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Baklava event honors Greek heritage (Feb. 13, 2008) – The Betty Strong Encounter Center will present “Honoring Siouxland’s Greek Heritage with Baklava” at 2 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 20. The program will include a demonstration and tasting of the Greek pastry led by Christine McAvoy. Admission will be free. The event will be the first in a series of programs that honor Siouxland’s diverse food heritage, a focus of Encounter Center programming.
“Filo is to Greeks what pasta is to Italians. You use filo for everything. Filo was the basis for many, many dishes my grandmother served, including baklava. She was a master,” says McAvoy, a member of the G.R. Lindblade & Co. staff. A photograph of Vasiliki making filo is featured in the Center’s “Aegean Encounters of the Missouri,” an exhibition that honors Sioux City’s Greek heritage and Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church. Baklava involves a layer-by-layer process that alternates buttery filo pastry with spicy chopped nut filling and then a rich topping of honey syrup. Today’s Siouxlanders can purchase prepared filo. With a reliable recipe, careful prep work and a little patience, they can achieve delicious results, McAvoy says. Like many heritage recipes, Vasiliki’s wasn’t written down. She had her own system for measuring ingredients, using a “little teacup” and a “big teacup.” McAvoy adds her own touch to the family recipe which calls for a combination of nuts and sesame seeds. “Baklava, like most ethnic food, is regional. The Armenians make a version, the Syrians have a version, the Turks have theirs. Nuts, filo and honey are the basis for all baklava,” she says. The Encounter Center recently launched the Siouxland Heritage Recipe Project to honor traditional recipes from families and communities in the area. The project is particularly interested in recipes that reflect cultural identity and connections to previous generations. The long-range goal is to create a heritage cookbook showcasing recipes and stories that celebrate the many cultures of Siouxland, says Marcia Poole, director of the Encounter Center. The recipe project was inspired by Poole’s research on Sioux City Stockyards history which has resulted in two books. Many first-person stories of the Yards led to memories of favorite dishes prepared by different groups who lived in the South Bottoms and East Bottoms near the Yards district. Polish, Lithuanian, Greek, African-American, German, Russian, Italian, Scandinavian, Syrian, Mexican, Irish and other immigrants lived alongside indigenous peoples from many tribes. Most worked for packinghouses and the railroads. Farm and ranch families brought additional richness, both through the food they produced and how they prepared it. Ongoing immigration to this area has continued to contribute deeper complexity to Siouxland’s foodways. For more information about “Baklava” and the Siouxland Heritage Recipe Project, call 712-224-5242. The Betty Strong Encounter Center is connected with the Lewis & Clark Interpretive Center on Sioux City’s riverfront.
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McAvoy has been making baklava since
she was 12. She learned from her mother, the
late Mary Glarum, who learned from her
mother, the late Vasiliki Mihos, a Greek
immigrant who settled in the South Bottoms
in the Stockyards district in the 1910s.
McAvoy will use her grandmother’s utensils
for the demonstration.