Marathopita

the Cretan wild fennel pie: hillside fronds and greens folded into a thin oil pastry and fried on a griddle until blistered

Origin: Chania, Crete & the Aegean

From the journey of Fennel.

Marathopita is a pie in the Cretan sense, which is to say a thin folded round cooked on a griddle rather than a pastry baked in a tin. The filling is marathos, wild fennel, gathered on the hillsides in spring when the fronds are young and soft, chopped fine with spring onion and whatever other greens the walk produced, and bound with nothing much at all. The dough is flour, oil, and a splash of the local raki or vinegar, rolled until you can nearly see through it. It belongs to horta, the eating of wild greens, which is one of the oldest continuous food practices in Europe and is still an ordinary Cretan activity rather than a revival. Crete has been studied hard by nutritionists since the Seven Countries Study of the 1950s found the island's population unusually healthy on an unusually plain diet, and the volume of gathered greens in that diet was one of the things that surprised the researchers. Marathopita is what a morning of gathering turns into. The raki in the dough is not for flavour and does not survive the pan. Alcohol inhibits gluten development and evaporates fast in the heat, which gives a pastry that stays short and blisters rather than toughening, and Greek cooks use it in every fried pastry for that reason. Vinegar does much the same job. Seasonality is absolute here. Wild fennel is a spring plant, coarse and stringy by early summer and gone by the heat, and a marathopita made from the bulb fennel of a supermarket is a different and blander thing. The fronds cut from a bought bulb, with a handful of dill, are the honest substitute.

Ingredients

Dough

  • 300 g plain flour
  • 4 tbsp olive oil
  • 2 tbsp raki, ouzo, or white wine vinegar
  • 0.75 tsp salt
  • 150 ml warm water, approximately

Filling

  • 300 g wild fennel fronds, or the fronds from 3 bulbs plus a large bunch of dill
  • 200 g spinach or wild greens, finely chopped
  • 6 spring onions, finely sliced
  • 1 small bunch mint, chopped
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 0.5 tsp freshly ground black pepper
  • 3 tbsp olive oil

To cook

  • 4 tbsp olive oil, for frying

Method

  1. Work the flour, oil, raki, salt, and water into a soft, supple dough. Knead for five minutes, then rest it covered for thirty; a rested dough rolls thin without springing back.
  2. Chop the fennel fronds finely, discarding any thick stems, which stay stringy however long they cook.
  3. Toss the fennel, greens, spring onion, and mint with the salt and leave them in a colander for fifteen minutes.
  4. Squeeze the greens hard in your hands. A surprising amount of water comes out, and any left behind will make the pastry soggy and tear it.
  5. Mix the squeezed greens with the pepper and the 3 tbsp of oil.
  6. Divide the dough into four and roll each piece out as thin as you can manage, to about 26cm across.
  7. Pile a quarter of the filling on one half, leaving a border, fold the other half over, and press the edges firmly. Flatten the whole parcel gently with the rolling pin.
  8. Alternatively spread the filling over the whole round, fold it into a parcel, and roll it flat again, which is the older Cretan way and gives a thinner pie.
  9. Heat a heavy pan with a little oil over a medium heat. Do not let it smoke: these want to cook through rather than sear.
  10. Fry each pie for five or six minutes a side, pressing occasionally with a spatula, until blistered and deep gold in patches.
  11. The filling is already edible, so you are cooking the pastry rather than the greens; when the dough has gone from pale to crisp and freckled, it is done.
  12. Drain briefly and eat warm, cut into wedges, with a wedge of lemon and a little myzithra or feta if you want it.

Notes

Squeeze the greens properly, which is the difference between a crisp pie and a torn one. Wild fennel is a spring plant and stringy once it has flowered; if you are using the fronds cut from bought bulbs, take the fine feathery parts only and make up the volume with dill, which is the nearest thing in flavour. The raki or vinegar in the dough keeps the pastry short and is worth including. These are shallow-fried rather than deep-fried and are eaten warm rather than hot; they also travel well cold, which is what they were originally for.

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