The Mediterranean · Volume 03, The Aegean and the Contested Table

Moussaka

Name: Moussaka
Total time: 2 h
Yield: Serves 8
Cuisine: Greece & Cyprus
Ingredients: 1 kg aubergine, sliced; 500 g potato, sliced; 700 g minced lamb or beef; 400 g tomato, crushed; 1 onion, finely chopped, 2 cloves garlic, 1 cinnamon stick, salt to taste onion, garlic, cinnamon, salt; 6 tbsp flour; 8 tbsp butter; 1.5 litres milk, added gradually; 1 cup (kefalotyri and kefalograviera) grated cheese, salt, pepper, 1 beaten egg

Greece

Moussaka, layered aubergine, potato and spiced minced lamb under a golden baked béchamel: a deep baking dish cut to reveal distinct layers, golden baked béchamel on top with a deeply browned surface, a dark spiced meat ragù beneath.

An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.

Time: 2 hours

Researched: 11 sources cited
Reviewed: Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
Cooked: Not yet cooked and reported

Moussaka as currently known is a twentieth-century creation, not an old dish. The Greek chef Nikolaos Tselementes enriched an already Eastern-derived dish called moussaka with French béchamel, publishing the recipe in 1910, a specific, well-attested claim; his name is literally the generic Greek word for a cookbook, "tselementes," because of how influential he was.

by Greece

This is the most important honesty test in this whole chapter, and Greek-language and Greek Cypriot sources are candid about it themselves. On the Greek side, a large part of Greek cuisine belongs to a wider Ottoman-era culinary tradition, and the dish names themselves give it away: moussaka, tzatziki, giouvarlakia, keftedes and dolmades all have Arabic, Persian or Turkish roots. Moussaka specifically is not ancient or even old: the dish as currently known is a twentieth-century creation, see below. Eggplant, the headline vegetable of what is often called the quintessential Greek dish, is not ancient Greek at all: native to India, cultivated in China and Central Asia in antiquity, the Greek name derives from the Arabic bāḏinjān, and it reached Byzantium via the Arabs around the eleventh to thirteenth century, treated for a long stretch as ornamental rather than edible. Greek coffee came to Greece in the sixteenth century from the Ottoman Empire and was for decades openly called Turkish coffee in Greece itself; the name Greek coffee only became established gradually after the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, a directly political renaming that the Greek sources themselves are candid about.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Serves 8. About 2 hours.

Ingredients

1 kg aubergine, sliced
500 g potato, sliced
700 g minced lamb or beef
400 g tomato, crushed
1 onion, finely chopped, 2 cloves garlic, 1 cinnamon stick, salt to taste onion, garlic, cinnamon, salt
6 tbsp flour
8 tbsp butter
1.5 litres milk, added gradually
1 cup (kefalotyri and kefalograviera) grated cheese, salt, pepper, 1 beaten egg

Method

Salt the aubergine slices and leave to draw out bitterness, 30 minutes, then pat dry and fry or grill until coloured.
Fry the potato slices until just coloured.
Brown the mince with onion, garlic, cinnamon and salt, add the tomato, simmer to a thick ragù.
Make the béchamel: melt the butter, work in the flour to a roux, add milk gradually, whisking, until thick. Off the heat, stir in the cheese, salt, pepper and the beaten egg.
Layer potato, then aubergine, then the meat ragù, in a large baking dish.
Cover generously with the béchamel.
Bake about 45 minutes until deeply golden on top.

Notes

The figures above rest on a single traditional-recipe source rather than a named chef or ethnographic authority, and are treated here as indicative rather than canonical.

What a modern chef changes

The béchamel treated as its own emulsion, and the aubergine's moisture controlled precisely

Rung 3

Method

Salt and press the aubergine properly, weighted under a plate for a full 30 minutes rather than a token rinse, so the béchamel is not sitting on top of a watery vegetable layer.
Strain a portion of full-fat yoghurt through a chinois, after Rung 3, and fold a spoonful through the finished béchamel off the heat, for a lighter, tangier top layer that still sets properly.
Rest the assembled dish 15 minutes before baking, so the layers settle and the béchamel does not slide when the dish is cut.

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