Alexandra Stratou - Cooking with Loula: Greek Recipes from My Family to Yours

Alexandra Stratou

New York

And then the day came,
when the risk to remain tight
in a bud was more painful
than the risk it took to blossom.

Anas Nin

To Kyria Loula, who cooked the food I ate growing up, and Giagia Sofia, who taught me the importance of family.

There is a land.

One land, governed by invisible laws.

Laws written in the wrinkles of the people.

In the tales told, untold, by mouths in whispers within walls of territory known, unknown.

Fleeting free moment, where that one land appears just as it is to eyes awaiting to be.

The words, the lives, the food that form a bridge that can be walked upon and tasted.

I travel back and forth to past and present time.

To a future that is mine to make, with eyes that saw that one that is.

She visited her own then, with me today.

She crossed those lines as I do now.

We went there holding hands into that past unknown to me.

They were then aristocratic, she was poor.

Grand as they were, they feasted and they who served them filled their empty insides as they could with what was left.

Lovingly she does recall, not bitter like today, when the middle has been found and lost to a new divide of aristocratic poor.

I am convinced with every passing day that this divide no longer shall endure.

The time has come for one land to be one, not to my eyes but to all eyes and somehow, unknown to me today, there shall be food for all.

Greece, the cradle of Western civilization, taught mankind many of the most important principles of lifeamong them was the value of cooking and sharing food with others.

When Alexandra told me of her intention to create a book based on her experiences of family and food, I understood that she would be honoring the rituals with which she was raised and capturing the legacy of her beloved teacher, Kyria Loula.

This is not a typical Greek cookbook, like those tourists buy to remember the meals they had by the sea. This book allows us to enter the kitchen of a Greek family that enjoys sharing, revealing their cherished annual traditions, and their ingredients, and their life cycles. It inspires us to cook and, above all, to share.

As I hold this book in my hands, the image of a relay race comes to mind in which one passes a baton to the next receptive hand. In a similar fashion, the family seed, a farmers most precious inheritance, is handed down from generation to generation.

The task of gathering the knowledge of our ancestors is respectful and insightful; transmitting itriddled with storiesis an act of generosity that contributes to the preservation of cultural diversity. Cultures of people, rooted to the land where they are born and from which they obtain their precious produce. Food artisans, who, each seasonto the delight of cooks, foodies, and apprentice kitchen magicians alikefill the markets with their produce.

Why does food become a channel for memory? Food made well and shared is an act of surrender, care, and love, while at the same time a celebration of color, rhythm, community, excitement, happiness, and pleasure. Who does not want to be part of this celebration?

Generations unite over steaming pots, hands work skillfully with decisiveness, and all is flooded with marvelous aromas. These same aromas, gestures, and traditions transport us, time and time again, to that uniquely magical moment of creation and offering. Sharing this legacy with others is a gift, one for which I shall always be grateful.

VISI IRIZAR, director of the
Luis Irizar Cooking School,
San Sebastin, Spain

Most of the time, cooks wait until they become renowned before they decide to write a cookbook, and everyone waits in anticipation until they can buy the book to make all their delicious recipes. I am starting the other way around. I went to the Luis Irizar Cooking School in San Sebastin, Spain, and, a few years later, I bring this cookbook to life.

Cooking with Loula is a result of my love of food, but also my love of words; food is the means I use to bring people together, and words are what I use to express the things that I see in life as enchanting. In this book you will find a collection of my familys Greek recipes, surrounded by my ideas on food. Everything is presented through my lens and with my aesthetic, both of which have been heavily influenced by what I have been exposed to growing up.

The idea for this endeavor was born after spending time with my eldest cousin, Alexia, and her then one-year-old daughter, Nefeli. It occurred to me that with our family cook, Kyria Loula, getting too old to cook for us, our working mothers with little time on their hands, and the older members of our family, who connect us to our roots, dwindling, there would be no way to share the tastes of our childhood with the newest addition. I felt the urge to collect these significant pieces of our past and pass them on to various family members to share with their own families, in the hope that these pieces could contribute to the building of their own sense of belonging, just as they have contributed to mine.

The process of collecting recipes began with weekly visits to Kyria Loulas home, where she offered not only recipes, but also direct access to my familys world from an outsiders perspective. Kyria LoulaKyria meaning Mrs. in Greekstarted working at my great-grandmothers house at a very young age, and then cooked for different members of my family on a weekly basis. She passed away while I was writing this book, so my great-aunt filled in the majority of the missing recipes, while the people who had worked with Kyria Loula in the kitchens of our homes contributed details that I could not have otherwise recovered. My great-uncle, who in my eyes embodies that which I call family, talked and still talks to me about my family in general, about the people I never met, and the things that happened before my birth. My first cousins brought some of the recipes in this book to life by sharing their food-related memories. Giagia Sofia, my grandmother, who will never know about this book, is responsible for creating a lot of my family memories. She is the person who gathered us, without exception, on Sundays for family lunch, and the one who overcame the differences and difficulties that families are often characterized by in a way I admire. My parents upheld our familys food rituals and made sure that I participated in them actively. As a result, the recipes, stories, and sentiments in this book are the product of a combined effort made by various important people in my life.