100 Grandmothers At Judy’s

Recipes inherited, borrowed, argued over, and brought back to the table through Anastasia Miari’s Mediterranea: Life-perfected Recipes from Grandmothers of the Mediterranean

Paati was the beginning.

Which is inconvenient, because I was only supposed to be planning a menu. But then one grandmother became many grandmothers, and suddenly I was thinking about carrots, pastry, chickpeas, harissa, stuffed vegetables, cocktails, family kitchens, inherited habits, and all the ways grandmothers have shaped how we eat without ever needing to call it influence. This is how menus happen sometimes, a book enters the kitchen and makes a mess of your brain. The book in question is Anastasia Miari’s Mediterranea: Life-perfected Recipes from Grandmothers of the Mediterranean, and it is very much not “just a cookbook.”

I know that phrase gets used too easily. Every cookbook with a few personal essays and nice photography gets called “more than a cookbook” now. Usually it means there is some mood-setting before you get to the actual recipes. A childhood memory, market scene, or a line about olive oil. This is not that. Mediterranea has recipes, yes. But it also has reporting. It has travel, women with opinions, kitchens that feel used, not styled. It has regional detail, humour, stubbornness and recipes that feel like they have been made under pressure, adjusted over decades, and defended in family arguments. Most importantly, it has grandmothers who are not treated like soft little symbols of warmth. They are not floating around in aprons, waiting to hand over wisdom in golden light or reduced to “nonna energy” or “ancient secrets” or any of the other lazy ways we tend to package older women when food is involved.

They are stubborn. Funny. Particular. Generous. Sharp. Thrifty. Loving. Difficult. Exacting. Unimpressed. Some of them are clearly impossible to argue with. Some of them clearly know they are the authority in the room. And honestly, good for them. That is what I loved immediately. Miari understands something very basic that food writing sometimes forgets: domestic food is not always gentle. It can be bossy, practical, and rushed. It can be full of corrections. It can involve someone telling you your flame is too high, your dough is too wet, your knife work is wrong, your salt is timid, your oil is cheap, your pan is unsuitable, or your version is simply not how it is done. And still, that is love too, love that makes sure nothing is wasted, that knows who likes what, that can stretch one pot for unexpected guests. The kind that can produce food from very little and still act like it was no big deal and that remembers your appetite before it remembers your words. That kind of cooking has the authority of repetition, feeding people every day. Of knowing what works because you have done it for forty years and nobody got up hungry. Of being able to cook without recipes because the recipe has stopped living on paper and started living in your hands.

Which is beautiful, yes, but also deeply annoying if you are trying to recreate anything. Because grandmother measurements are absolute chaos: a handful, a little, enough, until it looks right, until it smells done, until the dough behaves, until the oil tells you, until the colour changes - the best yet - you’ll know.

No, I will not know. That is why I am asking, grans! 

But that is also the point. A lot of domestic knowledge was never written down because it did not need to be written down for the people inside that kitchen. It was taught by watching, failing, being corrected, repeating, adjusting. It moved from one body to another through practice and daily use. Through the slightly terrifying process of being told to “just do it” while someone older watched over your shoulder. And because so much of that knowledge lived with women, it was often treated as instinct rather than expertise.

That bothers me. Because instinct is not the same as accident.

A grandmother who knows exactly how much water a dough needs is not guessing. A woman who can turn leftover bread, old vegetables, chickpeas, herbs, yoghurt, oil, and spice into a meal is not simply “making do.” A person who can feed a household through changing seasons, stretched budgets, family preferences, festivals, illness, grief, and guests has a level of skill we rarely name properly. We call it home cooking, and sometimes that phrase makes it sound smaller than it is.

Miari does not make that mistake. She treats these recipes as living records, they’re generous and curious and alive. Each grandmother has a voice. Each dish carries context. You get the sense that a recipe is never just ingredients plus method. It is place, family, economy, weather, memory, habit, and history all folded into something edible. And the map of the book is one of the things that really got me.

Miari does not do the lazy Mediterranean thing. You know the one. White table. Blue sea. Lemons. Tomatoes. Olive oil. Linen. Maybe a grilled fish. Maybe a hand reaching across a sunlit table. Everything very breezy, very European, very ready to become a lifestyle moodboard. Mediterranea widens the table - Tunisia. Algeria. Morocco. Lebanon. Palestine. Turkey. Cyprus. Croatia. Slovenia. And more. The Mediterranean basin appears here as a fuller, messier, more honest place. Not one aesthetic. Not one cuisine. Not one flavour profile.

Because the Mediterranean is not just a holiday feeling. It is trade, migration, empire, colonisation, religion, drought, ports, borders, language, war, labour, family, and survival. It is shared techniques and very specific local pride. It is dishes that look related but are argued over intensely. It is ingredients that travelled, adapted, settled, changed names, and became somebody’s grandmother’s version. And, often, it is women making food from what was available in season, affordable. What could stretch, could be preserved, could feed many people, could be carried, reheated. What had to be made before the heat got worse. What the family expected or the festival demanded. What the land allowed.

That is the part I kept coming back to while building this dinner. These recipes were built because people needed feeding, someone was coming home, or someone was leaving. Because the family had gathered. Because there were too many chickpeas and not enough meat. Because the peppers were good and the oil had to be used carefully. Because bread from yesterday still had life in it. Because herbs were growing wild. Because a grandmother refused to waste anything. Because the same dish had been made every year, and not making it would feel like a small betrayal.

That is where 100 Grandmothers At Judy’s began.

The answer, so far, is a lot of notes. A lot of excitement. Several tabs open. A cocktail idea that got out of hand very quickly. And a table that moves from the Maghreb to the Aegean without pretending the whole region can be flattened into one neat idea.

There will be carrots with heat and earthiness. Pastry with potato and cheese. Roasted peppers. A vegetable tart. Lamb with orzo. Stuffed summer vegetables. Chickpeas with harissa and cumin. Preserved lemon. Citrus. Honey. Sumac. Things that are simple on paper but not careless in practice.

Simple food is not lazy food. A dish can have few ingredients and still require attention. A salad can be sharp and balanced. A chickpea stew can have depth. A tart can be humble and still be the thing people remember. A stuffed vegetable can tell you immediately whether the cook was paying attention.

Grandmother food, for lack of a better phrase, often lives in that space. It does not perform complexity. It just has it. 

A lot of the work is hidden because the food looks familiar. That is the trick of it. You see carrots, chickpeas, peppers, rice, herbs, yoghurt, bread, and think you understand the dish. But the difference between average and excellent is usually in the handling. The cut. The oil. The patience. The acid. The heat. The timing. The refusal to overcomplicate what already works.

That is the kind of cooking I want this dinner to respect. By paying attention to the source. To the region and the grandmother behind it. To the reason the dish exists. To the fact that a recipe can be practical and still be important.

The cocktail came from that same place. I kept thinking: if this dinner moves across the Mediterranean basin, what does the drink do? It cannot be random. It cannot just be “something with citrus” because that is where everyone goes. It has to go with the food. 

So the idea started moving toward harissa, sumac, honey, salt. Something bright, sharp, tingly, and a little unruly. Not a serious, intimidating cocktail. More like a drink with a raised eyebrow. Something that wakes up the palate before the food starts arriving.

That is the fun part of building a menu like this. One thought keeps pulling another. Paati leads to Miari. Miari leads to the Maghreb. The Maghreb leads to harissa. Harissa leads to a cocktail. A cocktail leads to the question of how to introduce the table. The table leads back to grandmothers. And suddenly the menu has a spine. That spine is not nostalgia.

Because it is very easy to romanticise grandmothers in food. Too easy. We do it all the time. We turn them into symbols of comfort and tradition without thinking about the labour underneath. We praise the food, but forget the woman who stood for hours making it. We call it love, but sometimes it was also obligation. We call it instinct, but sometimes it was skill developed under pressure. We call it tradition, but sometimes it was a lack of choice dressed up nicely later.

I do not want to do that. This isn’t some soft-focus tribute to women who cooked endlessly and were expected to do it without complaint. That is not honest. Some grandmothers loved cooking. Some probably did not. Some cooked with pride. Some cooked because no one else would. Some guarded their recipes. Some shared freely. Some fed everyone and ate last. Some controlled the kitchen because it was the only place they had control. Some built entire family identities through food and were still not called artists, historians, technicians, or archivists.

But they were all, in some way, carrying knowledge. A recipe is an archive without the fuss of labelling, climate control, and catalogue numbers. It is an archive with oil stains, unreliable measurements, changing handwritings, ingredients that have been substituted because someone moved countries. It is one where a dish from one region became a family’s version somewhere else. One where a granddaughter remembers the taste but not the method, and tries to work backwards.

That is how food survives sometimes; badly, beautifully, in fragments. Through repetition. Through argument. Through “that’s not how she made it.” Through someone finally writing it down. Through someone else refusing to write it down. Through memory. Through muscle. Through feeding.

I am not Mediterranean. I am not pretending these recipes are mine by inheritance. That matters too. The food for this dinner is borrowed with respect, studied through Miari’s work, and cooked in my context - with what I can source, what I can adapt honestly, and what I can execute well. There is no point pretending otherwise.

This book gives me something to hold on to as a cook and host.

Because when you borrow food, you have to do more than make it tasty. You have to know what you are borrowing. You have to understand which parts are essential and which parts can bend. You have to know when adaptation is necessary and when it is just laziness. You have to respect that a dish may look simple, but it carries a lot more than your version of it.

This dinner is my attempt to cook from that place. With joy, because the book is also genuinely fun. That is another thing I do not want to lose. This is not some heavy, museum-like exercise. The book is alive. Miari’s writing has personality. It is zesty and curious and sometimes chaotic in the best way. You can feel the movement in it; the travel, the kitchens, the conversations, the grandmothers being themselves. That energy is what I want at the table too. Plates being passed. People reaching across. Someone asking what something is. Someone going back for more of the chickpeas. Someone discovering that a carrot dish can absolutely hold its own. Someone realising that stuffed vegetables are not a side note. Someone tasting harissa and immediately sitting up straighter.

The menu is structured, but the feeling isn’t stiff.

This is a dinner built for sharing. For passing. For tasting across the table. For eating food that has travelled through women’s hands before it arrived here. For letting a cookbook become a conversation, not just a source. There are many grandmothers in this dinner. Anastasia Miari’s grandmothers. The women she met. The women they learned from. The women before them. My Paati, standing at the beginning of my own thought process. Other people’s paatis and yiayias and tetas and nonnas and nenas and didas and nanas and all the names we use for women who fed us before we understood what that meant.

As people and cooks and authorities. As women who knew how to make food last, how to make it matter, and how to bring people to the table without making a performance of it.