Macedonian Greek

Thessaloniki at dawn smells like phyllo and butter — bougatsa shops crank out the morning's pies still steaming, custard inside, dusted in cinnamon and powdered sugar. Walk farther and there's gyros turning on the vertical spit, a kilo of yogurt being whisked for soutzoukakia, loukoumades dropping into hot oil. The Ottoman past sits openly on every plate; the Balkan north peeks through in the pickled cabbage and dense breads.

Within Greece's regional kitchens, Macedonia (the Greek region, not the country North Macedonia) is the one that absorbed the most: five centuries of Ottoman rule, refugee waves from Asia Minor in 1922, Balkan trade from the Slavic north. The result is a kitchen that uses more spice than the south (cumin, cinnamon, pepper), more phyllo, more sausage, more pickled and preserved things. Loukoumades are essentially Turkish lokma; tsoureki braids walked in from the Pontic Greek diaspora; soutzoukakia carry the smyrneika label of the Asia Minor refugees who carried the recipe west.