When restaurateur Paul Boundas was asked by his mother’s women’s church group to submit a recipe, he thought he was contributing to a ring-bound community cookbook. Then a photographer showed up at his house. Boundas’s recipe for macaronada, a pasta dish with nutmeg-laced red sauce and baked shrimp, is just one of the offerings in the new coffee-table cookbook Greektown Chicago: Its History, Its Recipes by local author Alexa Ganakos. Ganakos says she was able to cull family recipes from a “good sampling of people”–old and young, women and men–just by putting out feelers in the Greek Orthodox diocese. Even the Very Reverend Archimandrite Demetri Kantzavelos contributed his avgolemono, egg lemon soup.
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The rest of the 40-plus recipes come from chefs at five Greektown mainstays: the Parthenon, Greek Islands, Pegasus, Artopolis, and Costa’s. Some, like the eggplant dip melitzanosalata, look quite feasible to re-create at home. Others, like Costa’s stuffed grilled calamari, wouldn’t likely be much of a success made in a standard kitchen. Even Ganakos agrees that this one is probably better left to the experts.
Greektown Chicago devotes equal time to food, history, and culture. Flipping through it, you’re as likely to land on a discussion of athletes or the role of the church as on a recipe. In the introduction, novelist Harry Mark Petrakis mistily recounts his childhood as the son of a parish priest in the Greektown of the 1930s and ’40s, a place that, he writes, “might have been villages transplanted from Greece into America.” Jane Addams’s Hull House at Polk and Halsted anchored the roughly triangular area known as the Delta, bordered by Halsted, Harrison, and Blue Island in the 19th Ward. In the early 60s the Dan Ryan cut into the area and the Delta’s residents were displaced to make way for the new UIC campus. What remained of Greek commerce got nudged several blocks north, and in the 70s and 80s modern Greektown slowly came into its own. Ganakos remembers visiting the restaurants there regularly in her childhood. “The 70s were still pretty rough, but you knew you were safe coming here,” she says.
