Greek Breakfast

Greek breakfast brings coffee, bread, honey, strained yoghurt, pastries, eggs and fruit to the morning table of Greece. Food tours with a host run in Athens, Thessaloniki, Crete and Santorini, among other places. Stories run from oxygala and hot milk to bougatsa, koulouri, piroski, freddo cappuccino and Aristotle’s fig. Related reading covers Greek food, Greek coffee and Greek honey. Wider trip ideas sit under Greece tours.

Bookings made through the GetYourGuide widgets on this page earn Classical Greece Tours a commission, at no extra cost to the traveller.

What is a Greek breakfast?

Greek breakfast means the morning meal of Greece, with hot milk or fruit juice among the drinks. Strained yoghurt, pastries, eggs and breads fill the table. Dairy shops once served it, with milk, butter, yoghurt, sweets and honey for sale.

The English word breakfast points to breaking the fast of the night before. Ancient Greek writers name an earlier morning meal, the ariston, eaten soon after sunrise. With time, the ariston moved to around noon, and a new morning meal took its place. In classical times, the Greek breakfast was the akratisma, eaten straight after rising.

The akratisma consisted of barley bread dipped in wine, with figs or olives added on occasion. Greek cooks also fried pancakes named after the frying pan, the tagenon. Another pancake used spelt flour, and the writer Athenaeus mentions one topped with honey, sesame and cheese. Poets of the 5th century BC first mention these fried cakes.

A typical Greek breakfast list also holds strained yoghurt, the thick kind with its whey removed. Its pastries include bougatsa, a filled filo parcel, and tiropita, a cheese pie. Spanakopita, a pie made with spinach, stands beside them. Eggs appear boiled or fried, in an omelette, or scrambled with tomatoes as strapatsada.

• Bread ring: Koulouri is a bread ring covered with sesame, named on the list as a simit type.
• Last entries: Tsoureki closes the list beside the croissant and piroski, a fried stuffed bun.
• Old English: A regular morning meal was once morgenmete, before breakfast entered written English around the 15th century.

The dairy shops carried the name galaktopoleia, which means milk shops. They counted as a traditional home of the Greek breakfast. Only a small number of them exist today. Breakfast menus everywhere vary by region and tradition.

What does oxygala tell about the yoghurt on a Greek breakfast table?

Greek breakfast yoghurt is the strained kind, a fermented milk food with its whey largely drained away. Ancient Greeks already knew a sour milk food by the name oxygala. The 2nd-century physician Galen advised mixing it with honey.

Yoghurt at a Greek breakfast starts with bacteria fermenting the sugars in milk. They produce lactic acid, which acts on milk protein and creates the texture and tart taste. Straining then removes whey, the watery part of the milk. Even non-fat yoghurt turns thicker, richer and creamier after this step.

Oxygala, whose Greek name means sour milk, was a fermented milk food. It was known in late ancient Greek and Roman times. Its exact nature remains uncertain, because old texts used the word for different fermented products. Modern scholars compare it to yoghurt, cheese or curd. Greek and Roman diners accepted it because they thought it easier to digest.

The 4th-century BC Greek historian Theopompus gave one of the earliest references to oxygala. He described it as a Scythian food, taken both as a drink and in solid form. Greeks met the Scythians through Black Sea colonies. Later Greek writers list oxygala as a medical remedy. Modern Greek has xinogala, a sour milk drink.

• Word: The English word comes from Ottoman Turkish and first appeared in English in 1625.
• Milk: Cow’s milk leads yoghurt making, though goats, ewes, camels and yaks supply milk as well.
• Greek breakfast place: The typical list names strained yoghurt between koulouri and bougatsa, the filo pastry.

On Greek breakfast yoghurt sold abroad, the word Greek carries legal weight. In Britain and the European Union, it names only yoghurt made in Greece. North Americans use Greek yoghurt for the strained kind, and powdered milk sometimes thickens it instead of straining.

Why does honey keep so long on a Greek breakfast table?

Greek breakfast honey keeps for a very long time because of an enzyme from bees. It creates gluconic acid and hydrogen peroxide, and these byproducts help suppress bacteria. Honey also has an indefinite shelf life while its water content stays near 18%.

Honey has served over its long history in cooking, baking and desserts. It is also a spread on bread. The Greek breakfast list places it next to bread, butter and jam. Drinks take it too, with tea named first among them. Factories also use it as a sweetener in commercial beverages.

A jar of honey that turns grainy has crystallised, not gone bad. Part of its glucose, a simple sugar, has left the solution and formed crystals. Such honey also goes by the names granulated or candied honey. Warming brings it back to a liquid state, and crystals do not mean it has expired.

Creamed honey, also called whipped or spun honey, has its crystals controlled during processing. A large number of small crystals blocks the bigger ones found in unprocessed honey. The result has a smooth texture that spreads easily. In Britain the same product goes under the name set honey.

• Acidity: The average pH of honey is 3.9, with a range from 3.4 to 6.1.
• Heat: Pasteurising honey destroys yeast cells and delays the visible start of crystals.
• Greek breakfast history: Ancient Greeks treated ulcers, skin wounds and burns with honey in folk medicine.

Acids shape the taste of Greek breakfast honey. Organic acids make up between 0.17% and 1.17% of the mixture, and gluconic acid leads them. Aliphatic acids, a non-aromatic group, add greatly to flavour by acting on the other ingredients. Types and amounts differ by honey.

Which pastry sheet wraps bougatsa, a popular Greek breakfast?

Greek breakfast bakers wrap bougatsa in filo, a paper-thin pastry sheet. Filo reached its modern form in the Ottoman Empire by the 15th century. Bougatsa counts as a popular morning meal, sold mainly in bougatsadika shops alongside pies, pastries and drinks.

A classical origin for bougatsa remains possible, through the layered placenta cake of Greek and Roman times. Its name is comparable with focaccia, the Italian flat bread. Anthony Bourdain’s television series showed hand-made filo for bougatsa in an episode filmed in Chania, Crete. For the Greek breakfast version, bakers wrap the sheet around a filling.

Cooks traditionally roll filo with a slim, lengthy pin, which Turkish calls an oklava. During the 19th century, Ottoman chefs found a faster way to roll it. They worked a dozen layers dusted with starch together, producing 10 to 20 sheets like tissue. Today professional baklava makers mainly use this method.

Baklava seems the earliest dish made from this dough. Food historians suggest the sheet grew from yufka, a thin layered flatbread of Central Asian Turkic peoples. The word yufka itself means thin. Historian Speros Vryonis describes a Byzantine sweet, koptoplakous, as two pastry sheets around walnuts, almonds, sesame and honey.

• Machines: Commercially manufactured filo became widely available in supermarkets during the 1970s.
• Turkish cooks: A cookbook of 1900 says rolling out the pastry was widely practised among rural Turks.
• Greek breakfast spelling: Across the Balkans the dough took the name phyllo, which means leaf in Greek.

Filo also travelled far beyond the Greek breakfast counter. After the Ottoman conquest of Hungary in the 16th century, Hungarian sources began naming a pastry retes. This is the first recorded name for strudel, a development influenced by the idea of yufka.

How does sesame dress the koulouri at a Greek breakfast?

Greek breakfast koulouri is a bread ring coated with sesame, the seed of a plant called Sesamum indicum. The seeds grow in pods. Charred remains point to domestication of the plant in the Indian subcontinent at least 5500 years ago.

Carl Linnaeus described the plant as Sesamum indicum in 1753, and indicum means of India. English has a second name, benne, first recorded in 1769 from the American creole language Gullah. Traders moved sesame between Mesopotamia and the Indian subcontinent by 2000 BC. The Indus Valley possibly exported its oil to Mesopotamia.

Ancient Egyptians called the plant sesemt and listed it among medicines in a scroll of about 1550 BC. Excavation of the tomb of King Tutankhamen uncovered baskets of sesame among the grave goods. That find suggests sesame was present in Egypt by 1350 BC. The empire of Urartu pressed it for oil at least by 750 BC.

The plant behind the Greek breakfast ring grows 50 to 100 cm tall. Its flowers range from white through pink to purple. The capsule that forms the fruit holds white or black seeds. Each seed measures 3 to 4 mm. A ripe pod splits with a pop, a possible origin of the phrase open sesame.

• Oil: Among all seeds, sesame ranks near the very top for oil content.
• Survivor: Drought and high heat do not stop it, so one breeder named it the survivor crop.
• Greek breakfast relatives: Middle Eastern cooks turn the same seeds into tahini paste and sweet halva.

The Greek breakfast list describes koulouri as a sesame bread ring and a type of simit. Simit is the Turkish name for such rings. Seed-covered sweets also run through the cultures of the Mediterranean. Southern Italy keeps a brittle called giurgiulena, served at Christmas.

What stands behind the hot milk of a Greek breakfast?

Greek breakfast drinks include hot milk, and more than six billion people worldwide consume milk or milk products. Farmers collect it from farm animals, mostly cattle. Greece is also the home of one common dairy sheep breed, the Chios.

The milk in a Greek breakfast cup is a liquid food from the mammary glands of mammals. It is the primary nourishment of their young. It holds calcium and protein, along with lactose and saturated fat. The enzyme lactase breaks down lactose, the milk sugar. Adults digest milk only with lactase persistence.

The English word comes from Old English meoluc and milc, from a Proto-Germanic root. Since 1961, international food standards have defined milk as the normal secretion of milking animals. The definition allows no addition or extraction. Dairy farms produced around 730 million tonnes in 2011, from 260 million dairy cows. India is the largest producer.

A Greek myth explains the Milky Way through milk. The trickster god Hermes suckled the infant Heracles at the breast of Hera while she slept. When Hera awoke, she tore him away and splattered her milk across the heavens. Modern kitchens add milk to hot chocolate and French toast, porridge and granola.

• Greek breakfast partner: The typical list names hot milk straight after mountain tea, ahead of fruit juice.
• Sheep: Sheep milk commonly goes into cultured dairy products, and feta from Greece is one example.
• Dairy breeds: Specialised dairy breeds of sheep yield more milk than other breeds.

Milk at a Greek breakfast connects with a wide trade. New Zealand, Germany and the Netherlands are the largest exporters of milk products. India also leads exports of skimmed milk powder. Between 750 and 900 million people live in dairy-farming households.

What history does the croissant bring to a Greek breakfast?

Greek breakfast lists name the croissant beside piroski and tsoureki. This crescent-shaped pastry uses a laminated yeast dough. Laminating means layering the dough with butter, then rolling and folding it in turn. The result sits between bread and puff pastry.

The croissant takes its shape from the kipferl, an Austrian crescent pastry. That pastry dates back to at least the 13th century. In 1838 or 1839, an Austrian artillery officer named August Zang founded a Viennese bakery in Paris. It served the kipferl and the Vienna loaf, and it quickly drew French imitators.

The name of this Greek breakfast pastry appears among luxury breads in 1853. By 1869 the pastry was established enough for mention as a breakfast staple. Charles Dickens wrote of the dainty croissant in 1872. The earliest known recipe for today’s croissant came in 1905. A Paris encyclopedia of cooking printed a fuller one in 1906.

Popular stories tie the kipferl to the siege of Vienna in 1683. Others name the Battle of Tours in 732. No contemporary sources back any of these tales. A writer of 1799 left the kipferl out of a long list of breakfast foods. In the late 1970s, frozen unbaked dough turned the croissant into fast food.

• Greek breakfast company: Tsoureki, piroski and strapatsada stand next to the croissant on the typical list.
• Continent: Croissants are a common part of a continental breakfast in European countries.
• France: As of 2008, 30% to 40% of French bakery croissants were baked from frozen dough.

A Greek breakfast croissant shares its technique with an older French recipe. La Varenne’s cookery book gave that dough method in the 1680 edition, mainly for shells holding other ingredients. A link between this method and the croissant appears only in the 20th century.

Which Russian word gave the Greek breakfast its piroski?

Greek breakfast piroski takes its name from pirog, the Russian word for pie. Pirozhki, the Russian buns, hold ground meat, potato, mushrooms or cabbage in savoury kinds. Sweet kinds hold apple, cherry, apricot, lemon, jam or tvorog, a soft fresh cheese.

The Greek breakfast piroski can hold a mix of feta cheese and ham. Shops that sold it belong largely to the past, although a smaller number still trade today. Pirozhki, its Russian cousins, fit in the hand, and a smaller version goes with soups. Baked ones can get an egg glaze for a golden colour.

Serbia has a cylindrical form called piroska, stuffed with spiced meat or cottage cheese. Volga Germans carried varieties to the Americas, where the names bierock, pirok and runza took hold. Latvia bakes crescent-shaped buns filled with smoked fatback and onion. Polish pierogi, a related word, are a separate food.

Food writer Darra Goldstein calls the pirog as ubiquitous in Russian life as in literature. She describes street hawkers selling pies hot from portable ovens. Pies of other shapes include coulibiac, kalitka, rasstegai and vatrushka. Belarusian speakers say pirazhki and Ukrainian speakers say pyrizhky. Nikolai Gogol’s Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka gives her literary example.

• Greek breakfast order: The typical list names piroski straight after strapatsada, ahead of the croissant and tsoureki.
• Singular: Pirozhok is the singular word, and pirog itself means a full-sized pie.
• Croatia: The name piroska comes from pirog there, and it refers to a kind of fried dough.

The family of the Greek breakfast piroski spread widely abroad. Russian diaspora families carried classic versions to the Americas after the Russian Revolution and the Russian Civil War. A later wave followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.

How did butter move from ancient medicine to the Greek breakfast?

Greek breakfast butter carries a Greek name, since English traces the word through Latin butyrum to bouturon. Scholars read that as a possible compound of ox and cheese. Ancient Greeks seem to have used butter only as ointment and medicine.

The cheese word, turos, appears in Mycenaean Greek, the Bronze Age form of the language. The Mediterranean climate made butter hard to keep, because unclarified butter spoils quickly there. Cheese lasted far better, so butter was no practical way of preserving milk. Greeks and Romans treated it as a food of the barbarians, meaning outsiders.

The Greek comic poet Anaxandrides called the Thracians boutyrophagoi, or butter-eaters. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder called butter a delicate food of barbarous nations. He also listed its medicinal properties. Later, the physician Galen also treated it as a medicinal agent alone. Medieval Europe ate butter widely but gave it a low reputation.

Butter comes from churning milk or cream, which separates the fat globules from the buttermilk. The result holds about 81% butterfat and serves as a spread on Greek breakfast bread at room temperature. It melts to a thin liquid at 32 to 35 °C. Salt has gone into butter since antiquity to help preserve it.

• Colour: Butter runs from deep yellow to nearly white, depending on the animal’s feed and genetics.
• Greek breakfast partners: The typical list sets butter between bread and honey, with jam next in line.
• Cultured butter: Butter from fermented cream has a fuller flavour, thanks to aroma compounds such as diacetyl.

Butter for a Greek breakfast can come from more than the cow. Sheep, goats, buffalo and yaks also give suitable milk. Commercial butter holds about 80% butterfat and 15% water. Traditional kinds hold as little as 65% fat and 30% water.

How are jam and marmalade made for a Greek breakfast?

Greek breakfast jam belongs to the fruit preserves, foods kept by sugar and sometimes acid. Glass jars commonly hold them. Sweet kinds such as jam, jelly and marmalade go with morning bread, or into a pastry or dessert.

Jam for a Greek breakfast starts with whole fruit, cut into pieces or crushed. Cooks heat it with water and sugar until it reaches the setting point. Pectin, a natural fruit substance that helps the set, decides the method. Low-pectin strawberries can take added orange, pectin powder, citric acid or citrus peels.

Marmalade is a preserve made from the juice and peel of citrus fruits, boiled with sugar and water. Lemons, limes, grapefruits, mandarins, sweet oranges and bergamots all suit it. Citrus peel and extra water set marmalade apart from jam. British makers rate the bitter Spanish Seville orange as the benchmark, for its high pectin content.

High sugar keeps unopened jam for a very long time. Opened jars also last long at room temperature. Jam making became a great new industry in 19th-century England, helped by the 1874 repeal of sugar duties. Factory makers boil in an open pan or in a vacuum vessel. The open pan adds caramelised flavour.

• Word: English speakers use jam as the general term, while preserves hold pieces of fruit.
• Greek breakfast place: The typical list puts jam straight after butter and honey, before the fresh fruit.
• Savoury side: Preserves of tomato, squash or zucchini go with cheese, cold meats and curries instead.

Rules for jam beyond the Greek breakfast table differ by country. Canadian fruit jam must hold at least 45% fruit, while fruit jam with pectin needs only 27%. Both kinds must reach 66% water-soluble solids, and both exclude apple and rhubarb.

What happens inside the boiled egg at a Greek breakfast?

Greek breakfast boiled eggs cook inside their unbroken shells, mostly by immersion in boiling water. Heat sets the white first, as its proteins start to change at 55 to 60 °C. The yolk thickens at 65 °C and solidifies at 70 °C.

Hard-boiled eggs stay in the water until both white and yolk turn solid. Soft-boiled eggs leave the yolk, and at times the white, partly liquid. Cooks can also cook eggs below boiling point, known as coddling, or steam them. The egg timer took its name from timing this boil.

Recipes with boiled eggs appear in the first known cookbook, De re coquinaria. One calls for preserved boiled eggs. The poet Alexander Pope recommended cooking eggs over the embers or ashes of an open fire. A boiled egg is also a popular morning food around the world, well beyond the Greek breakfast.

Over-cooking leaves a thin green coating on the yolk, made of iron sulphide, with little effect on flavour. The reaction runs faster in older eggs, whose whites are more alkaline. Cold water after boiling halts the cooking and prevents the green tint. A peeled egg can show a flat end, caused by an air pocket.

• Greek breakfast list: Boiled eggs come first among the egg entries, ahead of fried eggs and omelette.
• Slicing: Hard-boiled eggs commonly appear sliced, and special egg slicers exist to keep slices even.
• Reversal: Sodium borohydride or vitamin C can break the protein links and reverse the setting.

The white of a Greek breakfast egg keeps changing after it begins to set. It stops denaturing, or changing its protein form, at 85 °C, with a tender but solid texture. A solid white with a thickened, unset yolk is therefore hard to produce.

Which bird laid the eggs of a Greek breakfast before the chicken?

Greek breakfast eggs had a different source in early times, as the quail was the main egg bird. Chickens arrived in Greece around 800 BCE. They came from jungle fowl of southern Asia and had reached Sumer and Egypt by 1500 BCE.

Bird eggs have been valued foods since prehistory, among hunting societies and among cultures that raised birds. People in Southeast Asia began harvesting chicken eggs for food around 1500 BCE. Chickens now lead egg eating worldwide, with ducks far behind. In Thebes, Egypt, a tomb of about 1420 BCE shows a man carrying bowls of large eggs.

Ancient Romans preserved eggs in a number of ways, and their meals frequently started with an egg course. They crushed the shells on their plates to stop evil spirits hiding there. In the Middle Ages, Lent banned eggs for their richness. That yearly pause also rested farm flocks and saved feed.

A fried egg on a Greek breakfast plate starts as one or more shelled eggs. The eggs then cook in a frying pan. Cooks in Britain and Ireland baste the top with hot fat, oil or water. Germans call fried eggs Spiegeleier, and Indonesians have a bull’s eye egg.

• Scale: In 2009, an estimated 62.1 million metric tons of eggs came from 6.4 billion hens.
• Carton: Joseph Coyle invented the egg carton in 1911 in Smithers, British Columbia, to settle a dispute.
• Greek breakfast plate: The typical list names fried eggs straight after boiled eggs, before the omelette.

The Greek breakfast egg has relatives beyond the hen. People also eat the eggs of reptiles, amphibians and fish. Fish eggs go by the names roe or caviar. In France, the seventeenth century favoured eggs scrambled with acidic fruit juices.

Which omelette links the Pontic Greeks to a Greek breakfast?

Greek breakfast omelettes have a Pontic Greek relative, foustoron, made of eggs fried in butter or oil. It comes plain or seasoned, and modern kinds add yoghurt and cheese. An omelette itself sets into a continuous disk, cooked without stirring.

Recipes for foustoron varied widely by region across the Pontic Greek kitchen. Certain recipes used onion and dried red peppers, while others did not. An omelette on a Greek breakfast table starts with beaten eggs, in the usual case from chickens. Unlike scrambled eggs, it stays undisturbed in the pan, butter or oil beneath it.

Ancient Persia is a possible birthplace, since omelettes are nearly indistinguishable from the Iranian dish kookoo sabzi. The French word omelette came into use during the mid-16th century. Earlier forms, alumelle and alumete, appear in a Paris household book of 1393. The modern spelling appears in a French cookbook of 1784.

Sweet omelettes were once popular, filled with liquors, fruits or fruit preserves. Alexandre Dumas described a rum omelette made with sugar and liquor. The cook rolled it and dusted it with powdered sugar. A hot poker burned a design on top. A sweet sauce of liquor and apricot jam went with it.

• European fillings: Cooks in Europe fold omelettes around herbs, cheese, cured meats, mushrooms and other vegetables.
• Arab cooking: Eggah, an Egyptian favourite, is a kind of omelette or frittata from Arab cuisine.
• Greek breakfast order: The typical list puts the omelette straight after boiled and fried eggs.

A Greek breakfast omelette uses a far smaller egg than one Dumas recorded. His Arabian omelette used an ostrich egg with a spicy tomato and pepper sauce. A royal cook of Prussia is credited with a sweet version using apples.

How does menemen compare with strapatsada at a Greek breakfast?

Greek breakfast strapatsada and Turkish menemen are close relatives, both built on tomato, egg and olive oil. Turks commonly eat menemen at breakfast with bread. Its name comes from Menemen, a small town in the Turkish province of Izmir.

Strapatsada goes by the name koskosela in the Cyclades. Cooks tend to prepare it on the spot. Turkish menemen also resembles Hungarian lecso and Serbo-Croat sataras. Oregano, thyme or other dried herbs serve as seasoning. Greek breakfast lists name it straight after the omelette, among the egg dishes. It can also be served cold.

Accounts say menemen developed in that town after Cretan Muslims resettled there. This followed the 1923 exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey. The settlers first prepared wild greens with eggs and olive oil. They later swapped meat for eggs in a local tomato stew during hard times. Green peppers came afterwards.

Turkish cooks dice the tomatoes finely, though grated tomato and canned paste also appear. Sucuk, a dried salami-like sausage, can join the pan after the peppers soften. Kasar cheese or white cheese can go on top just before the eggs finish. Cumin, paprika, mint and thyme vary the flavour. Mushrooms or minced lamb appear in other versions.

• Onion debate: A 2018 online poll on onion in menemen drew 437,657 votes and settled nothing.
• Served: Menemen comes in its own double-handled cooking pan, known as a sahan, with fresh bread.
• Greek breakfast kin: Shakshouka, piperade, huevos rancheros and scrambled eggs all stand as related egg dishes.

Onion divides cooks of this Greek breakfast relative. Menemen takes onions more commonly as a main dish than at breakfast. Saniye Anne, a Turkish cook, insists a proper menemen needs them. The online poll gave the onion side only 50.6%.

What powder goes into the frappé of a Greek breakfast?

Greek breakfast frappé starts with instant coffee, a powder of dried coffee extract that dissolves quickly in water. Cold water replaces hot for this iced drink. David Strang of Invercargill, New Zealand, patented a powdered soluble coffee in 1890.

An early attempt was a concentrated mix of coffee, milk and sugar. It went to the Union army in the American Civil War. Its name was Essence of Coffee, and it had the consistency of axle grease. Troops disliked it, and the army soon discontinued it. Satori Kato, a Japanese scientist in Chicago, showed a powder in 1901.

Factories dry coffee by freeze-drying or spray drying. Spray drying was hard at first, since sugars and acids in the extract made the powder sticky. In the 1950s, high temperature and pressure released carbohydrates that solved this problem. Agglomeration, the joining of fine grains, has shaped powder into granules since around 1968.

Greek breakfast frappé carries a thick foam, similar to the crema of espresso but longer lasting. A handheld shaker gives finer, more stable bubbles. Frappés from freshly brewed coffee or freeze-dried coffee hold more oil and make only short-lived foam. Certain places add a ball of vanilla ice cream instead of milk.

• Greek breakfast order: The Greek cuisine list names frappé right after Greek coffee and before mountain tea.
• Share: A 2009 paper says close to 50% of world coffee production becomes instant coffee.
• Trade-off: Drinkers consider ground coffee superior in taste, though instant coffee weighs less to ship.

The powder behind a Greek breakfast frappé keeps for a long time, unless it gets damp. One study gives instant coffee a lower environmental footprint than drip filter coffee. Certain modern sources credit the French humorist Alphonse Allais with the invention.

Why does the freddo cappuccino stand apart at a Greek breakfast?

Greek breakfast coffee has a cold relative in the freddo cappuccino, a drink of Greece and Cyprus. It differs from its Italian namesake in taste and method. Its foam is afrogala, cold milk blended with an electric frother and poured over espresso and ice.

Freddo is the Italian word for cold. The freddo cappuccino appeared with the freddo espresso in Greece in 1991. Demand for both rises in summer. Electric frothers were common in Greek coffee shops, because staff use them to make frappé coffee. Outside Greece and Cyprus, the drink turns up where coffee shops serve the Greek expat community.

A standard cappuccino, unlike its Greek breakfast cousin, is a hot espresso-based drink. It uses steamed milk and a layer of milk foam. The name comes from the Capuchin friars, through the colour of their habits. Vienna used the name Kapuziner for coffee with drops of cream. Menus across the Habsburg lands listed it around the late 1700s.

Italian writings of the 19th century describe cappuccino as black coffee with drops of milk or cream. Those drops gave the colour of the Capuchin tunic. Fresh milk in cafe coffee is newer, from the 20th century, when refrigeration became common. Full cream is far older in this use, since it kept more easily.

• Greek breakfast name: Greeks say freddo cappuccino, while the Italian order of words is cappuccino freddo.
• Cup: A traditional cappuccino comes in a small cup with a handle and thick foam.
• Size: In Europe and America, espresso and milk foam total between 150 and 180 ml.

The name story behind a Greek breakfast freddo also includes the Franziskaner. This Habsburg coffee held more cream and copied the lighter brown tunics of the Franciscan order. A popular but unverified legend names cappuccino after the friar Marco d’Aviano.

What did Aristotle know about the fig on a Greek breakfast plate?

Greek breakfast figs have an old record, as the fruit spread widely across ancient Greece. Aristotle and Theophrastus both wrote on its growing. Its native range covers the Mediterranean lands with western and southern Asia. People have grown it since ancient times.

Aristotle noted that figs come in two kinds, like the sexes of animals. The cultivated fig bears fruit, and the wild caprifig helps it to do so. He also recorded psenes, the fig wasps, inside the wild fruit. The adult wasp flies out and enters a cultivated fig, which saves it from dropping.

Theophrastus compared this work with date palms and with fish. He observed that Greek farmers tied wild figs to cultivated trees. The Greek word for the fruit is sycon, and a Boeotian form is tukon. The Latin word ficus and these Greek forms come from a single Mediterranean source, possibly a Semitic language.

A fig on a Greek breakfast plate is really a hollow, fleshy structure. Botanists call it a syconium, and tiny flowers line it. They class it as an infructescence, meaning a group of small fruits together. The seeds inside are in fact small single-seeded fruits. A narrow opening at the tip lets the fig wasp enter.

• Greek breakfast season: North of the equator, fresh figs stay in season from early August into early October.
• Keeping: Ripe figs bruise easily in transport, so dried and processed forms lead commercial production.
• Content: Raw figs hold roughly 80% water and 20% carbohydrates, with very little protein or fat.

The fig at a Greek breakfast comes from one of the first crops on record. Nine ancient figs, from about 9400 to 9200 BC, turned up at Gilgal in the Jordan Valley. The find precedes the domestication of wheat, barley and legumes.

What does the orange bring to a Greek breakfast glass?

Greek breakfast fruit juice can come from the sweet orange, a hybrid of pomelo and mandarin. Common oranges make up about two-thirds of all orange production. The greater part of that crop goes to juice. The fragrant peel has its own uses.

The sweet orange arose under domestication in East Asia, around Southern China, Northeast India and Myanmar. Chinese literature holds the earliest mention, from 314 BC. Genomic study puts its make-up at about 42% pomelo and 58% mandarin. Every variety descends from that first cross, differing only through selected mutations.

Sicily knew bitter oranges from the 9th century. The sweet orange stayed unknown there until the end of the 15th or start of the 16th century. Italian and Portuguese merchants then brought orange trees into the Mediterranean area. An orange holds about ten segments, each with juice-filled vesicles, tiny sacs, and small pips. When unripe, the fruit is green.

Around 1900, orange juice at breakfast was still a new idea. Canned fruit juice rose after the discovery of vitamins. Development of frozen orange juice concentrate began in 1915, and companies were producing it in the 1930s. A Greek breakfast glass can come from a squeezer at home or from a factory.

• Marmalade: The first recipe for this orange preserve came from the Englishwoman Mary Kettilby in 1714.
• Greek breakfast plate: Oranges, sweet or sour in flavour, are commonly peeled and eaten fresh as a dessert.
• Acid: Orange juice holds only about one-fifth the citric acid of lime or lemon juice.

The orange on a Greek breakfast table belongs to a wide family. Sweet oranges gave rise to the grapefruit, the clementine and the murcott. Common, blood, navel and acidless oranges form the four classes of the Citrus sinensis group.

What do travellers ask about Greek breakfast, and what are the answers?

Greek breakfast fresh fruit raises questions about four names: the apricot, the mandarin, the pear and the watermelon. Greek sweet lists also name komposta, a compote made from peach, apple, pear or other fruits. Candied and dried fruits stand beside it.

At a Greek breakfast, where does the word apricot come from?

Apricot first appeared in English in the 16th century as abrecock, taken from Middle French aubercot. Further back it runs through Arabic to Byzantine Greek berikokkia and late Greek praikokion, then Latin praecocia. The plant behind the word was domesticated in ancient times in Central Asia and in China.

How does a mandarin differ from an orange at a Greek breakfast?

The mandarin is small and oblate, or flattened at both ends, unlike the roughly spherical sweet orange. The thin, loose peel has little white mesocarp, the pale inner layer, so segments separate easily. The ancestral mandarin was bitter, and commercial strains owe their sweet fruit to crossing with the pomelo.

Which Greek word sits behind the pear at a Greek breakfast?

The English word pear comes from Latin pirum, which scholars link to Greek apion, with the same meaning. About 3,000 varieties of pears grow worldwide, varying in both shape and taste. The fruit is eaten fresh, canned, as juice or dried, and it also ferments into a drink, perry.

Before a Greek breakfast, where did the watermelon first grow?

People domesticated the watermelon in Sudan, and farmers in Egypt were cultivating it by 2000 BCE. Sweet dessert watermelons then spread around the whole Mediterranean world during the period of Roman antiquity. The fruit is a large berry called a pepo, with a firm rind and no internal divisions.

Featured photo: Dietmar Rabich, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.