CHAPTER 3
Nina and Irini
Passing the Torch?
Kitchenspace is always one woman’s territory, regardless of the number of women working there. . . . In a society where women’s power is rooted in their role as mothers and nurturers, it should be no surprise that older women are reticent to give up their territory in the kitchen, or their sons for that matter, to another woman.
—Christie 2008, 245–46
“MY MOTHER HATES MY COOKING!”
“My mother hates my cooking! Every day she tells me how much she hates my cooking.” This was the first time I had filmed Nina Papamihail, as one of the first subjects of my new cooking project, in 2005.1 I had known Nina; her mother, Irini; and her husband, Manolis, since the early 1990s, so Nina’s claim was striking to me, applied as it was to her mother, who seemed mild-mannered to me. Nina stood out in the neighborhood of Ayios Mammas, one of Kalymnos’s more “traditional” working-class neighborhoods. She spoke Greek with a strong New York accent, reflecting her birth and upbringing in the town of Seneca Falls in Upstate New York. Her father, a cook, had retired in the late 1960s, and by 1971 he had wanted to move back to Kalymnos, or at least to his memory of what Kalymnos had been when he left it as a boy of sixteen. Her mother was more ambivalent. As Nina remembers, “She missed her friends when she left. And she missed all the conveniences of the United States. In 1971 Kalymnos was not like it is now; there was nothing in the way of conveniences.” While Kalymnos had no conveniences, Seneca Falls had no Greeks. The lack of Greeks, much less Kalymnians, in Seneca Falls led her parents to want to return to the island so Nina could have a “proper” marriage. Nina remembers a very difficult first year on Kalymnos, when on many occasions she thought about moving back to the States on her own: “Kalymnos in 1970 didn’t have everything you take for granted in the States: bubble bath, perfumes, shopping—everyday things that are really not that important to your life, but they are when you’re twenty-two. But eventually I decided I had to be a good girl and not disappoint my parents, so I stayed.” By 2005, when I began this project, Nina had never been back to the United States, even for a visit.
I have to admit that during my initial fieldwork in 1992 I had avoided Nina, as her penchant for speaking English and her knowledge of the United States went against what at the time I believed fieldwork to be about. This was before an interest in transnational migration and lives lived across borders had become a staple of anthropology. But the fact that Nina’s circle of friends included a number of non-Greek women who had married on the island, and the fact that Nina seemed to have both an insider’s and an outsider’s perspective on island life, began to intrigue me. More significant, perhaps, as an English speaker Nina befriended my wife, and their reciprocal get-togethers for coffee pulled me along with them.
While I soon found that Nina cast a critical eye on Kalymnian life, and retained what to me seemed a rather idealized picture of life in the United States based on her childhood memories, she never spoke overcritically of her mother. I thought Nina and her mother got along quite well most of the time. This admission of conflict in the kitchen, therefore, took me a little by surprise. By 2005, unfortunately, Irini was in her mid-eighties and in physical decline, so I was never able to see her in action in the kitchen. But as I explored cooking with Nina, I became intrigued by questions of control and transmission of cooking knowledge, and how this knowledge and skill might develop and change quite late in life. In 2005 Nina was in her mid-fifties. A few things were immediately striking: Nina had still not cooked “on her own,” but only under her mother’s guidance. Nina and Irini were a bit unusual in that they shared a kitchen. Thanks to the combined wealth from Nina’s father’s work in the United States and Irini’s inheritance (her father had been a well-off merchant), they had built a large kitchen rather early by Kalymnian standards, and didn’t have the dual kitchen setup of many other households in the neighborhood of Ayios Mammas. When Nina married Manolis Papamihail, a fisherman and later a seasonal migrant to the United States, when she was in her mid-thirties, he moved in with them, following the matrilocal pattern of the island. They also had a house—part of Irini’s dowry—on the other side of the island that they used in summer. Nina recalled Manolis commenting on his good fortune—this was his second marriage—at meeting such a good woman with two such beautiful houses.
FIGURE 7. Manolis Papamihail eating garlic bread in the kitchen of his downtown home (2013). Photo by Nina Papamihail.
In 2005 Nina was extremely hesitant in the kitchen, telling me repeatedly that she was not a good cook, that she often didn’t know what she was doing. Irini had clearly been in charge in the kitchen throughout Nina’s life. But by 2005 Irini’s health had become precarious. While she might occasionally show the fire in her eyes that I remember from my earlier fieldwork, she more commonly would sit half asleep in a corner of the kitchen. Irini died, after an extended period spent bedridden, in 2008. By 2011 Nina was saying, “You know what, I can cook.” I was curious to learn how this transformation had been effected, and what it implied for Nina.
To understand the significance of Nina’s metamorphosis, let’s start with 2005 and the first cooking video I made with her (see video example 7, “Nina Making Octopus Stew”). Nina is cooking octopus stew in the large kitchen of her summer house. Her mother is there, but dozing. Nina’s friend Julia Koullia, an American woman married to a Kalymnian man, is also there, accompanied by her daughter Marianthi. This video shows Nina processing the ingredients and putting together the stew while I ask her a series of questions. What follows is a transcript of a few key moments in the video, interspersed with a few scene-setting descriptions.
Nina is cleaning and rinsing the octopus and preparing to cut it over the sink into a bowl. She cuts the tentacles by holding each in one hand between thumb and forefinger, sawing the knife upward through the tentacle to cut off one inch, and then feeding another inch between thumb and forefinger.
David: When did you take over the cooking from your mother? Did you take over from her at a certain point, or did you do it together?
Nina: Well, my mother has stopped cooking since May.
David: Really? She was still cooking—
Nina: She would still cook basically. But I would help her, I would do some foods, it all depends. Like I would clean the fish. She hasn’t cleaned fish in years, I don’t know when. . . . I would clean the octopus, I would cut up the meat. For years. But if you brought all the tomatoes, all the stuff to her, and it’s all ready . . . she could carry on from there. But now she can’t.
David: And she liked to do that?
Nina: Oh, yeah! She says I’m a terrible cook. She hates my cooking. Every day! She hates my cooking [Julia laughing in the background].
David: What’s different about it?
Julia: It’s not hers.
Nina: It’s not hers, “It tastes terrible,” she tells me. Terrible, she hates it.
David: And when your husband is here, does she also always do the cooking?
Nina: Not now.
David: I mean, did she?
Nina [offhand]: Nai [yes]. Now she doesn’t cook. She can’t stand because of her hip. My mother used to be a pretty good cook. But now she’s aged, she’s not as good as she used to be, if I’m honest. But she’s still good.
David: Do you make things that she didn’t make before, or do you make the same things?
Nina: Oh, I make a little bit different. I like it hotter [spicier]. I like spaghetti with . . . I don’t use cream, I’ll use milk, but she doesn’t like that kind of food that much ’cause she’s not used to it. Nor Manoli [Nina’s husband]—Manoli is like a traditional Kalymnian. They like all the traditional Kalymnian foods. So when he’s here I’ll do it [spaghetti with cream sauce] once and they’ll eat it. You know, blue cheese and things like that. Carbonara I like, but no one else seems to like it.
David: Where did you get the recipe? [Pause] . . . From friends?
Nina [offhand]: Yeah, friends.
Later I ask her about cooking recipes she has seen on cooking shows, and she mentions a meat pie that her mother “of course didn’t like. . . . I bought ground pork, and I put in a whole bunch of spices. It was quite good! . . . But my mother is a traditional Kalymnian, she doesn’t like all that stuff.” She begins washing tomatoes.
Nina: I’m going to grate them. Now, other people put them in the blender [processor]. You know, a little mini-blender. But I don’t do that, I have done that, my mother does not like them in the blender.
David: Because it’s a machine?
Nina: No, because it mushes everything up. Now, I leave the skin on. Do you want the skin on? [She begins to cut the tomatoes into a plastic bowl, holding them in one hand over the bowl.]
David: I don’t care.
Nina: Okay. ’Cause other people do not like it with the skin. She likes it with the skin. Other people—[turning to Julia and Marianthi]. Do you like it with the skin on?
Marianthi: It doesn’t matter.
David: You cut it rather than grate it?
Nina: Oh, I could grate it.
David: What do you normally do?
Nina: I do both. I got the grater out, you see? Should I grate it?
Julia: Do what you normally do.
Nina: I’ll ask my mother [smiling, turning to her mother and speaking in Greek]: Ma, should I grate ’em or cut ’em?
Mother: Cut ’em up really small [kopse tis mikra-mikra].
Nina: She likes ’em cut.
Julia: She wants texture.
[Nina continues to cut as she had been.]
Julia [noticing the large pieces]: Now, remember, she said really small, “mikra-mikra.”
This was the first video session I had done with Nina. I had done only two or three others with Kalymnians at this point. Right away it raised for me a number of interesting issues. One was the way that community norms shape even the most subtle of practices and choices: whether to cut or to grate, whether to peel the skin off tomatoes, even issues of how to store rice (in jars or in the woven bags that Nina’s mother had made many years earlier but that were still in use). Such questions were adjudicated based on a notion of what the wider community does and finds acceptable. Indeed, Nina told me that her mother complained about her cooking not just in terms of flavor, but because, for example, Nina would knock a wooden spoon against the pot while she was stirring something. “Why do you do that? I don’t know anyone who does that” was her mother’s exasperated comment. Nina’s cooking alerted me to questions of tool use as well: I had assumed that perhaps the older generation would prefer hand tools to machine technology, and this did seem to be the case for some. But kitchen technologies like a small food processor or blender were also embraced by older Kalymnian women. As Nina told me, many elder Kalymnian women do use blenders and other motor-operated kitchen devices because these tools allow them to continue to exert control over the processing of ingredients even when their bodies begin to fail them.
Notice how Irini struggles to retain her power through her control over the kitchen environment and such micro-decisions as whether to cut or grate the tomatoes. As Nina notes, her mother is simply too old to carry on cooking, and in a sense her criticism is her only source of continued relevance in the kitchen. Clearly at stake are Irini’s power and her reputation. The fact that the larger community values such sensory distinctions gives them the importance to justify Nina’s mother’s demand for compliance. Hence, Irini still exerts her power in telling Nina how to prepare dishes and process ingredients. Cooking, here, is defined as the actual assembly of the ingredients and their transformation by heat, as distinct from the “processing” that Irini has already increasingly delegated to her daughter. Irini’s ability to distinguish between her own cooking and her daughter’s “terrible” cooking is based on her sensory evaluation of different qualities of cooked food.
Despite these constraints, Nina was already tentatively experimenting from the time that she took over primary responsibility for daily cooking. She had experimented with flavor through adding hot sauce as a condiment to already cooked dishes. She had a particular penchant for Barbadian hot sauce, a combination of mustard, vinegar, and habanero chiles that one of her friends, a British woman who had been living on Kalymnos for a number of years, had brought her. She noted that her friend used the sauce on Kalymnian stuffed grape leaves, filla, and that she couldn’t really imagine doing so because filla is a “traditional dish” that she “wouldn’t want to screw up.” Thus the category of “traditional” puts a brake on some experimentation.
Before my visits to the island, Nina would request that I bring unusual spices, different colors of peppercorns and the like. She had also begun to try recipes she saw on food programs on TV, or a spaghetti carbonara (which a number of Kalymnians had been making during the past decade), but because of her mother’s and husband’s preferences for what Nina clearly defined as “traditional Kalymnian dishes,” and because of her sense at this point in time that she wasn’t a “good cook,” these were rare events. I also sensed some of the improvisational aspects of cooking when Nina discussed making a meat pie that she had seen on TV. When she mentioned one of the ingredients, leeks, she said, “Oh, I have some of those—wild leeks from the field outside that I froze. I’ll put them in the octopus stew for today. Normally I wouldn’t because my mother is traditional and doesn’t like things like that in the food.” Using the leeks, however, was also a way of connecting with her husband who, though he shared her mother’s “traditional” tastes, did enjoy wild leeks. Indeed, in the middle of the filming Manolis called from New York, and she told him that she was using leeks in the octopus stew, so he would have enjoyed it.
It was clear that the category of “traditional” had significance for Nina in that it meant being stuck in the past, not willing to try new things. “Traditional” served as a foil against which Nina was establishing her own tastes. In noting that she didn’t like as much olive oil in food as her mother, she commented, “I’ll add more today to make it more traditional—because I know you like it and my mother likes it and everybody likes it, so I figure, you know, so not everybody complains that I’m not a good cook.” But the pejorative connotations she associated with “traditional” cooking were complicated by the attachment she felt for individual kitchen objects she used to decorate her kitchen spaces. So in other ways, as we see in the next section, the kitchen was also clearly a space of continuity for Nina.
NINA’S KITCHENS
When I began this research in the United States, I found that people seem to develop a strong attachment to certain cooking tools: a cast-iron pan, a steel knife, a bread board. In an article with my student Michael Hernandez, we wrote about these tools as “biographical objects” that people use to tell the stories of their lives. On Kalymnos it seems that there is less of a focus on particular objects, and more a style of kitchen decoration and display that emphasizes meaningful objects that connect people to the past. This was certainly the case in Nina’s kitchens. Nina gave me a tour of her kitchen in her main home, emphasizing each knife, pot, serving plate, and other object that was “old.” The cabinets themselves were new wooden cabinets brought from the United States by Manolis for $800 in 2005 to replace the original Formica cabinets that had been put in when Nina and Irini had returned to the island in 1971. But every available space on and in these cabinets was littered with objects that represented “old times.” Some of these objects were clearly for display purposes: the china figurines and china canisters that were part of her mother’s dowry on shelves above the sink; a set of glassware of various kinds sitting on insert shelves or on top of cabinets—wine decanters, vases, water pitchers, and glasses. Nina said she would be tempted to use some of these, but was afraid they would break. As for the brass mortar and coffee mill, copper pots, oil lamps, ceramic oil dispenser, and copper coffee grinder, “These are like over one hundred years old, they’re ancient,” Nina commented. They were inherited about 1973 when her father’s unmarried sister had died and the family members who remained on Kalymnos—Nina’s family and the son of another of her father’s sisters—had divided up the house and furnishings. While many objects belonged to a generalized past of “my mother’s dowry,” some were specific, like a ceramic pot with the face of a little girl, which, Nina noted, Irini had bought “as a gift to herself” before they returned from the United States.
At a certain point in her review of the past of these objects, Nina encountered several sets of china plates of Italian manufacture, purchased most likely by Irini’s parents during the Italian occupation of Kalymnos. It seemed as if she hadn’t thought about these sets for a while. Nina suggested, “Maybe we could use old dishes for lunch.” She looked in a cabinet. “What do I have here? . . . David, these are old dishes, my mother’s. We will use these today,” adding in reference to my video camera, “Aren’t they nice? Show them in America.” But quickly she changed her mind, noting that the bowls were too small, and thus not practical for serving fish soup.
Under the sink Nina kept various arrays of pots and pans, including many aluminum pots from before World War II. She was aware of the health risks associated with aluminum, but said simply that she liked them, that they were “heavy-duty,” and for certain things they worked especially well—fish stew, casseroles in the oven, “Kalymnians use them for stuffed grape leaves because they taste better in aluminum.” One aluminum pot had a special lid with holes at the top, which Nina said was especially for making herbal tea from local mountain herbs. The holes made it so that you could boil the herbs in the pot and it didn’t boil over.
One drawer in the summer-house kitchen was exclusively filled with bone-handled forks and steel knives that had been Nina’s father’s, from his work as a chef. She pulled out one knife with a curved blade, noting, “I use this one, but mostly I keep them here for sentimental reasons. . . . Why shouldn’t my father be present in the kitchen? He’s always present anyway.” Here we get a hint of biographical objects, like the Easter ovens discussed in the previous chapter, although for Nina it was not any one particular object that seemed to be the focus of her memories, but rather how all of these objects combined to create a milieu of pastness in her kitchen.
It should be noted that Nina was being somewhat metaphorical in her claim that her father was “always present anyway.” Despite his job as a chef, Nina’s father rarely cooked in their kitchen, in either Seneca Falls or Kalymnos, although he might do more typically male-gendered food preparation such as grilling fish outdoors or helping to prepare lamb or other festive meals. In Seneca Falls his work took him away from home six days a week for long hours. On his one day off, typically Wednesday, he requested that his wife prepare traditional Kalymnian bean soup (fasolada), not, Nina insisted, because Wednesday was a religious fasting day, but because he would grow tired of all the meat and non-Greek food he consumed at work during the rest of the week. After he retired to Kalymnos, his days would be filled with taking care of their fields (often with Nina’s help), harvesting olives, or going downtown for business or socializing. So even in this case of a husband who was a professional cook, gendered cooking space determined that the kitchenspace be the domain and responsibility of Nina’s mother, who, Nina insisted, had a lifelong penchant for cooking. Nina never remembered observing or learning cooking techniques from her father.
One object that Nina focused on was the white bag that her mother had sewn more than thirty years earlier for storing rice. She noted that bags like these were practical; they didn’t take up much room in her pantry. As a type of object, Nina spoke of these bags as being much older than the thirty years since Irini had made them, because the technique of storing rice in bags went back to “before the war.” Nina added, “I don’t know where other people store their rice, maybe in glass jars, but I’m still doing it this way because that’s how my mother did it and that’s how I was brought up.”2
As previously mentioned, while Nina and Irini did have a small kitchen in an outdoor shack, used for frying fish and other intensive food processing, they did not follow the typical pattern of a mother’s kitchen and a daughter’s kitchen. From the time they moved back from the States to Kalymnos, kitchenspace was shared between mother and daughter (and occasionally the daughter’s husband, when Manolis cooked). In part this reflects the fact that Nina and Manolis had never had children together,3 so they did not create a “separate” family, but continued by and large to share meals with Irini (Nina’s father was dead by the time they married). Although in many cases there is a putative separation of mother’s and daughter’s kitchen (and shopping), there are other cases in which this separation does not hold up in practice, as mother and daughter often jointly negotiate the cooking of meals for both the mother’s husband and the daughter’s husband and children. Another explanation for this lack of spatial division might be that Irini had grown accustomed to an American-style kitchen, and thus did not want to return to the Kalymnian pattern of using a two-burner stove in a limited space with visible storage of cooking tools. This American influence was also reflected in Irini’s penchant for baking pies and making other oven-cooked meals such as roast chicken, going against what was until recently the typical Kalymnian pattern.4
But when I discussed their kitchen setup with Nina (in 2011), she pointed out that her aunt Katerina, who had also lived for many years in the States, returned to Kalymnos and did adopt a Kalymnian-style kitchen. Nina noted that her aunt’s commitment to not using an indoor kitchen for most cooking was part of the Kalymnian pattern of keeping the indoor kitchenspace clean and free of odors, one that she and her mother rejected out of habit. Part of this might then be personal differences, but it also reflected the unusual circumstance that Nina’s father was a professional cook, and accordingly it was not only the women who wanted a large kitchen when they moved back to Kalymnos in the early 1970s.5 The lack of division between mother’s and daughter’s kitchen might also have contributed, to some extent, to Irini’s control over Nina’s cooking, since she didn’t have her own separate space to cook in (although as noted, daughter’s kitchens are usually not used for cooking the main daily meals anyway). But if a lack of kitchen autonomy was a downside, this arrangement also gave Nina greater freedom in relation to other household work. Nina said it was a relief at the time not having to cook because it was such a time-consuming activity, “and my mother never liked my cooking anyway.” So as part of their division of labor after their return from the States, Irini controlled the kitchen while Nina worked in the gardens and did other physical labor.
No doubt the fact that Nina and Manolis never had children influenced her relationship with her mother, and perhaps her mother’s control over her in the kitchen. When I asked Nina about this, she replied, “It’s hard to know, but probably having someone else in the kitchen would have changed our relationship.” This suggests that if Nina had had a daughter who was learning kitchen tasks, the dynamics between her and her mother might have shifted. I also thought that perhaps if Nina had had children for whom she was doing some cooking (even though grandmothers often take primary responsibility for feeding grandchildren), it might have given her more confidence in relation to her mother’s judgments. However, when I suggested this to her, she once again replied, “It’s hard to know. Some grandmothers aren’t domineering in the kitchen, but they are domineering about other things, demanding constant attention, or things like that.”
When Nina and Manolis renovated their summer house in the early 2000s, they also built it with a large kitchen inside the house with all the amenities and a small outdoor kitchen and oven (once again, cabinets were brought back from the United States from one of Manolis’s seasonal work trips). Nina recalls that when she was renovating the kitchen a neighbor told her, “‘Don’t make your kitchen so nice you’re not going to use it.’ I said, ‘Of course I am. If I have a nice kitchen, why not use it?’” Nina noted that her outdoor kitchen is on a lower level, down some stairs leading to the garden, a few minutes’ walk from her main kitchen. If she has work down there, she might use the outdoor kitchen for cooking, but she certainly wasn’t going to walk up and down the stairs from the house to the garden to do her daily cooking.
COOKING CONNECTIONS
In 2006 Irini was no longer cooking at all, but she continued to dominate the kitchen through her presence and her commentary. And Nina still considered herself to be incompetent in the kitchen: “My mother will tell you I have two left feet for hands.” During an interview with Nina and Manolis, Nina remarked, “I’m not a good cook, am I, Manolis?” Manolis insisted that she was “good.” But Nina responded, “And my mother?” “She’s better,” he begrudgingly remarked. Nina laughed, suggesting to me that this exchange was not simply a statement of opinion, but part of an ongoing joking relationship among wife, husband, and mother-in-law. There were other jokes of this kind, such as Manolis’s frequent suggestion to his mother-in-law that he was going to “find you a boyfriend,” a comment that she would always dismiss with annoyance. Similar comments could have a loaded edge to them. In other families I would hear comments—with perhaps a small undercurrent of sexuality—about whether a son-in-law preferred his wife’s or his mother’s cooking; these seem to be part of the interesting dynamics of matrilocality on Kalymnos.
FIGURE 8. Irini Psaromati and Manolis Papamihail in the kitchen of their summer home with family friends (2004). Photo by Nina Papamihail.
In the case of Nina, Manolis, and Irini, there was an interesting ongoing balance within what was, in many ways, a very warm and loving family relationship. Manolis would sometimes get annoyed at Nina because of her deference to Irini on everyday decisions. As Nina voiced Manolis: “You’re so-and-so years old, and you’re still asking your mother?” Nina admitted that she leans on her mother for such daily cooking decisions: “I’ll even carry the pot over to her and say, ‘Look, Ma, did I add enough water? What should I do next?’” But Nina also seemed to recognize the more complicated constitution of intrafamily relations of love and of power. As she noted, her mother always “ran the household” and “made the daily decisions,” but at the same time would lean on her father, “see him as the boss,” and expect him to make the “major” decisions like whether to stay in the United States or move back to Kalymnos, in large part because those were the expected gender roles at the time. Since her father’s passing, Irini would increasingly lean on Nina for those major decisions while at the same time continuing to dominate the kitchen space. Nina struggled to capture the ambiguities of their relationship: “Really [my mother] is the child, even way back then. And I was always the mother but I’m also dependent on her. Do you know I can’t even make a decision sometimes . . . because all my life she has told me what to do.” This unpunctuated stream of thought captures, I think, some of the difficulty of making any clear statements about “power” or “dominance” within a relationship that Nina characterizes as “still basically good.”
Some of the positive aspects of Nina and Irini’s relationship also came through in discussions about food. Nina’s fondest memories are of some of the foods that her mother used to cook in the United States. When I mentioned the rhubarb growing in my garden, Nina had a Proustian moment, remembering a particular rhubarb pie that her mother had made. She recounted an image of her mother, describing in detail the housecoat she was wearing (saying first that it must have been summer, and then that maybe not, because the houses were so warm you didn’t change dress for the season the same way you do here). She said she was carrying a small rhubarb pie, taking it to the neighbor’s as a gift, and she could taste the tart flavor of the rhubarb. Nina spoke many times of the delicious pie crusts her mother made, which she had learned by observing her father as he worked in the restaurant in Seneca Falls.6 “I’m her daughter, but anybody who tasted her pies . . . they were great!” Nina’s conversations about cooking over the years are sprinkled with flavors of her mother’s kitchen. Irini’s pies are a constant touchstone in these conversations. “When my mother used to make pies in America, she used Crisco. What do they use now? Do you think that’s why her pies were so flaky?” would be a typical interjection, brought on by a discussion of different kinds of cooking fat.
At another moment Nina reflected on her hybrid food upbringing in the United States and what food culture was like when she was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as some of the changes in Kalymnian eating patterns:
When I left America I never had a McDonald’s. There was no Mexican food [no Mexicans or Puerto Ricans in Seneca Falls], there was none of this other kind of food. There were TV dinners. My mother cooked. I don’t remember any neighbors making shrimp in those days. The only fish that I ever ate was fish sticks at school and at home and tuna fish in the can. And fried haddock and scallops. My mother used to fry them or make them in a pilafi with tomatoes. I had octopus only once, when someone from Greece came and brought a dried octopus and my mother cooked it. I never had fresh fish or fish soup. My mother used to make pizza and ftasimo, kourambiedes, koulourakia [baked goods], she used to make good pies, excellent crust, mine is crap. She used to make meat loaf, which I consider an American food, now they make it here. She would make grilled [i.e., roasted] chicken in the oven with lemon and savory. Once I had Chinese food, but in Syracuse. A nice restaurant, not take-out. I lived a very sheltered life. She used to make macaroni salads and potato salads, she made revithia [chickpeas] and fakes [lentils]—they’re in the grocery store. I had grilled lobster out, with butter. My aunt would catch sunfish and my mother would fry them. My mother would go with another woman and cut wild greens, and she would boil spinach. When we came here forty years ago, there were vegetables only in season. I’m still stuck in this time capsule; I still only buy vegetables in season. You had to buy onions in the summer to have all year around, the same with garlic. Oranges only in the winter. Then I tasted fish soup, which I liked. My mother used to make clam chowder in America. My father must have taught her. I don’t know if I ate that. My mother would make lamb chops; I had more lamb in America than I have here, it tasted better too, or maybe it’s just that I think it did. When I first came to Kalymnos, there were no spanakopites, tiropites [spinach or cheese pies], my mother said they make them pano stin ellada [in mainland Greece]. But when we came forty years ago, nobody was making this type of food.
Nina also recalled a tuna noodle casserole that she had learned to make in home economics class. Nina had liked it so much that she had gotten her mother to reproduce it at home, and it became a staple in their household during the winter months. Now, in 2006, Nina says that she herself makes it every year, even though Manolis hates it, referring to tuna as a fish to eat fresh, and only if the tuna are small (“up to ten kilos”). For Manolis, canned tuna is something “to feed the cats.” Nina and her mother would eat it, Nina noting, “since it reminds me of my childhood, and it was different from the foods we had at home [i.e., Kalymnian foods].” These small connections were part of a relationship of caring that characterized many aspects of Nina and Irini’s daily interactions and that had given me the initial impression that they were “close.” All of this led to my surprise the first time Nina told me about her mother’s control over and deprecation of her cooking.
TRANSITIONS: 2008
By the spring of 2008 Irini was much worse, and confined to bed much of the time. Nina was anxiously fretting about the lack of her mother’s daily participation in the household. She noted the feeling of security she got from having her mother telling her what to do (even if she often didn’t do what her mother said). She was particularly concerned while I was visiting because Manolis was on the cusp of leaving for his seasonal migration to the States, so she felt that she would really be on her own with “no one to lean on,” and worried about something happening to her mother while he was gone. When she told Irini that Manolis would be leaving soon, Irini responded, “Who will protect us?” but then added, “We’ll be okay, Mary [the Virgin] will protect us.”
At the same time, Nina was growing increasingly confident in her own abilities. When she made octopus stew this time, there was no deferring to her mother, simply some casual coordination with Manolis: she got him to cut up the octopus before she started cooking it, and asked him to throw the water out in the backyard “to save her the trouble.” There was still very much a sense of kitchen practices being done in relation to a larger community: adding a little tomato paste to the base of tomatoes and onions, she noted, “My neighbor only uses tomato paste, because they like it really red”; even the gesture of throwing the water out in the backyard (to add its nutrients to the soil) was noted by Nina as part of her “traditionalness,” as opposed to other Kalymnians who might now simply dump the water down the sink. She consulted with Manolis about whether to use well water or tap water in boiling the octopus. Here it struck me that such back-and-forth was not simply about the small differences that make a difference for Kalymnians in creating proper flavor, it also served the role of a recipe—as a memory jog for all the procedures involved in creating even a familiar, well-tried dish.7 There was a sense that I had seen in many Kalymnian kitchens of a kind of distributed cognition (Hutchins 1995) in Kalymnian cooking.
Nina was taking pleasure in using more spices, including a variety of different peppercorns that I had brought her from the United States. While making the octopus stew, she added some whole pink peppercorns and crushed some of them up with a spoon. Earlier she had asked me for a recipe that explained what to do with pink peppercorns, and I had found one on the Internet and printed it out for her. Apparently the recipe had said to crush the peppercorns with a spoon. Nina was still hesitant: “I don’t know if it goes in here or not, but since you brought it I’ll put it in.” She added while crushing the peppercorns, “I don’t know if I’m doing it right, but, you know, I like it.” The sense that her own preference might outweigh the “proper” way was a new aspect of Nina’s cooking that emerged as her mother’s control receded.
FIGURE 9. Irini in her favorite spot (2005). Photo by author.
But there was still a very strong sense of Irini’s presence, both in terms of memories evoked—Nina remembering the use of Crisco in her mother’s pie crust—and in terms of everyday practice. “I asked my mother recently how to do the pie crust, but she was out of it, she didn’t say anything.” The pie crust was still a touchstone: “Well, at least I can’t make a pie crust good like my mother used to, that’s comforting.” Here, her own lesser competence is seen as a positive thing, as if this indicates that Irini had not been superseded and thus still had a place in the kitchen.8
One sign of Nina’s newfound confidence in the kitchen in 2008 was her eagerness to cook veryioi, a type of wild field onion that is now difficult to find on Kalymnos, though it was more common in the past. This is the kind of food that is associated with Kalymnian tradition, and the mere mention of it can make people express nostalgia. Nina had run into a neighbor whose cooking I was also observing, and who was carrying a bag full of veryioi. When Nina asked her how she was preparing them, the neighbor was dismissive, saying, “To be a good cook and cook veryioi so they aren’t bitter, you have to have toughness.” Indeed, it requires several days of soaking and processing to remove the bitterness from veryioi. Nina took this as a challenge; she asked two other neighbors how to prepare the veryioi, and bought them (at some expense, they were 5 euros a kilo at that time). Because of my project, I happened to taste the neighbor’s veryioi. Nina was extremely pleased when I admitted that her neighbor’s veryioi had still tasted somewhat bitter to me, while Nina insisted that her veryioi had come out sweet.
By the fall of 2008, Irini was in serious decline. Nina recalled one day at her bedside when Irini hadn’t spoken for a month. Nina was feeding her and suddenly she knocked the spoon away, saying, “Stop!” Nina asked what was wrong, and Irini said, “My brother-in-law [kouniados] is trying to come to greet me.” Nina asked, “Which brother-in-law?” and Irini replied, “Mihalis.” “Did he come?” “No . . . he didn’t,” said Irini, before lapsing again into silence. Sightings of Mihalis by those close to death are interpreted by Kalymnians as the presence of the archangel Michael, preparing the person for heaven. Nina also talked about how beautiful her mom looked on her last few days—no wrinkles, beautiful color in her face. Irini died on November 17, 2008.
“My mother went out in glory,” Nina recalled, speaking of Irini’s memorial service (kollivo). The archbishop was having coffee with the priest who was going to perform her kollivo, so he came along to it, even though he didn’t know her personally. “So she had the archbishop of Kalymnos attending her memorial!” The memorial was held at the neighborhood church of Ayios Mammas, where Irini hadn’t been in the ten years prior to her death, and now she is buried in the church cemetery. Now when Nina goes to tend to Irini’s grave, she tells her that she can enjoy all those liturgies she used to miss. On the nine-day anniversary of her death—one of the days that one marks with a memorial ceremony—a bird appeared at Irini’s grave, an “eighteen” bird (named after the call it makes, which sounds like the Greek word for eighteen). Nina had a stranger experience six months after her mother died, on what would have been Irini’s ninety-first birthday. A peacock had been visiting their summer house for several weeks, coming in the evening and spending the night there. On that particular evening, “When I was going out of the kitchen, I look up and there is the peacock on the small kitchen roof looking at me. We looked at each other for a few minutes and it flew away. I was surprised it could fly so far, though not high.” When Nina told her family and neighbors about this, they told her it was her mother’s soul paying a visit. At the time she wrote in a letter to me, “I do think it was my mother’s spirit.” Looking back two years later, Nina noted, “It’s all how you interpret it.”
NEW EXPLORATIONS, 2009–2011
I visited Nina and Manolis a little over six months after Irini’s death during a short trip to the island (accompanied by my wife and two sons for the first time since 1998). Because it had been a long time since they had seen my family, Nina and Manolis took pleasure in making a huge meal for us. This meal included octopus stew, two kinds of fish, baked chickpeas, fava beans, boiled zucchini, and a salad. As Nina looked over the table, she expressed amazement that she could put on such a spread without her mother’s direction. As we sat around after lunch my son Sam filmed us as Nina and I talked about some of the changes over the past year. Nina immediately underlined the fact that without her mother to cook for, she was “experimenting more,” trying different ingredients and spices in dishes. She noted that she was aware of adding certain ingredients to the cooking “because Mom’s not going to eat it.” This felt like a license for experimentation: “I put a lot of cloves in the food; I put quince [kidoni] in a beef, zucchini, and potato dish, and it turned out good, wasn’t it good, Manoli?” The idea for using quince, normally used only to make preserved spoon sweets, was something Nina had picked up from watching Boukia kai Sihorio (Forgiveness with Every Bite), one of the popular Greek cooking shows, hosted by celebrity chef Elias Mamalakis.9 Nina noted, “He made it with pork. I saw the quince at Smalios (one of the supermarkets near her summer house). I had been to go shopping and I saw it there and so I bought it. I thought I’d make it with pork, but I didn’t get around to it, I didn’t have any pork, so I made it with beef.” In this short description I got a sense that Nina was developing a more improvisational approach to cooking, sparked by new inputs beyond the neighborhood and her mother as judges of what is proper and what goes with what. While in past times quince might be a discovery to be consumed fresh or preserved, and variations in a recipe for beef and potatoes might have included whatever vegetable came to hand, it was only because of the wider circulation of food recipes and knowledges introduced on cooking shows, and the coincidence for Nina that it was being made available by supermarkets stocking it more regularly, that this new combination became part of Nina’s kitchen experiments.
At the same time, Nina admitted that she still felt “used to [Irini] telling me, ‘Do this, do that, go here, go there.’ I even ask Manoli odigise me [guide me], tell me what I should do. You know, like it could be simple things like should I put this in the refrigerator now or should I put it in later. She would tell me ‘all right, Nina, it’s time that that goes in the refrigerator.’ I’m used to somebody telling me even little things. I might not do it, but I’m still used to her telling me.” Nina admitted that this was a pattern that she felt “conditioned” to expect “after sixty years, even though I might get mad, or I might not do it.” I asked Nina, “Do you think that as time goes on, this will change?” “I don’t know, David, I don’t know.” This referring of small decisions to her mother or to Manolis did not simply reflect Nina’s insecurity. It can be seen as part of the “outward orientation” of Kalymnian cooking that I discussed in relation to the technique of cutting in the hand. Part of cooking was exactly these kinds of social interactions about the small details of preparation, which might, or might not, reflect unequal power relations.
Despite this awareness of a desire for things to continue the same way as before, Nina also noted the incredible freedom she felt to do things in the house that she had never done because her mother had not wanted them. She gives the example of putting a canopy on the bed that her mother had been using, which she had long thought about doing, “and now I’m going to do it.”
“And that feels okay?”
“It feels okay, because den eimai ego i nikokira? [Aren’t I the head of the house now?] I’ve always been the nikokyra, but she always ruled, but now I am the nikokyra, aren’t I?” Later she added that her mother had always sat at the dining table at the seat closest to the stove “because she was always the head of the household sitting closest to the kitchen [i.e., the stove], but now I sit next to the stove.”
Here, as elsewhere, Nina seems to recognize the subtle balances of power that go into family relations, relations in which on the one hand her mother may have “ruled” in the daily household activities (against which Nina could sometimes chafe and rebel), but in which on the other, Nina had long been accustomed to playing the role of her father, someone to lean on for major decisions. Food preparation is, of course, among the most mundane of daily household activities. Yet considering the value that Kalymnians ascribe to good food and good flavor, sitting next to the stove stands as a kind of symbol for household power, or nikokyra, a word that represents the good household management that is often central to an evolving sense of self and identity.10
FIGURE 10. Nina Papamihail enjoying a cup of coffee at her kitchen table (2014). Photo by author.
During late 2010 and early 2011, Nina kept a food diary of her daily meals. While she had recorded this for me in the past over short periods (see Sutton 2001, 105–7), this diary stretched for three months from the beginning of December through early March. I then followed up by discussing the diary with her when I visited for several weeks in May. One of the issues on Nina’s mind during this entire period was health concerns. While she had earlier talked about avoiding excessive salt in cooking, she had become increasingly concerned about cholesterol. Then over the winter Nina had to have several biopsies and finally a tumor removed from her breast. It took until late June for her doctor to determine that she didn’t need additional therapy for it. Over this period Nina was thinking about food as both a source of pleasure and a source of stress. As she joked to me at one point, “Isn’t it funny, I’m more depressed about cutting back on sweets [because of cholesterol] than about having cancer?”
Despite this backdrop, what struck me most in Nina’s diary were her comments next to different meals—“good,” “really good,” “tasty,” and “I’m becoming good” with exclamation points littered throughout. These comments all reflected Nina’s new balance in her sense of herself in the kitchen, a confidence that extended to other areas as she bragged to her husband’s cousin about taking the Metro (subway) all over Athens and often by herself, while she was there for her operations, an idea that her husband’s cousin found outlandish. Just as in 2005 cooking was very much seen in relation to what other people in the community do or like, by 2011 the “community” had broadened increasingly to include practices in Athens or on the increasingly ubiquitous cooking shows. This wider circle was apparent when I asked Nina about the “good!” that she had put next to her meal of split-pea soup (fava) on February 1. Nina exclaimed, “We always have fava, it’s nothing special. But my cousin in Athens orders it from restaurants [tavernes], for twelve to sixteen euros a plate. I said, ‘You’re shittin’ me.’ I couldn’t believe that people order this because it’s so common here, but in Athens they don’t make it anymore. On some TV show when I was in Athens in late March for my operation, they showed how to make fava with beef broth. My cousin Popi said, ‘dhen einai nistisimo’ [it’s not appropriate for fasting days]. But I just couldn’t believe that they were showing fava on TV.” Nina’s tone was ironic, because she felt that her fava was as good as anything they could make in a restaurant. She was distrustful of what she saw as fancy, status foods, just as she ridiculed me when I told her what I had spent for an espresso maker. As she told me in an earlier interview: “Good food should be tasty. I’m not the fancy type that wants everything to look pretty. . . . Just as long as it tastes good and it satisfies me and I get full, I’m happy.”
The clearest influence on Nina’s cooking over this period was Jamie Oliver, the British celebrity chef whose cooking show had been playing in Greece for the previous several years. While Nina had drawn from some of the Greek cooking shows in the past, she had become a devoted fan of Jamie Oliver’s show, which turns up in her diary. During the winter and spring of 2011, Nina made four meals based on his recipes. In each case, however, it is notable that Oliver provided the inspiration, but Nina made significant changes (as she did in substituting beef for pork above). When I use the word inspiration, what is implied? Not, for the most part, that Nina followed a menu, or even a particular recipe presented on the TV show. Rather, the show seemed to provoke ideas of possibilities, or it acted as a memory jog. For example, Nina made a salad and added fresh mint and basil leaves from her garden because she had seen Oliver use these ingredients in a salad (basil is not typically used as food in Greece). Or Oliver made grilled zucchini brushed with olive oil and that reminded Nina of how her mom had done it in the past, so she made it; or she noted that Oliver was using fennel in a cooked dish, while she had only used it raw in salads (it grows in her garden). So without reproducing the recipe, Nina got the idea of using fennel as one of the ingredients to make a meatless (pseftiko) pastitsio. She put vegetables on the bottom, followed by a layer of mushrooms, and béchamel with cheese on top. For all of these dishes Nina was very pleased with the results, commenting, “I’m getting really adventurous,” “I outdid myself,” “It was quite good,” and, with her sardonic humor, “Nobody died!”
The fact that Jamie Oliver was such an influence on Nina also reflects her hybrid-outsider identity—that is, she was often looking for justifications for practices that might lie outside the community of Kalymnos, to keep her in touch with her non-Kalymnian identity. She often took pleasure in noting when something was superior in the United States as opposed to Kalymnos. This, too, carried an overtone of potential rebellion against her mother and her “traditional” ways, even if Irini had adopted a number of American practices in the kitchen as well. For example, Nina noticed that Jamie Oliver uses enamel bowls to mix things in the kitchen, which she also does. Here, she is taking from Oliver not the idea but the justification, as she noted that on Kalymnos most people consider enamel bowls to be old-fashioned, using plastic bowls instead. She also remarked on his plates, which are “old and nice,” once again implicitly comparing this to her kitchen practice.
Another source of cooking explorations and adventures came from ideas taken from neighbors or friends, which seemed to work as a kind of horizontal source of knowledge. For example, on December 3, Nina made a bean soup with sun-dried tomatoes, which she had started making in 2010. She had been talking with a store owner near her summer house who had mentioned that she sun-dried her extra tomatoes, so Nina asked her how and decided to try it, noting the fun she had adding different spices to the jar to create different flavors.11
At other times, the availability of certain ingredients would guide the meal. They might get fish or goat milk as a gift from a neighbor and make it the main course or part of a meal (the goat milk, made into a kind of yogurt, accompanied a meat and orzo dish). They were also making more egg dishes, from fried eggs to eggs cooked with tomatoes (avgozoumi), because their chickens were producing lots of eggs during this period. By contrast, Nina might create a change by using a special ingredient like alcohol in cooking. She noted, “I don’t usually cook with wine because I don’t have it, it’s too expensive, we’re economizing. But maybe I find a cheap brand and why not change, cook gourmet? Sometimes I cook octopus with ouzo—I’m becoming good!”
Another factor is a balance of desire and boredom. For example, on January 16 she made cabbage with rice because they were “tired of meat.” On March 1 she made meatballs with rice and potato soup because she “missed it, haven’t had it all winter.” On March 2 she noted that Manolis had wanted this food for months: rice in a tomato sauce with fresh tomatoes. Manolis said, “Delicious.” On January 27 Manolis made pizza with homemade pizza dough as a “supper” snack, something that “Manolis always does better than me.”12 When I asked her about this, Nina said that they had probably been talking for a few days about having a pizza, a dish that her mother used to make for them, and had finally decided to do it. The same goes for pies: Nina made a lemon pie on January 16, which she noted she does every winter, as in the summer they eat more fruit for dessert. However, on February 10 Nina made a “beautiful coconut cream pie,” which she noted that she “thought about and made it.” Like the rhubarb pie, this dish was strongly identified with her childhood in America and with Irini, and her mention of it led to a flood of reminiscences about food and childhood experiences in the United States. Here the thought of particular foods both project into a near future of their making and consumption, and index a past not of habit, as in the dishes that are commonly eaten every week, but of more distant memories and connections.
But pie also is projected into the future through Nina’s concerns about health and cholesterol, as Nina complained that she couldn’t control her appetite, unlike her mother who, she recalled, could fry a dish of chickpea “meatballs” and not eat a single one, “whereas if I’m frying something I’ll have filled up before I get it to the table.” Nina also noticed how worries about her biopsy had affected her cooking, telling me about making stuffed grape leaves and forgetting to put the rice in. So she ended up making the rice on the side; “It turned out okay,” she conceded. A month later, after getting good results from the doctors, she noted that her grape leaves had been very good, and she had made them along with some delicious grilled green chiles. “I bought them from the woman from Kos who sells down by the customs office. I asked her, ‘Why are these peppers over here, not with the other ones?’ It turns out they’re hot, really hot! I’m going to put them in beef stew tomorrow along with potatoes from the garden. I’ll only use one pepper so it’s not too hot for Manolis. I’ll add hot sauce if I need to for me.” Thus, Nina was striking a balance between her tastes and Manolis’s, while continuing to explore different possibilities. However, it was clear that “health,” with its nebulous ties of present eating to future states, had become one of the key values around which cooking had to be negotiated at the same time as Nina was becoming increasingly confident over her ability to control “taste” and to be in control in the kitchen, to be “the head of household” in her mother’s absence.
FIGURE 11. Nina cooking “American-style” baked beans with sausages (2013). Photo by Manolis Papamihail.
CONCLUSION: HYBRID MEMORIES
Like many Kalymnians who have lived through a migration experience, both Nina and Irini were deeply shaped by their divided experience living in the United States and on Kalymnos, and this shows in their kitchen practices. In some ways Nina reversed Irini’s experience of girlhood in Kalymnos and mature adulthood in the United States, and it was clearly Nina’s youthful experience that shaped many of her food preferences and desire for “difference” in spicing up Kalymnian food. While in my earlier work on food and memory (2001) I was interested in the imprint of local foods on Kalymnian memories, especially for Kalymnians who were living abroad and were desperate for a “taste of home,” I did not take in how deeply shaped some Kalymnians might be by their childhood experiences outside of Greece. Nina’s strongest memories were of some of the “American” foods that her mother made—the pie crusts that she despairs of reproducing, or a summer salad with coconut, pineapple, and rice, the kind of concoctions straight out of 1950s Americana (see Shapiro 2004). It is these foods that connect Nina and Irini in a positive sense, as it is these memories of her mother’s cooking that she cherishes. Nina does have some strong Kalymnos-based food memories, though even these are not for typical Greek dishes. When she was complaining about limiting the fat in her diet because of concerns about cholesterol, she recounted a particularly vivid memory: the first time she saw her grandmother dunk cheese—the Greek hard cheese, kaseiri—into her coffee (this was when they had recently moved back to the island). She told me that the fat from the cheese goes into the coffee, and then the cheese gets soft and delicious, forming at the bottom of the cup. Watching her grandmother do it for the first time, Nina remembered thinking it was disgusting, but then she tried it and thought it was incredible. This anecdote united a family memory with a rich sensory feeling of longing for the kind of food of which she was currently depriving herself.
Nina certainly adapted to many Kalymnian foods after her move to the island, and she is extremely aware of community tastes and standards; yet she also has a strong awareness of her difference from standard Kalymnian views and “traditional” Kalymnian tastes. This brings up a more general point that every dish on Kalymnos is fraught with myriad decisions as a cook negotiates a path between her own tastes, the tastes of other family members, and a sense of how the larger Kalymnian community has determined standards of taste. Therein, I think, lay Nina’s attraction to a figure like Jamie Oliver, who represented a source of authority outside the local community with whom she could identify.
Nina’s preferences had often been muted by Irini’s control of the kitchen, which produced a sense of insecurity for Nina in her cooking competence, noted in such practices as asking her mother whether to cut or grate tomatoes, or in her tendency to check the food constantly while it is cooking: “My mother asked me why I always check the food; she didn’t need to check so much.” Irini’s voice continues to echo in the kitchen and to shape her, even as she grows increasingly confident in her abilities. During the same discussion in May 2011 she proudly bragged to me about producing the best Easter cookies in the neighborhood (because of her willingness to use good butter) but also said she was still using Manolis as a crutch for her uncertainties in daily tasks: “I’ll still ask ela na deis, einai etoimo to fai, ti nomizeis? [come look, is the food ready, what do you think?]; maybe not all the time, but I still ask. It’s comforting. And then [laughing] it’s his [Manolis’s] fault if it doesn’t turn out good [pause]. But I’m not as bad as I used to be.” Here she recognizes the comfort of sometimes subsuming one’s agency to the projects of others, while at the same time making some claim for her own desire for creativity. This is a tension that was clearly constantly in negotiation and expressed to different degrees in Nina’s relationship with Irini, and now with Manolis. It makes a mockery of the notion that cooking knowledge or skill “passes from mother to daughter” in any smooth, uninterrupted sense.
Nina remarks on her difference from her neighbors, as well, in the more limited role she allows for ritual prescriptions in mourning her mother’s death. Unlike some of her neighbors, Nina notes, she stopped wearing black about a year after Irini’s death, and now does not shun bright colors. She chides other neighbors—some young or middle-aged women—who carry on wearing black for the death of a parent because “it’s easier, they don’t have to worry about what to wear, but they’re too young to be wearing black all the time.” Similarly, Nina kept a light constantly at her mother’s grave for forty days, but does not follow her neighbors in paying someone to keep it lit beyond that point. Nina once again sees a certain practicality in her approach to Kalymnian traditions. Nina’s memories of her mother are less activated by these ritual actions than by the objects with which she surrounds herself: Irini’s chair, sitting in the corner offering advice and criticism, and the myriad kitchen objects, the “inalienable possessions” that seem to store memories through their ubiquity. To give Nina the last word: “When I die, they’re going to have truckloads to throw away. And I feel bad, because I appreciate these things. . . . Nobody appreciates this crap like I do. . . . I wish I had more room to display these things. . . . These things are old and they’re my mother’s. And they’re old, they’re nice. I like them. They don’t make things like this anymore.”