As I mentioned in a previous post, I got the impression cookbooks from the various ethnicities of Europe were handing me a snow job and that the real scoop could be found in cookbooks by immigrant communities in the U.S.. This has been working out real well.

I recently got one written by people from the Carpathian mountains of Slovakia who had moved to Pennsylvania around 1900. The recipes are very simple, almost primitive, but the food is to die for.

I know that it is because it's the food of my childhood (though that was spelled mostly in Polish (other side of the hill from Slovakia) so the little squiggles above the letters may have been different but I doubt that affected the taste a lot).

I'm now reading one on the food of Lithuania (the land of my surname). It's maybe a little more primitive - as befits the one people who still speak a language close to the original Indo-European that gave birth to Hyksos, Sanscrit, Hindi, Greek, Latin, Russian, German and the rest of the European family (Fins, Hungarians, Etruscans and Basques are excused. Turks, while considered ethnically European, speak an Asian language).

Interestingly, a French geographic society recently assigned the true geographic center of Europe to be just outside Vilnius, capital of Lithuania (using a "center of gravity" algorithm).

. . but by various and sundry historians.

Turkey was home of the Hittites, one of the earliest peoples identified as speaking a European language and has been subject to migration from the north (European Russia, etc.). Some language historians theorize that the PIE (Primitive Indo European) language originated in Turkey and/or Armenia, but it seems more likely it was from farther north.

Due to the most recent conquests Turks now speak an asian language (Turcic) and adhere (mostly) to a Semitic religion.

. . errr . . "Greek Culture".