Back to blogging…
It’s been an eternity since my last post, but in the meantime I finally finished up the edits on my book. The Lexicon of Greek Taste is due for release by Aspri Lexi Press in September 2009!! Add to that the lost of my domain name, and the last couple of months have been exhausting.
To make a long story short, www.historyofgreekfood.com became www.historyofgreekfood.org, because the registrant company STARGATE.COM was bought by UK2 Group. My domain name was supposed to be purchased by UK2 Group, however it had not. This was despite historyofgreekfood.com being on their list of domains. As a result, I could not renew it either through UK2net or through Stargate and I could not access my website. Even worse, historyofgreekfood.com was bought by domain squatters and the price went sky rocketing when I tried to buy it back. So, I changed it to historyofgreekfood.org. Unfortunately many posts, comments, links and photographs are gone, since I was not very wise to export all of them to my computer.
….. and a glass of coffee.
When the temperature rises in Greece, the frappé season is! This very popular Greek summer –coffee started by accident in 1957, at the International Trade Fair of Thessaloniki. Dimitris Vakondios, employee of the representative of the Nestlé food company, couldn’t find any hot water to make his instant coffee, so he mixed the coffee with cold water and shaked it in a shaker. A new coffee had been born.
Thinking that instant coffee was launched onto the international market just in the 1950’s, it is not suprising that the idea of the ‘shaken’ cold coffee spread slowly. But in 1975, Nestlé began advertising on Greek television Nescafe, the hot instant, easy-making coffee. Four years later Nestlé expanded promotion to cold instant coffee and gave it the name of Nescafe Frappé. Greeks begun to drink it with such enthusiasm that became their most characteristic summer coffee. When a Greek today wants to drink a cold instant coffee, he simply asks for a frappé.
Frappé is a simple beverage. The instant coffee is combined with 1/5 of a glass of really cold water, sugar (optional), shaken vigorously together in a shaker or with a hand mixer, until the mixture will turn to thick foam. In case of using a shaker, the creamy mixture is poured over ice cubes in a tall glass. More cold water is added, some milk(optional) and the coffee is ready!
The foam of a good frappé is very thick. The lower oil content of instant coffee compared to traditionally brewed coffee makes the coffee -bubbles do not collapse and the foam creamy and durable. The best foam is made with spray-dried coffee, which actually is cheaper because spray-drying is simpler than freeze-drying. On the other hand, the high temperature needed in this process, destroys the natural flavor of coffee.
The popularity of frappé has nothing to do with its quality or quantity. The frappé is more about social gathering, contact, talking and watching people go by. The statistics say that the average person needs about 1 hour to drink a frappé at a cafeteria. Its high price – 3-6 euros for a glass of coffee- probably has mostly to do with the time that customers keep the tables. And it makes Athens the second most expensive city in Europe after Moscow, at least in terms of the price of a cup of coffee.
And here is the frappé I drink in summer mornings. Well, it is not so traditional but is tasty and I love it.
2 fingers of cold milk and 1 ½ tsp. coffee are mixed together with a hand mixer and then more milk is added into the foam.
I use the organic coffee Mount Hagen, a freeze-dried coffee with very rich flavor.
It is a product of Fair Trade, which means that the final customer is charged a little more but the middlemen have been cut off and the farmers have fair wages.