Jeff Cole fell in love with the cooking when he taught English in Greece. Michael Bateman samples some of his favourite recipes cooked in a traditional terracotta oven. Photographs by Arthur Meehan.
English teacher Jeff Cole is a keen cook with a passion for the food of Greece. So much so, that, in order to make the delicious country dishes he loved so much, he had planned to build himself an earthenware oven like those he had seen in Greece, Crete and Cyprus. It may have been no more than a fond fantasy, but his wife Elaine decided to make his dream come true. And duly, this Christmas, she unveiled a terracotta beehive oven.
Jeff was stunned. "My first reaction was how much it must have cost, though I did have a vague idea." With difficulty (it measures 60cm across and weighs a formidable 93 kilos - more than 14 stone), they lugged it onto the patio of their basement flat in London's Stoke Newington, and started cooking at once. Now, wrapped in a protective jacket against rain and frost, it takes pride of place in the garden. It is the focal point of entertaining and is used every weekend, whatever the weather.
You might assume it's difficult to manage but, says Jeff, the opposite is the case. If you can light a barbecue, you can heat a beehive oven. But the advantage over a barbecue is that it generates a much more intense heat. "It's perfect for vegetable dishes, fish, pizzas and bread, chicken and smaller joints of meat. The only disappointment has been larger joints, which roast quickly on the outside leaving the meat on the inside too pink." He needs to work on this.
Jeff, 37, is a Geordie, born in Gateshead. His grandmother cooked traditional local dishes such as tatie pot and pea and ham soup and he grew up with a fairly insular view of food. Then his parents took him on holiday to France. He survived the culture shock though not without discomfort. "I remember the first time I had sweetbreads. It was a terrible meal that really frightened me." But he got on fine with the coq au vin.
Jeff went to university to read English, but at 21 couldn't make a career choice. He answered an ad in a Newcastle paper from a woman who needed a man to teach English in Greece. "It was 100 miles north of Athens and I was the only Englishman in the village. I'd finish work at 9pm and there'd be no one to talk to." The food was a shock, too. "Imagine a boy from Newcastle hitting the olive oil. It was not one of the best experiences of my life." But he moved to another town, found some mates and began to enjoy himself.
"I was there for a year, lodging in a house. The landlady wouldn't let me do anything for myself. If I went to wash my clothes in the marble sink in the garden, she'd rush out and take them from me. She also used to bring me things she had cooked."
Every day he would watch the women taking trays of food to be cooked in the village baker's oven. Many of them were layered dishes, such as moussaka or tyropitta, a pie with spinach and feta.
A year later, a more confident Jeff returned to teach, this time in Iraklion in Crete, and to expand his knowledge of Greek food. By the time he met his wife, Elaine, now a senior nurse at the London Hospital in Whitechapel, he was an expert cook. Inevitably, they took their honeymoon in Greece.
Jeff has a growing library of cookery books - all of Elizabeth David's, and others by Julia Child, Jane Grigson, Alan Davidson and Rena Salaman's Greek Food. A recent acquisition was the River Cafe Cookbook Two by Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers, which has a section on using a wood-fired oven. "Sadly, they assumed people wouldn't actually have wood-fired ovens, so they don't give cooking times."
So, much of Jeff's cooking continues to be experimental. Asparagus, for example, takes no time at all. "Put it in an earthenware dish, with some olive oil and salt, and it cooks almost at once. I bought two sea bass and put them in the bottom of the oven with some wine and oil. As soon as the top bubbled, I turned them over, and when they crisped up on the outside they were ready. It took minutes." The results, he says, are always better than those in a con-ventional oven, due to the intense heat of around 250°C (or more), a temperature much higher than a domestic oven could achieve.
Jeff's beehive is effectively one terracotta dome inside another. The heat is stored in the terracotta and cooking is very rapid in the early stages. But it's not quick to get going and the wood needs 45 minutes or so before it is ready. Much like barbecuing, you can start cooking when the flames die down and the wood gives off a more or less smokeless glow.
To bake, Jeff brushes the embers to the perimeter of the oven. He cooks flat bread and pizza on the terracotta floor. The chicken for our lunch he stuffs with lemons and lays on a bed of flat-leaf parsley and rosemary in an earthenware dish. This is then placed on a raised grid, since the chief source of heat is from above (the dome intensifies downward radiation.) When Jeff first made briami, a vegetable stew, he chopped up the courgettes, aubergines and tomatoes and thought he would need to add water. But the heat draws the liquid from the vegetables and they cook in their own juices.
It is a bonus that Jeff lives near a large community of Turkish and Greek Cypriots. Their shops provided the delicious ingredients for the feast he prepared: roast chicken, briami, horiatiki salata of feta and tomatoes, melitzanosalata - aubergines and peppers - tzatziki and flat bread. He buys dried oregano locally, as well as thick, green olive oil, juicy purple Kalamata olives, piquantly salty feta, waxy Cyprus potatoes, lemons, sweet tomatoes and peppers, and pink-striped aubergines. And, finally, vine cuttings which he tosses into the beehive oven to add an authentic Greek aroma.