Local gastronomy constitutes a tasteful combination of products of the area and the imagination of the local people. The agricultural production embellishes the local dishes with traditional flavours, influenced by the historical circumstances, but also by conquerors from East and West that brought with them their ethnic cuisines. Thus Nafplio, is suitable for a voyage into taste which demonstrates that, indeed, when it comes to flavours at this corner of the planet, West meets East.
The traditional home-breeding of goats, sheep, poultry and pigs is the feature that characterizes the diversity of tastes, in combination of course with the way they are cooked. The dominant and most characteristic dish at the fairs in the region of the Peloponnese is roast piglet that is even sold by peddlers on country roads. The piglets that are bred were slaughtered once a year at the celebration of "choirosfagia" (literary meaning slaughtering of pigs) and their meat would secure the nutrition of the family all year round. This is how the many ways of cooking it came about: pork roasted in wood-fire ambers, "Tigania" (cubes of pork meat cooked in the pan and sprinkled with oregano) and "Kontosouvli", pieces of pork roasted on a spit on charcoals.
Meat roasted on spits or skewers is very characteristic of the Greek cuisine. Already from antiquity, during the Ottoman rule and until our days, spit-roasting is the basic feature of the eastern profile of our cuisine. Such a dish is "Giosa", spit-roasted mature she goat or sheep that does not reproduce anymore.
But the most popular dishes are "Bogana", oven roast kid-lamb with potatoes cooked in butter, a dish served traditionally in weddings. Also the traditional dish savoured during the carnival season called "Goges": homemade pasta sprinkled with melted butter and grated "mizithra", a hard, local cheese.
Another dish found very often in the wider area is cock with tagliatelle- looking pasta called "chylopittes", a classic traditional recipe in many regions of Greece. Home-bred poultry combined with homemade pasta. A dish cooked often by simple folk to celebrate their special family moments or to honour their house or dinner guests. Another popular dish in the area is goat soup, made with a female goat, the broth of which is ideal for those that were out and about all night or the ill.
The traditional table is complete with "Tirolagano" a homemade, fried cheese pie and "Poumeki" a traditional milk pudding of the Peloponnese made of a milk and semolina cream and baked in the oven. As all over Greece, here too, the staple food is homemade sourdough bread baked in a stone oven on charcoal wood.
