More people to memorialize on a day of remembrance. Last week we also lost Aglaia Kremezi, who wanted to bring Greek food to every curious cook in the country. The emphasis is on curiosity. She wanted to know the technique and recipe for every eggplant, egg, artichoke, lamb, and gigandes bean recipe she found on one island or one mountain village, and compare it to another. She wanted to document the history and culture associated with a recipe, and make the dish accessible to any home cook--and, unusually, she knew American home kitchens and ingredients. And she wanted to make everything look beautiful--something she had been trained to do at art school in London after her Athens childhood in an intellectual, politically connected, complicated family.
When I launched @TheAtlantic's Food Channel, I asked Aglaia to write a regular column from the cooking school she'd opened on Kea, the island closest by ferry to Athens, where she and her husband, Costas Moraitis, rebuilt and expanded a family house to provide a paradisal setting for spirited, hands-on lessons.
The biography she supplied us has her typical tang, and you can hear her voice especially in the last line: "Aglaia Kremezi has changed her life and her profession many times over. She currently writes about food in Greek, European and American magazines, publishes books about Greek and Mediterranean cooking in the US and in Greece, and teaches cooking to small groups of travelers who visit Kea. Before that she was a journalist and editor, writing about everything except politics. She has been the editor in chief and the creator of news, women's, and life-style magazines, her last disastrous venture being a 'TV guide for thinking people,' a contradiction in terms, at least in her country."
But you can't hear her voice trilling the R in "That would be grrrreeat," or the excited, breathless squeal of "Yes it's wonnderful" or the staccato dismissal of "It's terrrible terrible." Aglaia loved discovery, and sharing her enthusiasm. Her energy was constant--in the @Substack newsletter she and Costas wrote and photographed, in her reading, and in her travels. A trip to a new country with her--I took many, thanks to @OldwaysPT, whose @sarabaersinnott posted a wonderful tribute to Aglaia, and thanks to @SlowFoodHQ's conferences we often met in Turin--was an exercise in near-exhaustion. She wanted to go to every museum and gallery and stop at every antiquarian bookstore, every public market, every flea market. Again, curiosity and wanting to understand everything drove her. She was an invaluable part of the annual @Oxfordsymposium, and wrote a thorough report of its first post-pandemic meeting in 2022, dedicated to "Food Away from the Table," which @elisabethluard, a main organizer, remembers as still the best symposium summary.
She was vehement in her likes and dislikes. But when she liked you, nothing was too much. She and Costas were wildly generous to the groups that would visit Kea for several days of cooking lessons, frequently followed by educational and of course food-centric excursions they organized to other part of Greece. In the spring of 2024 our friends Jamie and Nina, also friends of Aglaia, came with us to Kea and then Thessaloniki, and rolled dolmas and pide pastry under the grape arbor that dappled daily sunlight. At our first dinner Aglaia and Costas, knowing of our love of wild greens and my embarrassingly insatiable sweet tooth, made an elegant and emerald-green soup to start and a cassata-style ricotta cake with Greece's gem-colored "spoon sweets," extremely sweet but powerfully flavored candied fruit. And they arranged scholarly guides for our own excursion to Thessaloniki and the stunning, relatively new, archaeological museums at Vergina dedicated to the family of Alexander the Great.
Do look at the Atlantic archive of pieces Aglaia wrote, and the wonderfully appealing Substack Aglaia and Costas posted even as she was being treated for the aggressive cancer diagnosed only a year ago. And find a copy of The Foods of the Greek Islands, my favorite of Aglaia's books. Every page has a recipe I want to make, as I remembered when I opened my copy--along with a typically loving inscription from Aglaia.
As @chefjoseandres has given so many gifts to the world, most especially his example as a tireless and fearless humanitarian, his wonderfully popular @zaytinya restaurants lastingly give diners the gift of Aglaia's inspiration and also recipes at every meal. Andres called Aglaia “a teacher, a cook, a master storyteller, and a friend,” and never failed to give her credit as being a guiding force for the restaurant; he asked her to write the foreword to the Zaytinya cookbook, which you should also buy. We take any and every excuse to dine at Zaytinya. We'll toast Aglaia's memory many, many times over the next weeks and months.
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