Grapes

Grapes have been grown in Greece for four thousand years, but in the kitchen rather than the winery the fruit usually turns up as moustos, the unfermented juice of the autumn pressing, rather than as something eaten from a bunch. Boiled down for hours it becomes petimezi, a thick dark syrup that sweetened Greek baking for centuries before refined sugar was cheap or widely available.

That syrup carries a whole set of autumn dishes with it. Moustokouloura are ring cookies sweetened with petimezi alone, no sugar at all, and moustalevria is a set pudding of must thickened with flour or semolina. Cypriot soutzoukos and its Greek equivalent soutzouki thread almonds or walnuts onto string and dip them again and again in thickened must until a chewy coating builds up.

Fresh must is only around for the few weeks of the harvest, so most cooks work from good unsweetened dark grape juice reduced by about a third, or buy petimezi ready made. The one thing to watch is the reduction: must thickens further as it cools, so a syrup taken to the consistency you actually want in the pan will set hard in the jar.