“Trust me, this is the traditional Greek moussaka,” I tell my student friends in the early 2000s. “I got it out of an old Greek book. I bet this recipe goes back a thousand years!”
Luckily none of them were Greek, or else they would have laughed in my face.
At this time as an amateur cooking enthusiast, moussaka (a layered dish of sliced aubergine, lamb mince and a lot of olive oil) is my signature dish. It’s also pretty much my only dish: beyond the usual no-brainer British bachelor fodder – baked potatoes, fried breakfasts, beans on toast – it’s the only way I know of impressing friends (and potential girlfriends) with my ‘exotic’ culinary skills. Yes yes, I say, I grew up in Cyprus, so Greek food just comes naturally to me, and then I rattle off the few Greek phrases I‘ve learned to say fluently, mutter something about olive oil and stuffed vine leaves, and then, somewhat insufferably, I announce they’ve never lived if they haven’t had an authentic moussaka.
Sadly, by those criteria I haven’t lived either. My moussaka recipe is out of a battered old cookery book that’s half-English, half-Greek, and I’ve learned literally nothing else in it. As a kid growing up in Cyprus, I may have eaten my own bodyweight many times over in Cypriot-Greek food, but preparing it is mostly alien to me, if I’m honest (which I rarely was when friends were over for dinner).
If I’d known a little more, I might have known the truth. Yes, moussaka is one of Greece’s most famous dishes – but it’s also surprisingly new in origin.
Actually, that needs some explaining. The essential mix of ingredients that forms the base of moussaka (aubergine, mince, oil and spices) have been around for basically forever, in various forms in different Mediterranean countries. The name itself comes from Ottoman Turkish and before that Arabic – muṣaqqa‘a, meaning “moistened”. People have been eating sauteéd aubergine (aka. eggplant, if you’re not familiar with the European name) for a long, long time.
But it was one particularly influential Greek chef that created the form of moussaka that you’re most likely to encounter in Greek restaurants and cafes. He was born in Sifrios in 1878, was trained in classical French cooking in Vienna, and he most definitely wasn’t a fan of traditional Greek cooking with its passion for liberal quantities of garlic, herbs and lemon. Too strong-flavoured. Too oily. Too heavy. Too Turkish. Too much of all the wrong things used in all the wrong ways (in his opinion).
Once Tselementes had grown in fame and fortune and was ready to put his ideas into print, he saw his chance to “correct” this popular dish. His Ogidos Mageirikis – an immensely cookery guide that led to all cookery books being nicknamed “tselemente” – featured a recipe with three distinct layers that you prepare separately before combining in the final dish: a layer of aubergine; a strip of ground lamb lightly cooked with tomatoes, onion, garlic, and spices (cinnamon, allspice and black pepper – but no bay leaf, one of the hitherto strong Greek flavours), and on top, béchamel sauce, which was mostly unheard of in Greece at the time.
By replacing the normally oil-saturated top layer with a butter & milk white sauce, Tselementes transformed moussaka from delicious-tasting but aesthetically simple fare into something that looked sophisticated enough to serve in the posher restaurants of Europe. With this commerce-friendly boost, the Tselementes moussaka quickly conquered Greece.
It’s the first thing I eat whenever I return to Greece, and I hope one of your first experiments in Greek cuisine if you’re joining Wheel & Anchor in one of its island-hopping trips next year. Shameless fraud that I am when it comes to my moussaka-cooking, it does trigger a lot of happy memories (mainly because my university friends never caught me out in my lies).
But there’s one thing I might have got wrong. In older cookbooks, you may be ordered to salt your aubergines before cooking, to sweat their bitterness out. This was part of my preparation routine: once you’d slice the eggplant pieces, you sprinkled salt onto them and left them for about an hour (or, you’d soak them in brine). Once you come back, they’d be peppered with tiny brown beads of “sweat” – this is because the salt shrinks the aubergine flesh and moisture is squeezed out of all its air pockets. This used to be a good idea because aubergines half a century or more ago were generally rather sharp – but modern varieties have lost their bitterness, so it’s no longer required. However, this still helps firm the aubergine up so it absorbs less oil. Oily-moussaka-hater Tselementes would undoubtedly approve.
Oh, and there’s one other thing you should do if you cook moussaka at home, and it’s a lesson that also applies to Indian curries: leave it a day. Don’t eat it on the same day you prepare it! If you want to release all the flavours of those spices, give them time to come out.
But also, don’t do this if you like! One thing about successful modern moussakas is that their variations are endless. There are vegetarian, vegan and non-dairy versions – Tselementes provided one of these suitable for religious fasting. There’s a type in Crete that swaps out the mince for crayfish. There’s even a form in the UK that uses goose, apparently nicknamed “goosaka” (I wish I was making this up).
So that would have been a further dead giveaway of my lack of expertise, when I claimed mine was “the real moussaka recipe”. There’s no such thing – and even its inventor knew this!
Join Wheel & Anchor in 2025 for an island-hopping adventure covering some of the well-known islands like Crete and Santorini, and some of the lesser-visited ones like Naxos and Paros. We’ll take local ferries and stay at least 3 nights for each stop to really see the islands that most cruise passengers only catch a glimpse of. Get all the details for our 2025 trips in April here and for September here.