Matriarch Eats: A Food Talk with Anastasia Miari

Collecting stories and time-perfected recipes from grandmothers in Greece and around the globe.

Photo: Courtesy.

“Yiayia” means grandmother in Greek, a culture where these represent not only figures of love and support but symbols of strength, mentorship, and heritage. They provide care, wisdom, guidance, and last (but not least) comfort food.

I bumped into Anastasia Miari’s books for the first time while doing deep research on Greek dishes for a dinner that I never hosted. Yet, discovering “Yiayia: Time-perfected Recipes from Greece’s Grandmothers” felt like finding the ocean when I was looking for a pond.

Inspired by her Yiayia, Anastasia ventured on a journey collecting the recipes and memories from grandmothers throughout Greece who welcomed her and Marco Argüello (the lens behind these stories) into their homes to show them first-hand how their “time-perfected dishes” were made.

Along with this publication, Matriarch Eats was born, a project sharing the stories that have seasoned grandmothers’ recipes all over the globe and where she has been cooking with and interviewing them for six years, holding a Guild of Food Writer’s Award for ‘inspired storytelling and great journalistic integrity’.

After the birth of her baby girl Callipso, we managed to successfully contact Miari to talk about growing up in Corfu, Greek grandmothers, culinary retreats, and food, lots of food!

Photo: Courtesy.

Georgina:  Located in the Ionian Sea, you were raised and spent every summer of your life in Corfu. How was it growing up on this Greek island?

Anastasia: Growing up on the island was amazing because I had a lot of freedom. I come from a small village in the south where there was not a lot of tourism, so I had the freedom to run around from an early age. I didn’t have to be accompanied by an adult. My parents were working during the summer season so I spent a lot of time cooking with my Yiayia, planting tomatoes, taking care of the land, and observing the cycle of the seasons.

Georgina: How would you describe the “art of living” of the contemporary Greek society?

Anastasia: In comparison to other places I’ve lived in like London, in Greece people know how to live in a more relaxed and measured way. We go out and we take our time. We take coffee with our friends and not everything is dumped into a fantastic schedule. Everyone knows how to enjoy life and I appreciate this very much. I think that contemporary Greek society still follows the same lifestyle as my Yiayia.
 

Georgina: And talking about her, “Yiayia: Time-perfected Recipes from Greece’s Grandmothers”, showcases sharing and feasting dishes from the kitchens of grandmothers across Greece. Tell me more about the role that Yiayias represent in Greek culture.

Anastasia: Grandmothers from a Greek family might stay at home taking care of the children while men go out to work, but that also means that they have a commanding force over the family. They decide what everyone eats and when everyone sits to eat. I think this is a very defining part of every Greek person’s routine. Grandmothers often looked after the money while their husbands were away, so they had a very good head for what was needed at home for the family. I think that grandmothers are very strong and not so cute and cuddly.

Georgina: After the boom of this first Greek Yiayia’s anthology, you founded “Matriarch Eats”, a project collecting and sharing the stories that have seasoned grandmothers’ recipes all over the globe. How was the idea of this project born?

Anastasia: It was born by me being inspired by my Yiayia and her cooking. She cooks the most amazing dishes! They are very simple, with very good ingredients, and she uses basic equipment like blonde knives and not-so-sharp knives. She doesn’t have a chopping board either, she chops directly into a bowl with this amazing ability like a lot of Greek Yiayias do. She is one of the best cooks that I know and I wanted to recreate her dishes so that once that she is no longer around, I can still have the flavor of being in her kitchen to honor and remember her.

Georgina: How can we see Yiayia reflected in you?

Anastasia: Unfortunately for my man and the people around me, Yiayia has had a huge influence on my personality. Lots of people say that I am exactly like her, that I am very opinionated, quite strong as a person, and a little bit scary in that force. Otherwise, in terms of how I live, I think that she inspires me to eat seasonally. I try my best to cook as much as I can and to take my time while preparing every meal even if it's just for me. Feeding myself is an important part of my day. Even though my Yiayia lives on her own since my papou died, she still focuses on cooking for her every day. I find inspiring that she always has a focus and that she never really stops. Her day revolves around food, nourishing herself and the people around her. I inherited that need of nourishing people around me.

Georgina:  The culinary retreats that you’ve been lately organizing sound like my type of retreat. No yoga, no mindfulness. Just eating, drinking, and discovering hidden gems. Can you tell us more about them?

Anastasia: Yes! What I like about my retreat is that it focuses on wellness but in an epicurean sense. It’s meant for people that like to have fun and not restrict themselves, like myself. I often hear about all these yoga retreats and I think that I would love to go to all these nice places and do yoga every day but I don’t want to restrict my eating and I don’t want to eat salads every day. I want to enjoy the food of the region! So the idea behind this was showing people visiting my island, food that they would not find if they were coming as a tourist. Corfu is a very touristed island. The whole coastline has been very damaged by tourism in the past thirty years and for me, it’s important to show people the island that I know and the one that my Yiayia grew up in. You can have a home-cooked meal on the sideway that doesn’t cost a big amount of money. You can meet local producers respecting old traditions, culinary heritage, and also my Yiayia. You will learn how to make Greek coffee from a person that knows how to make the best Greek coffee. I want everyone to have a fun time, get drunk, dance, enjoy the experience, go on hikes, swim on secret beaches, and discover secret places that I wouldn’t just take anyone to. The places I take my friends to.

Photo: Courtesy.

Georgina: You recently had a beautiful baby, congratulations! How would you like to inculcate in her this way of living, enjoying and perceiving life?

Anastasia: Yes, I recently became a mother to a baby girl named Callipso and there are a lot of things that I would like to share with her. It was very special that I wrote my book “Yiayia” while I was pregnant with her, traveling around Greece and meeting Yiayia while learning lessons of wisdom from them. More than everything, I wanted to give her a lot of food. She started eating solids and from the very beginning, I was adding spices to her food. She’s been playing with her food, touching it, and picking up sweet potatoes and avocados. Today she had a curry with so many different spices in it. So I am very excited to share with her a lot of the passion of squeezing as much as she can of life, traveling, and finding her power as a woman on this planet.

Georgina: Is there any exciting/upcoming project that you would like to share with us?

Anastasia: I am in the editing stage of my new novel and working in a series of supper clubs where I’m hosting dinners in interesting locations in Athens for people to come and enjoy

Photo: Courtesy.