Greek cuisine Greek cuisine Greek cuisine (, "Elliniki kouzina") is a Mediterranean cuisine. Contemporary Greek cookery makes wide use of vegetables, olive oil, grains, fish, wine (white and red), and meat (including lamb, poultry, veal, beef, rabbit and pork). Other important ingredients include olives, pasta (especially hyllopites, a kind of pasta similar to tagliatelle), cheese, lemon juice, herbs, bread and yoghurt. The most commonly used grain is wheat; barley is also used. Common dessert ingredients include nuts, honey, fruits, and filo pastry. It is strongly influenced by Ottoman cuisine and thus, especially cuisine of anatolian Greeks shares foods such as baklava, tzatziki,
Baklava over which dishes were originally Greek and which Turkish. Baklava, for example, is claimed by both countries. Greek and Turkish cuisine both built upon the cookery of the Byzantine Empire, which was a continuation of the cooking of the Roman Empire. Roman cuisine had borrowed a great deal from the ancient Greeks, but ' (and hence baklava) had a Latin, not a Greek, origin—please note that the conservative, anti-Greek Cato left us this recipe." Andrew Dalby identifies this, and surrounding dessert recipes in Cato, as coming from a "Greek tradition" and cites Antiphanes (fl. 3rd century BC) as quoted by