Greek cuisine gyro, moussaka, dolmades, yuvarlakia and keftethes with the neighboring countries. To an even greater extent it is influenced by Italian cuisine and cuisines from other neighboring south European countries, and thus, especially in southern regions and the islands it includes several kinds of pasta, like hyllopites, gogkes and tziolia. Greek cuisine has a culinary tradition of some 4,000 years and is a part of the history and the culture of Greece. Its flavors change with the season and its geography. Greek cookery, historically a forerunner of Western cuisine, spread its culinary influence, via ancient Rome, throughout Europe and beyond. It
Cabbage variety of other vegetables and pulses. The ancient Greeks had some varieties of cabbage, as mentioned by Theophrastus, although whether they were more closely related to today's cabbage or to one of the other "Brassica" crops is unknown. The headed cabbage variety was known to the Greeks as "krambe" and to the Romans as "brassica" or "olus"; the open, leafy variety (kale) was known in Greek as "raphanos" and in Latin as "caulis". Chrysippus of Cnidos wrote a treatise on cabbage, which Pliny knew, but it has not survived. The Greeks were convinced that cabbages and grapevines were inimical, and