe for moussaka, which is loosely based on her mother’s recipe, includes green bell peppers and optional sausage or bacon. My platonic ideal for the dish is purely lamb, and I wanted to come up with a recipe that was as elemental and simple to execute as possible, while still delivering maximum impact and fabulous flavor.
I loved Kremezi’s idea of adding yogurt to the béchamel for lightness and tang when I first came upon her moussaka in von Bremzen’s book, and it was that recipe I used as a jumping off point.
Meanwhile, I couldn’t help but feel that frying the slices of eggplant and potato wasn’t necessarily the worth the trouble and heaviness. My “aha!” moment came as I remembered one of my favorite dishes in Sami Tamimi’s recently published cookbook, Falastin — Baked Kofta with Eggplant and Tomato. The Palestinian chef-author peeled eggplants, zebra-like, leaving half the peel on (which adds nice texture), sliced them, tossed with salt, pepper and olive oil and roasted the slices to meltingly tender, before building them into delicious layered towers of tomato, and lamb-beef kofta patties and baking.
The aha! was roasting the eggplant that way.
Cinnamon, which also appears in Tamimi’s dish, sounded like a great idea as well; I love the way it plays with allspice, garlic and Aleppo pepper.
I liked the idea of parboiling potatoes rather than frying them, which I came across in a 2018 recipe by Sydney Oland on Serious Eats. However, parboiling whole, peeled russets and then slicing them resulted in potato slices that were still crunchy once baked, even when I tripled the boiling time from 5 to 15 minutes.
Wylie (who at 23 years old has developed into a confident and terrifically talented cook during the Great Confinement) unwittingly solved the potato problem for me a couple nights ago. As he was improvising a dish of crusty sautéed potatoes, he sliced the potatoes, then blanched them for 5 minutes before putting them in the hot pan with duck fat.
Aha! Slice first, and then blanche. I had considered that, but worried the slices would fall apart, or wind up too mushy in the moussaka. It worked perfectly. Moussaka makeover achieved!
Here’s how you build the dish. Brush a square, deep baking dish with a little olive oil. Cover the bottom with a layer of blanched russet potato slices; season gently with salt and pepper. Next add a layer of roasted eggplant slices. Because they’re so nicely tender, you can squish them in a bit so there’s an even layer off eggplant covering the potatoes, without big gaps between them.
Next comes a layer of lamb and tomato sauce, with all those lovely spices. And finally, on top, a thick layer of béchamel with yogurt and grated cheddar cheese stirred in. Into the oven it goes, and when it comes out, it is gratinéed a gorgeous golden-brown.
The temptation is to dive into it right away, it’s so beautiful. Nathalie — my son’s girlfriend, a moussaka fanatic who’s Lebanese and knows about such things as layered lamb and eggplant — put up her hand and said, “Wait. Let it rest a few minutes.”
She was right: It wants to settle, come together. It’s still plenty hot when you slice into it 15 minutes later.
Yes, it’s as delicious as it looks. One piece of advice about ingredients: Put your hands on the best ground lamb you can manage. I once made it with lamb I ground at home from boneless shoulder — it was insanely, out-of-the-world wonderful, the best result I’ve had. Other times I have made it with pre-packaged supermarket ground lamb. Very good, but there’s definitely a difference. Tonight I’m making it using ground local lamb from the counter of a halal butcher in a Lebanese bakery and market. I will update the story with the results, so you might want to check back tomorrow.
Want to enjoy a delicious moussaka at your own table? Help yourself to the recipe. And please let me know how you like it.
Originally published at Cooks Without Borders on December 13, 2020.
