Wild Greens

Horta covers any edible leaf gathered rather than planted, and the category is genuinely enormous: dandelion, chicory, sow thistle, mustard greens, nettle, wild fennel, amaranth and dozens more, varying by region and by month. Crete has the deepest foraging tradition, with cooks there able to name and use many more species than a mainland market would ever stock, and the practice is still ordinary rather than nostalgic.

Horta vrasta is the whole dish: the greens boiled in salted water until tender, drained, piled on a plate and dressed while still warm with a great deal of olive oil and lemon. Nothing else is added. The cooking water, the zoumi, is not thrown away but drunk warm with lemon, and it is treated as the healthy part of the exercise rather than a byproduct.

Mixing bitter greens with milder ones is how a good plate is balanced, and a bunch of pure dandelion will be sharper than most people want on its own. Outside Greece, chard, spinach, kale, chicory and beet tops in combination get close enough for a hortopita filling or for tsigarelli, the Corfiot dish of chopped greens cooked down with chilli and plenty of oil.