Spana-Kota
by Joanna Eleftheriou
I invented this recipe long before the pandemic, during my early thirties – my Missouri years. I can see the first iterations of the nameless chicken-breast-and-spinach dish being assembled in the attic kitchen of my grad school apartment, with its slightly sloping floors, its odd, leftover-wood cabinets (and countertops) thickly varnished so they shone. Some Midwestern snow appeared out the window. I lived alone, but in the duplex’s downstairs apartment I heard a parrot squawk “Hello Claire!” on the regular, and I felt my poet-friend’s presence nearby. Ours was a grad student neighborhood so thick with writers one Tennessee transplant said, “In Benton-Stephens, you can’t throw a stone without hitting a poet!” I loved my neighborhood not least because there, I learned to happily cook for one by discovering one rule: share with friends. Find a way, that is, to parcel out portions to friends. I made a lot of lentil soup in those days because the cold Missouri winters required soup. Recipients won’t feel beholden or obliged to reciprocate if you share lentils. Beans were cheap enough to give away, even on our miniature stipend.
The chicken-spinach dish in question came about (as most inventions do) after I encountered a practical problem: spanakopita, a Greek staple, was delicious but not filling. My lifelong determination to remain thin meant that I wouldn’t eat much of anything with a phyllo base even though I’m Greek, and thus encounter lots of opportunities to eat something with a phyllo base. Tiropita (cheese pie), loukanikopita (sausage pie), prassopita (leek pie), eliopita (olive pie), kolokopita (squash pie), manitaropita (mushroom pie) are only a few of the phyllo-wrapped pies on display in Greek and Cypriot bakeries. Back when I lived in Cyprus and followed the rules of Orthodox Lent (which demand veganism), a feta-free spanakopita from Zorba (yes, Zorba) bakery was my go-to while on the go. Spanakopita appeared frequently at meals with my extended family, and I always ate a little. I even learned to discern when the pita includes leeks, a cheese other than feta, an herb other than dill, or other variations on the typical spanakopita theme. I had, as a longtime anorectic, been given to leaving some phyllo on my plate while devouring the fiber-rich, spinach-y innards with gusto. But since eating spanakopita as a meal would just leave me wanting more food, none of my nostalgia for that dill-and-spinach flavor of my childhood could move grad-student-me to make or buy spanakopita for myself. But what if the spanakopita didn’t have any crust? What if the carb-and-fat phyllo case were replaced with – what? What else could encase the healthful (i.e. thinnifying) interior?
I’d heard of stuffed chicken breast but never eaten it. As most American readers will know, twenty-first century American grocery store chicken breasts dwarf the breasts of your typical foreign chicken, so I was able to make a small incision and then produce a sizeable cavity with my knife. I stuffed it with a mix of sautéed onion, thawed spinach, crumbled feta, and chopped dill. I slit and filled another one and enjoyed, I must admit, the odd feeling of flesh in my hand. I learned later that the proper way to “stuff” a chicken breast is to slit it right down the middle, open it “like a book,” stuff it and stabilize it by swaddling it in bacon or impaling it with toothpicks. Before chickens were bred selectively to generate enormous breasts, no one could make a stuffable pocket inside them. Some recipes suggest beating the breast with a mallet, and rolling the beaten breast up with the stuffing like a Swiss roll. Anyway, I baked my mammoth breasts and loved them. I don’t believe I shared.
Years later, when I presented the dish to a Greek friend, she asked what I gained from baking the breasts, arguing in favor of a stovetop, one-pot, chicken-spinach stew. This tweak split the preparation time in half. Now, I brown the chicken while sautéing the onions, then add the spinach while it’s still frozen (the bag, not the block kind) and then the feta, garlic, black pepper, and dill. I haven’t decided whether the stovetop tweak compromises the taste. I suspect the stuffing-and-baking method keeps the chicken juicy but that might be an illusion. I might be biased by a preference for the integrity of my original invention, for the labor of stuffing a pocket of meat, and a sense that extra labor makes extra flavor.
I don’t need to explain why chicken-spinach became my pandemic food of choice. Cheese, especially feta, keeps for ages in the fridge. Spinach has always been my go-to vegetable if I can’t get to the store or can’t afford fresh greens. When we became afraid, I ordered big buckets of feta. When I found that in their (understandable) haste, our proxy shoppers selected overripe or rotten produce, I decided to rely on frozen goods, especially spinach. Fresh carrots and celery were safe bets, so I bought lots and chopped bags and bags of them to make soup–the lentil soup I had made in such great quantities as a grad student. Freezing lentil soup made me feel safe, like it was a bulwark against the virus. If I grew weak, I could still eat. In the eleven months since we went indoors, though, I’ve evaded Corona. I’ve made a lot of spinach-chicken. The sour decadence of good feta warms a lonely heart. Chicken (the animal) in Greek is kota, so one might, perhaps, call the dish fashioned from chicken and spanakopita’s interior a spana-kota.
I have adjusted to pandemic life. I bought a house in coastal Virginia and put down roots in a neighborhood less run-down, much warmer, and just as communal as my Missouri one. Still, I’m not quite sure we’ll make it out of this pickle. The virus has outpaced our botched efforts against it. I wrote a flash fiction piece in 2017 about a war that made humankind extinct. Terrified of one another, trigger-happy Americans wiped out humanity and my narrator (a horse) explains that now, humans are a precautionary tale. Their storied demise scares colts into loving each other and being kind. That same year, I read Her Body and Other Parties, which includes Carmen Maria Machado’s story about humankind dying out in a pandemic. Honestly, I thought my own scenario more likely. As the threat of viral death has grown, though – as the tally of the dead has marched on and corpses fill the morgues – in spite of all the claims that these deaths are unstoppable (or not worth stopping for), I am sad to see in mid-January that the kind of extinction I envisioned – death caused by white rage – is vying with the virus for primacy.
We still fear each other. We are more afraid, it seems, of each other than of disease, and the times when we should fear other humans, we don’t. We gauge the threat badly. I’ve done it myself. I let beloved friends breathe on me because how on earth could a person I love prompt my death?
I don’t want to use the Trojan Horse as an example because I’m Greek, and that would be cliché. But if I were to talk about the Trojan Horse, I would also talk about bodies that seem safe, safe like a celebration. I would admit that bodies we read as foreign signal danger even though they might be the only bodies that can save us.
I lost weight during the first months of isolation, but when I was told that I would not be permitted to teach remotely unless I acquired severe asthma, severe heart disease, cancer, or obesity, I let loose and began to eat. I am now afraid that I’ll be asked why, that I’ll be called to account for a change in my body that was designed to save my life.
I became anorexic (I’m mostly recovered now) because I’m afraid of my body and myself, and of what would happen if other people caught me taking pleasure in myself, in eating, in being alive.
One day, maybe we’ll sort out our enemies from our friends, and figure out who is safe to hug and who isn’t. One thing that’s for sure – it’s safe to eat. It’s always been safe to eat and if I hope to gain any knowledge from the pandemic, I hope it will be that. Our impulse is to name as dangerous people who seem different from ourselves. It’s usually untrue. To figure out what’s true takes effort and attention; to keep safe, we have to take care.
Recipe
Chop and sauté several onions in olive oil.
Grate a clove of garlic. Add a pound of spinach.
Add lots of dill and black pepper.
Add feta until the mixture resembles a spanakopita’s insides.
Slit as many chicken breasts as you have. Stuff them.
Bake until the chicken is no longer raw.
Joanna Eleftheriou is author of the essay collection This Way Back. Her essays appear in Crab Orchard Review, Arts and Letters, and Sweeter Voices Still: An LGBTQ Anthology from Middle America. A contributing editor at Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Joanna holds a PhD in English from the University of Missouri and teaches at Christopher Newport University and the Writing Workshops in Greece.