Tastes Like Home: Keeping My Culture Alive Through Cooking

My grandmother’s recipe book belongs to me, her food belonged to everyone who loved her.

My Yiayia is in her urban garden, picking the last of the season’s sour cherries and scooping them into the hem of her dress. The garden sits in the center of Halifax, Nova Scotia, not far from the port where my grandparents first arrived from Greece in 1958. The yard is small but generous, boxed in by fences and laundry lines.

The higher branches of the cherry tree have already been claimed by birds. She has tried everything to outsmart them—fine-mesh netting, stone owls, homemade baking soda sprays—but nothing has worked.

“The birds always win,” she’d mutter, shaking her head, though she never stopped trying.

Her hair is wrapped in a blue-and-white paisley scarf, a white cotton apron tied at her waist. Inside, sugar and lemon juice wait on the counter. She’ll pit the cherries one by one with a hairpin; her fingers will be stained crimson for days. When the preserves are ready, she’ll serve them the Greek way: on a spoon, with a tall glass of cold water. Some eat the preserves straight from the spoon; others dip it into a glass of water, stirring it to make visinada, the ruby liquid blooming outward like ink.

She’ll set some of the fruit aside to make a cherry liqueur—cognac, sugar, cinnamon sticks, cloves. The ingredients will be placed in a large jar, left in the sun for 40 days and then strained using a cheesecloth. The soaked fruit will later crown bowls of yogurt and French vanilla ice cream. When guests visit, she’ll pour the liqueur into delicate stemmed glasses on collapsible wooden tray tables alongside braided, buttery cookies made with orange peel and brandy, and tiny cups of Greek coffee.

I was 7 years old and watched much of this from the upstairs window, balancing a plate of cinnamon dusted rice pudding on my knees, listening to the steady clunk of watering cans below as she worked outside. I didn’t know then that I was watching an archive being built. 

Now, 26 years after her death, I find myself trying to do the same.

My Yiayia began keeping a black, hard-cover recipe book shortly after immigrating to Canada. When she died and we were going through her things, I asked my mother if I could have it. She said yes. I don’t know why I felt such a pull toward it, only that I did. But I also knew the recipes didn’t belong to me alone. They belonged to everyone who had loved her and eaten at her table.

Yiayia arrived with a suitcase, a few pans, and the recipes her family had taught her by heart. In her new country, the seasons would change. Her daughters would change. The language around her would change. But in her kitchen, very little would. Her recipe book is a testament to that. I think it was her way of making sure she didn’t forget the important things—her mother’s recipe for spanakopita, St. Basil’s New Year’s Cake, and Aunt Helen’s stuffed zucchini flowers.

For years, her recipe book sat on my shelf, untouched. I would take it down occasionally, run my fingers over the worn black cover, trace the indented grooves of her pen, and then close it again. I wasn’t sure what I was afraid of—diluting something beautiful, perhaps. Turning something sacred into something ordinary.

One Christmas, I decided to frame a few of the recipes—pages stained with olive oil, cognac, and orange blossom water, written in my Yiayia’s unmistakable script—as gifts for my mother, Aunt Maria, and siblings. I framed one for myself as well: hand-rolled noodles with braised beef and tomato, my favorite growing up. 

I had cooked her dishes for years, usually with my mother or Aunt Maria nearby to guide me. But I had never followed the book by myself. I could remember the sound of her voice and the taste of her food. But I still had not stood alone and tried to make the dishes exactly the way she had written them. But then, I can’t say why exactly, but I had a strong pull to finally try. So, six weeks ago, I opened her book with intention. 

I decided I would move through her recipe book and cook each dish the way she had written it. I began filming the process as a way to document what it looked like to learn it properly. To share the recipes and the stories together, the way she lived them.

I made space on my kitchen counter and started at the beginning—spanakopita, Aunt Lela’s cake, the beef and short noodles I had framed. I balanced my camera against a jar of pickles and pressed record—proof that I had tried.

What I discovered almost immediately was that her recipes are not really recipes at all. They’re outlines. Suggestions. Some entries are nothing more than a list of ingredients. No quantities. No real instructions. Occasionally she’d scribble an asterisk in the margin: “one cup orange juice” or “one cup flour.” But her “cup” was the water glass she used every day, and her other “cup” was a particular coffee mug reserved for dry ingredients.

“Add enough flour until it feels right.”

“Bake until ready.”

“Add as much water as the recipe needs.”

I didn’t understand what she meant until I thought about the spanakopita.

As a child, I would perch on her kitchen table and watch her mix flour, salt, and warm water into a sticky ball of dough. She poured olive oil in a steady stream and folded it with her hands until it turned smooth and elastic. Then she’d flour the table and, using the handle of an old broomstick as her rolling pin, stretch the dough until it was nearly transparent.

Making the spanakopita was a whole day affair, at least that’s the way it seemed to me when I was a child. Yiayia was an expert of course and used practice and experience as a guide instead of traditional measuring cups and spoons. She relied on the way the dough felt in her hands, adding more water or flour until the texture was just right. 

“You just know,” she would say when I asked about real measurements. 

I did not know. Not then, anyway.

Now, as I recreate her recipes, I’ve had to slow down in order to follow her. The way I salt with my fingers instead of a spoon. The way I tilt my head when tasting. The instinct to save every scrap of dough. 

Filming has forced me to narrate what she never did—to explain why we score the bread that way, why we braid the dough before Easter, why St. Basil’s cake hides a coin. Sometimes I find myself telling stories to the camera—things she never would have bothered to explain. That my mom and aunt used to make potato chip omelets after school when they came home hungry and impatient. That spanakopita tastes better the next day. This is what we ate on Sundays. This is what we packed when we drove to the beach.

What gets lost in immigration is sometimes small. The way a coffee cup becomes a measuring tool. The way a coin hides inside a cake. If we don’t say it out loud, if we don’t cook it again, it disappears. 

I’m 50 now. I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to hold on—through food, through stories, through the religious and cultural holidays we mark, the words and gestures we still use. Still, I can see how quickly things fade if we’re not paying attention.

When my daughter was born 22 years ago, we planted a cherry tree in our yard. I chose a cherry tree because it was the tree I grew up with—the one that stained my Yiayia’s fingers red each summer. 

This year, my mother and I are finally going to make Yiayia’s preserves. Maybe we’ll gather the cherries in the hems of our dresses. Maybe we’ll pit them by hand, measuring with whatever glass is closest. Maybe we’ll argue about how much sugar is needed. And somewhere in between, my children will be watching and learning and pitting cherries, too. That’s how these things continue.

My grandmother didn’t write essays about identity. She made sour cherry preserves and spanakopita. She kept a cookbook. She cooked the way her family had taught her. 

I used to think preservation meant protecting something from change. But I think it means participating in it. Allowing things to continue with intention and purpose. Passing them on to the next generation with notes and lessons and stories. 

A few people have asked whether I’ll keep documenting once this project ends. It’s a lot of work—not just the cooking, but the filming, the editing, the narrating. At first, I thought there would be a clear finish line.

Now, I’m not so sure. 

Somewhere along the way, it stopped feeling like a project and more like practice. And practice is how you learn it well enough to pass it on.

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