A memoir cookbook tracing my grandmother's journey from a mountain village in occupied Greece to Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, through the food she planted, harvested, and carried with her.

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Giannoula was eight years old when she lost both parents within forty days of each other, in the early years of the German occupation of Greece. She grew up in Agia Triada, a mountain village in Aetolia-Acarnania, raised by an uncle and a kind aunt, learning to read the land the way her mother might have taught her, what to plant, when to harvest, how to feed a family through a fasting season, through a hard winter, through years when there wasn't enough. She became a farmer, a keeper of a kitchen. Later she carried that knowledge across an ocean to Brooklyn, moving between two worlds for the rest of her life.

 

When we harvested bay leaves from the tree in the courtyard, she told us to take only what we needed, nothing more. This book follows her, through the plant-based dishes of a Greek village kitchen and the agricultural calendar she lived by, through a life that knew, in its bones, the difference between enough and too much.