d e d e- ld t- p, ur e lf- rn o- o- e is ts d nt is e is- a- as so s ... - Economia

Foreword
This book is a gift –a gift I wanted to make to my mother. When the Greek version
came out on November 29, 2011, the day of her 81st birthday, she was deeply
moved and profoundly happy. She had had a difficult year spending months in
hospital and rehabilitation. The “book of her recipes”, which in the end was to
become also the book of her life, was actually designed to help her over those
long months. Help her to regain her spirit, her joie-de-vivre and the strength to
wage yet another battle for her health. It provided her with something to look
forward to. Working on it allowed her to talk about food, to pick recipes, to taste
and to think about cooking even when she could not stand in her kitchen any
more. Just as importantly, it helped her reminisce and unfold memories of her
childhood years, of her love for our father, of the joys and sorrows of family life.
As a mother of four, a grandmother of thirteen and a great-grandmother of five,
she had had plenty.
That autumn day in Athens, when the book was publicly launched, was her day.
She was acknowledged and recognized not as the wife of my father –a prominent
politician– but in her own right. That day she was the center of everybody’s attention,
admiration and love. She deserved it and I am glad my sister Katerina –who
worked on the recipes– and I speeded up the process of finishing the book because,
as it turned out, it was to be her last public appearance. She left us a few
months later.
Her life certainly informed her cooking: there was pre-war Athens, my grandmother’s
recipes and the support, as it were, of American technology –meaning
the refrigerator and the blender– which she discovered before they became staples
of every Greek household; there was the influence of French cuisine during
the years of political exile in Paris; and finally, the flavors of Greece and most specially
of Crete, her adopted home.
In our family, as in most Greek families, food plays a central role. In fact, there
are two things we consistently do at home when we are all together: we eat and
we talk! And strangely enough, even while eating, we talk about… food. Food is,
in the end, a strong social link: When we are all together, somebody is bound to
ask what we are having for dinner. For my mother, the long distance call –almost
a daily habit– would inevitably include the question “What’s on the menu today?”,
whereas her welcome from a night out would conclude with, “And how
was the food?”, just as the return from a long trip abroad was always met with
“Did you eat well there, my dear?”. But the most important question of all, which
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