By Leigh O’Connor.
Celebrating traditional regional dishes, Yiayia is a collection of recipes and stories from Greece’s matriarchs across the country and its islands.
Follow author and cook, Anastasia Miari’s travels through Greece as each Yiayia welcomes you into their home, cook with them in their kitchen, learn their time-perfected techniques and read the memories that season the recipes in this cookbook.
"This book was a whirlwind in the making,” Anastasia explains. "The same week my editors commissioned Yiayia, I discovered I was pregnant – cue an intense four-month odyssey across Greece which saw photographer Marco Arguello and I barely seeing our respective partners.
"These grandmothers welcomed Marco and I into their homes and were kind enough to show me first-hand how their time-perfected dishes were made.”
While each yiayia cooked with Anastasia, letting her into memories with nostalgia often triggered by the aromas of the kitchen, Marco took to snooping around (no one ever seemed to mind), snapping away at corners that have miraculously escaped the passing of time.
Whether you are recreating Yiayia Anna’s homemade pasta from Karpathos, Yiayia Vasiliki’s citrus salad from Corfu or Yiayia Eva’s tomatokeftedes (tomato fritters) from Santorini, each recipe helps you discover the real Greece.
Let’s start with a classic dish of prawn saganaki from Palaio Faliro – a recipe that Yiayia Toula, having lived by the sea in this city, knows well. The rich tomato sauce, suffused with the flavour of prawns and the freshness of spearmint, is one you’ll want to mop up with a load of crusty bread.
Traditionally in Greece, soul-soothing giouvarlakia (meatballs) are paired with an avgolemono (egg and lemon) sauce, but Yiayia Poly is not a purist so she makes a tomato sauce to sit her meatballs in instead.
An Athenian yiayia with modern sensibility and cutting humour that’s as sharp as her nose, Poly takes an inventive approach to cooking, looking beyond Greece for many of her favourite dishes.
"Poly instructed me to do the jobs she least enjoys (like grating onion) and pointedly ordered her grandson, Karolos, around – all the while amusing everyone with her sarcasm and wry wit.
"She’s a force to be dealt with, but her warming giouvarlakia reveals the care and love she obviously has for her grandchildren – a true yiayia in every sense.”
With roots in Italy, pastitsada is Yiayia Evangelia’s all-time favourite dish.
"It nods to my island’s geographical proximity to Italy - you can see the very southern point of Puglia from Corfu’s most north-western tip. It makes sense, then, that this dish has its roots in Italy,” she tells Anastasia.
Originally known as pastissada de caval (on account of it being made with horse meat once upon a time) the dish was brought to Corfu by the Venetians in the 1400s.
Each recipe in this cookbook will help you discover the real Greece, along with breathtaking photographs of the landscape and characterful women behind beaded curtains in white-washed homes.
