One bite of the barbecued lamb says it all. The skin is salty and crisp, with a thin layer of fat, the meat so yielding it falls to pieces with just a gentle push of the fork. Seasoned with nothing but salt and pepper, its pale, herby flavor—as delicate as the smell of wild anise on the wind—comes through the strong char of the skin. This is no-frills eating; food that creates a bridge between the eater and the land, food that tells you where you are.
Where you are, exactly, is the town of Meeker, in the northwest corner of Colorado. So you might wonder why the leathery hands of the weathered rancher leaning against the split-rail fence are sticky with baklava. But this rugged country, more than a mile above sea level, is part of a great swath of territory along the Colorado-Utah border that was homesteaded by Greek families in the early 1900s. Sheepherders turned sheep ranchers, they adapted their trade from the Old World to the New.
Among the early arrivals was Angelo Theos, who as a youth had herded goats and sheep for his village in northern Greece. In 1903 he emigrated to Utah, and six years later he was running sheep in northeastern Utah and northwestern Colorado. By 1926, Angelo had homesteaded both his primary ranch and his summer ranch, and by the time of his death, in 1958, he had acquired 12,000 acres (plus 70,000 acres of grazing leases). Today the Meeker ranch, which pours over rolling, forested plateaus in the White River Valley, is still owned by Nick Theos and his brothers or their heirs.
“It’s almost unheard of in this country that every sibling in a family still does the same thing for work,” says 50-year-old Eleni Theos Stelter, Angelo’s granddaughter. “But all of my grandfather’s children stayed in sheep ranching. We’ve never lost touch with our roots.” To ensure this, every couple of years the extended family stages a giant lamb barbecue to remind themselves, and their children, who they are and where they come from.
On the night before this year’s barbecue, Eleni has come with a gaggle of friends and family to Nick’s ranch to help with the preparations. Crowded at the dinner table are aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, and cousins. The smaller children vie for position near a large chocolate layer cake; the older ones listen to stories in Greek and English about relatives long dead, recently dead, or in the chair next to them. “We all learned the family history sitting at the table,” says Eleni.
“Is this Aunt Helen’s spanakopita?” asks a nephew, reaching for a heaped platter of the delicately crunchy pastries.
“Yes, precious,” says Eleni. “Now eat, and hush.”
Nick Theos, at 83 a lean, beef jerky of a man, sits at a separate table with the other old-timers: Nick Mahleres, who is married to Angelo’s only daughter, Helen; Trian Patsantaras, a former sheepherder; and the current foreman, Martin Inda, a Basque of few words. They wash down Eleni’s tender pork roast with the Greek white wine Rhoditis and discuss the next day’s activities. Opinionated statements—“I don’t give a goddamn about fruitwood, I’m using charcoal”—waft past.
Earlier that day, the men had slaughtered and dressed four 150-pound free-range lambs using pocket knives sharpened to stubs over the years. The offal was flopped into a bucket of cold water and the carcasses checked for signs of disease. “If we find anything wrong, we discard the whole thing,” says Rick Stelter, Eleni’s husband, who, at 46, is considered too young to do anything more important than change the water in the guts bucket. Nick used the innards to make kokorétsi, a sausage that will star in the festivities. There was much smacking of lips and rubbing of bellies as the sweetbreads, lungs, spleen, and hearts were laid out in ribbons on the fell, spiced with salt, pepper, and oregano, and then wrapped in the small intestine to make the fat, lumpy, three-foot-long sausage.
The lambs that provide this feast came from a herd of 3,800 ewes that Nick summered on the Meeker ranch and on land leased from the Bureau of Land Management in the White River area. One afternoon we take the long, bumpy ride into the high country. Nick’s daughter Connie, 59, keeps a sharp eye on her dad, who tends to be lulled to sleep by the steady jostling—even when he’s driving. Connie notes broken fences, roads that must be cleared, and the various “criks” between thick stands of trees that are the lifeblood of the region.
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