Wild, fresh, delicious: You can’t go past this 1000-year-old Greek dish

The dish

Spanakopita, Greece

Plate up

If you’ve been to Greece, you know. If you’ve been anywhere in the country for any amount of time. At some point you would have wandered past a bakery and had a quick glance at the products on offer in the display case and you would have seen a golden, crusty, pie-like beauty nestled in a metal tray. And you probably would have wandered inside to order a slice, or a whole pie. You would have tried spanakopita. This is perhaps the finest of all Greece’s pastry-draped treats, with layers and layers of crisp filo wrapped around a savoury filling of spinach; soft, salty cheese such as feta; some fresh herbs and usually an egg to bind it all together. This is a pastry with an intense sense of place, a taste of the Greek countryside, wild and fresh and delicious. You can’t go past it.

First serve

There is no official inventor of spanakopita. There isn’t even an agreed timeline. At one point there was no spanakopita, and then there was. Of course at one point there was no spinach in Greece – it was introduced from the Middle East, via Spain, during the Byzantine Empire – and the technique to make filo pastry was also developed around then, so we’re looking at a recipe that still could be 1000 years old. At the risk of stoking regional tension, we should also point out that spanakopita is similar to ispanakli borek, a Turkish dish of filo pastry wrapped around a spinach and white-cheese filling.

Order there

For a classic spanakopita made with love and care, visit Pnyka, one of the oldest bakeries in Athens (Pratinou 2, Pangrati – no website).

Order here