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Nikolaos Tselementes: the Sifnian who reinvented Greek cookery

Born in 1878 in a small hamlet of Sifnos, Nikolaos Tselementes wrote in 1932 the book that codified modern Greek cookery. His name is now, in the Greek language, the word for *cookbook*. The story of a man who put béchamel into moussaka.

In modern Greek there is a word that means cookbook. The word is tselementes. It is the name of a man — a Sifnian, born in a hamlet on the island in the late 19th century. When a Greek today says “my tselementes,” she means my recipe book, the way a French cook might say “my Bocuse” or an Italian “her Artusi.” This is his story.

A Sifnian tsoukali — the clay pot that has cooked Greek food for centuries

Exambela, 1878

Nikolaos Tselementes was born in 1878 at Exambela, a small hamlet on Sifnos a few kilometres south of Apollonia. Greece was still a young country — independence dated only to 1832. Sifnos lived from its olives, its fishing, and above all its pottery, which was exported across the entire Aegean.

His family did not stay on Sifnos. Young Nikolaos grew up in Athens, where he completed his secondary education. He began his working life as a notary’s clerk — a steady, predictable trade. But around him, two figures mattered: his father and his uncle, both restaurateurs. It was in their kitchens that he came to love the trade that would shape his life.

The Vienna training (~1900)

Tselementes spent a year training in Vienna, then the gastronomic capital of Central Europe. The Viennese cuisine of the time, an heir to French cooking and the imperial school, gave him what he would later inject into Greek cuisine: a grammar.

Returning to Greece, he worked for several embassies — a cosmopolitan milieu where one cooked French in a Greek style, or Greek in a French one. Tselementes began to formalise a project: what if Greek cuisine were codified as French cuisine had been by Escoffier?

The magazine and the Hermes Hotel (1910-1919)

In 1910, Tselementes launched a magazine, Odigos Mageirikis — “The Cooking Guide.” A monthly mixing recipes, nutritional advice, international cuisine, and gastronomic news. Within a few years it had become a reference for Athenian housewives — and for the chefs of luxury hotels.

In 1919, he became manager of the Hermes Hotel in Athens — one of the great hotels of the capital. It was social consecration. But Tselementes had a larger project in mind.

The United States (1920-1932)

The following year he left for the United States. In New York and then Chicago, he worked in the great restaurants of the Greek diaspora, took courses in cooking, patisserie and dietetics. It was in this last field — scientific nutrition — that he picked up the tools that would set his work apart from his peers.

In 1930, he published in the United States Cooking and Patisserie Guide — a professional manual. But that was only a draft for the work he was preparing.

1932: the book

Tselementes returned to Greece in 1932. He founded a cooking school in Athens. And in that same year, he published the first complete cookbook in modern Greek.

The book was an immediate — and lasting — success. More than fifteen official reprints in the decades that followed. No Greek kitchen was without it. Housewives memorised the recipes. Chefs treated it as authority.

But the book did something deeper: it modernised Greek cuisine, and that modernisation was controversial.

Pot, oven, transmission — the foundation of the Sifnian cooking that Tselementes documented

Béchamel in the moussaka

Tselementes’ most famous contribution to the moussaka — Greece’s national dish — is the introduction of béchamel. Before him, moussaka was a simple layering of eggplant and tomato-meat. Tselementes added the upper layer of béchamel — baked in the oven, golden, rich.

Many Greeks still find this a Gallicism — a French betrayal of an Ottoman dish. Others say that this layer is what makes the modern Greek moussaka what it is: a dish that is at once rustic and structured.

Tselementes did not innovate only on moussaka. He also:

  • introduced béchamel (and more broadly French sauces) into Greek home cooking
  • brought into the canon the piroshki (Russian-origin filled pastry) and bouillabaisse (Provençal fish soup)
  • rewrote pastitsio — the baked pasta gratin — into the structure we know it by today
  • formalised artichokes alla polita (in the Constantinople style)
  • translated into measured and reproducible terms the traditional recipes that housewives had until then held only in memory

The controversy, the compromise

For the guardians of traditional Greek cookery, Tselementes is a francophile — a man who over-Europeanised a popular cuisine that did not need it. For his defenders, he is the man who saved that cuisine from oblivion by fixing it on paper at a moment when urbanisation threatened oral transmission.

The truth lies in between. Tselementes codified more than he invented. And the Greek cuisine that travellers eat today in the tavernas of Sifnos, Athens or Thessaloniki is largely the cuisine he fixed in 1932.

The word, the death

Even in Tselementes’ own lifetime, his name began to pass into the language. When a housewife said she “had her tselementes,” she meant she had her cookbook. When someone said of a cook that he was “a real tselementes,” they meant he knew. The proper noun had become a common one.

Tselementes died in Athens on 2 March 1958, aged 79 or 80. In 1950, he had published his only English-language work, Greek Cookery — a book aimed at the Greek diaspora across the Atlantic.

Sifnos, home

Sifnos has made its most illustrious son an emblem. Every year in September, the village of Artemonas — the village of captains’ mansions, ten minutes’ walk from Apollonia — hosts the Cycladic Cuisine Festival “Nikolaos Tselementes.” It has become, over the editions, one of the most important food festivals in Greece — awarded in 2016 the Gold Award by CEUCO (the European Council of Gastronomic and Oenological Brotherhoods) as best European gastronomic festival.

For three days, delegations from across the Cyclades — and across mainland Greece, and sometimes from abroad — come to present their traditional dishes on the central square of Artemonas. Entry is free. The food is free too. Children aged 6 to 12 take part in cooking workshops called “Little Tselementedes.” In the evening, at 21:30, the square fills for the songs and dances.

For the exact dates, see our Sifnian calendar; to understand why Sifnos is the food island of the Cyclades, see our restaurants guide.

The legacy, on the ground

Going to Sifnos is, in a way, going to Tselementes’ kitchen. The revithada — the Sunday chickpea stew, slow-cooked overnight in a clay tsoukali in a wood-fired oven — is not in his book, because he inherited it rather than inventing it. But it is his island that codified it. The mastelo — the Easter lamb in red wine and clay — is Sifnian before it is Greek.

Tselementes did not make Sifnos. Sifnos made Tselementes. And that is probably why the island keeps, more than any other in the Cyclades, a sense of the meal.

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