Author Archives: Diana Farr Louis

“The storm is called ‘Elpida,’ or Hope, but does it bring hope with it? Hope that our lemon tree on Andros will not suffer frostbite; hope for all the citrus groves in Greece—for this is a countrywide phenomenon, hitting even Crete; hope for the farmers and market gardeners who pray their produce will not be […]

“As the summer drew on, we became aware that we were living in a bubble, somehow protected from the disasters that seemed to be striking most parts of the world. Besides the unstoppable fires in the West of the US and Canada, floods were killing people and tearing towns in half in Germany, while a […]

“Dearest Friends and Rellies, sorry it’s been so long since you last heard from me, but since the lockdown ended on May 14, exactly a month ago as I write this, I’ve had no wish nor time to sit at the laptop composing epistles or even jotting a quickie update.”—Diana Farr Louis Eating Well Is […]

“Didi found me a small pension in Calenzana, a nearby village notorious for being a center of the Union Corse and the white slave trade. ‘How can you go there on your own,’ friends would exclaim. ‘You’ll be abducted by your straight blonde hair and whisked off to Saudi Arabia!’”—Diana Farr Louis Eating Well Is […]

“Maroussi would be an idyll that lasted almost two decades. I would meet the rest of my neighbors, who included a quintet of wonderfully eccentric older ladies, Greek, English, and Maltese; an academician/professor of philosophy; the mothers—as stout as one of the house’s heirloom wardrobes—of boys who would become Duff’s pals; an English woman my […]

“I also remember the tales of my mother-in-law, my first husband’s mother. Dora Lada, known to the family as Dodo, was born in 1900. She brought up her two children on her own, after her husband died of something preventable not long after the Stock Market crash of ’29. Dodo did not resemble the eponymous […]

“The journey I’m about to describe took place a few years ago, but it could well have happened four or five decades ago. We seemed to travel back in time as we chugged around the Cyclades in an aged steamer. If you have not lived here among the Greeks, you probably don’t know the expression […]

“Then, I might stare at the laptop screen for a few minutes until I remember a phone call that must be made. Today—and this is five days after I started this piece—we have to go to the spring (15 minutes away) to fill up our water containers, and down to the port (15 minutes in […]

“It all began on a tennis court in the late 1980s. I was co-editing a magazine for a Greek hotel chain and, since we were writing most of the articles ourselves under pseudonyms, we were searching for someone to do a food column. Whom to ask but my French tennis partner? You can always rely […]

“The neighborhood around Boulevard Haussman was residential and stuffy, staid apartment houses with few shop windows to peer into. But before long I found myself in front of a façade masked with heavy curtains and the name Cordon Bleu stamped in gold letters on a discreet dark blue background. The door was ajar, so I […]