Homing In On Home

“There’s nothing a thief would covet, yet all these bits and pieces are precious to us, even the carafe filled with beach glass and the terrace ledges littered with heart stones and anthropomorphic driftwood.” —Diana Farr Louis

Eating Well Is The Best Revenge

By Diana Farr Louis

ANDROS & ATHENS Greece—(Weekly Hubris)—7/4/2016—I’ve been pondering the question of home ever since our fearsome and formidable editor dictated the theme a few weeks ago. I’ve had so many in my life—though I’m not a diplomat’s or army officer’s brat—in at least four countries.

Is home that feeling you get when you open the door and see your familiar belongings and furniture? The smell of fresh wood that greets me here in our small place on Andros, which has remained the same since we built it almost 30 years ago, even though it contains very little wood? Or is it the sight of our olive trees as we open the gate, which have grown so thick they almost conceal our white walls?

Maybe it’s the proprietary sense I have when standing on the terrace that I am the master of all I survey—surely a delusion, since I can do nothing about the rosemary hedge that is turning yellow and threatening to die despite being pruned and watered, or the raids of the stone martens who pluck our apricots before we get here? Perhaps the familiarity of our splendid view, the broad alley between the trees with the prehistoric looking threshing floor, occasionally adorned by a goat, in the middle distance just beyond our own stone boundary and the never static Aegean stretching to the horizon?

There is so much that delights me about this place: the beautiful gray-beige stone floor laid with such care by a Cretan tiler, who was so pleased when I noticed his handiwork; the niches in our walls—called balathoures in the Andriot dialect—that hold treasures picked up on our wanderings; the treasures themselves, pottery from Skyros, Sifnos, Paros, Lesvos, Kythera, and Morocco; paintings of Greek scenes by artist friends; ancient shards, rendered more shardlike by our two-year-old great granddaughter last year; wicker cheese baskets and wooden spoons, and sagging bookcases, one with cookbooks and ten years’ worth of Gastronomos magazine, another dedicated to Seferis and war memoirs in Greek and English, and another for nature books and the tavli (backgammon board).

There’s nothing a thief would covet, yet all these bits and pieces are precious to us, even the carafe filled with beach glass and the terrace ledges littered with heart stones and anthropomorphic driftwood.

Then there’s the sea. Where I am completely at home, barefoot on the beach, swimming for hours, exploring the (increasingly fish-less) underwater-scape. In fact, the water element is the only tie that links me to my first homes on Long Island, where we were never far from the ocean. At one of them, our backyard led to a pond fed by an inlet and exciting marshes where fiddler crabs and herons provided endless entertainment. But Long Island never felt like home to me, if home is where your heart and soul are.

My first home of my own, or let’s say the first place where I paid the rent instead of my parents, was an apartment in a 19^th-century hôtel particulier or private house with cobbled courtyard on Rue Seguier between the Place St. Michel and Quai des Grands Augustins in Paris. It had floor-to-ceiling windows, black-and-white tile floors, and a big kitchen where I executed some of the dishes learned at my few months at Cordon Bleu. Profiterolles and gnocchi au gratin became my specialties. I got a frisson seeing my clothes hanging at the cleaners between Jane Fonda’s and Jean-Paul Belmondo’s, literally sniffing at the hem of stardom if not power.

Charming and romantic-sounding though it may have been, it was not a home but more like a pad. I shared it with one friend and then another and, at some point, it became a place where college and school friends and friends of friends crashed when they got to Paris. After a year, I left it with no regrets, though I do like to look into the courtyard whenever I revisit that city.

Fast forward a couple of years when I returned to Greece as a young bride. I had spent the summer there before my year in Gay Paree and indeed had spent the winter listening to Greek music and poring over a picture album, La Grèce que j’aime. My honeymoon was unorthodox since my new husband left me in the bosom of his family and returned to New York for two months.

Strangely, I did not mind at all, but loved my new status as Auntie to my college mate, and being a part of her family. Thinking back, my sister-in-law Marina Sulzberger’s house on Spetses crystallized my idea of Greeks as gracious, warm, hospitable, well-read, loquacious, trilingual story tellers, thoughtful, brimming with kindness and kefi, an untranslatable word that roughly means joie de vivre. Hers was an open house where everyone felt or was made to feel at home, everyone from movie stars like Vivien Leigh or journalists like Joe Alsop to the delivery boy or the fishmonger. It was simple and comfortable, though we mostly lived outdoors on the spacious terrace, perfumed by jasmine and potted basil round as a sultan’s turban.

It’s the lunches I remember best, family and guests seated at the round table in the dining room that should have been a hall. Eleni the cook, who’d been with the family for 45 years, served the divine Greek classics—from humble lentil soup to zucchini croquettes, keftedes, grouper with mayonnaise—that none of us has ever managed to emulate. Probably we don’t sprinkle in the right amount of love.

Marina’s home was an idyll that ended too quickly with her sudden death in 1976. But in 1971, the one year I did not come to Greece, I found another home in Italy that had the same qualities as hers. I did not live at the Bacigalupos in Rapallo; I had my own little house by the sea, and with my parents in theirs, I was looked after so many people so quickly that the whole town felt like home. And though that idyll lasted but a year, I still think of Rapallo as a place where I am at ease.

A year later, in 1972, I was back in Greece for good, in my ex-in-laws’ spitaki (little house) in Maroussi. For though I separated from my husband, the family never divorced me, not even his mother, who called him “an ass” and vowed she would never acknowledge another Mrs. Lada (I had been Number 3). That little house had been built with love, like ours on Andros, and its occupants—Dora, Marina, and Alexis —had been happy there even though they’d lost their father/husband and their savings with the Crash of ’29. And when my six-year-old son and I arrived on June 4^th, the whole neighborhood turned out to welcome us and offer sheets, towels, and food.

Apart from two beds and three big cupboards, the house was empty, and after a shopping trip to Athens for essentials—a stove, fridge, kitchen table and four chairs—we camped out in it until the fall, padding barefoot on the red tile floors, picking figs, and making friends. Marina had worried that Maroussi was too far from Athens and that Duff and I would be lonely, but that did not happen, as there were lots of kids nearby and the people I already knew introduced me to their friends until we had a ripple effect of expanding circles and deepening ties that has persisted until today.

The Maroussi house, with its sheltering garden, embraced almost everyone who entered and we had countless parties, fueled by our barrel of retsina, but I think also by the cumulative effect of good times, good friends, and heaps of humor and affection.

When we had to leave after 16 years because my ex-husband “wanted to grow old in the house he grew up in,” the spitaki changed overnight. It literally died and it wasn’t only I, perhaps prejudiced, who saw and felt that even after Alexis moved in, the house had become merely a roof supported by four walls.

But in the meantime, Athens itself became home, familiar but always novel, too. My pulse quickens when I spot the Acropolis from whatever angle but also when I enter familiar shops near the Central Market, run into friends by accident or design, watch kids break-dancing in Monastiraki, show visitors my favorite graffiti, or hear a flute playing near the Roman Agora.

Long ago, in the early 80s, I was on holiday in Provence. One night I was wandering through the red-ochre town of Roussillon, drinking in the beauty, loving France and the French language, when from a distant window came the tinkling beat of a Theodorakis melody. A tsunami of homesickness rushed through me and suddenly I found myself sobbing, missing Greece, a severe case of nostalgia or yearning to return (from nostos, return, and algia, sickness, as in neuralgia, from algos=pain).

I’ve since become a human snail, carrying my home inside me and finding that all it takes to feel at home is to be with people I love, admire, and am comfortable with. In the past few years, I find true minds in our book club group of 40-plus years, at Sparoza (the headquarters of the Mediterranean Garden Society), in my neighbor’s yurt on the night of the full moon and, especially, this winter whenever I met with the Boroume team, particularly my co-editor, Tatiana Blatnik, to work on A Taste of Greece, a cookbook in which 40 celebrities contributed recipes and memories connected with their love of Greece. That the German publisher, teNeues, will be handing over the profits to Boroume to help feed more starving people made the meticulous work we did a pleasure, and every time I read and proofread the texts, I felt—and we all agreed—that we were falling in love with Greece all over again.

In this little homily I have not yet mentioned the man who makes my life here possible and rich, though we have become poorer than church mites (sic). Harilaos is my anchor and my hearth, my teaser and my joy, while being The Joy of the People (Hari, or joy, laos, the people), as well. No home would be home without him.

Recipe

Plum Dessert

My English friend Anita L., who gave me this recipe calls it Plum Duff, which I like since that’s my son’s nickname, but it could just as well be a Clafoutis aux prunes. We have two plum trees on Andros. One produces hundreds of almost black fruit that even the wasps shun—they make a horrible mess and smell as though they’re fermenting. The other tree, a gift from Graziella S., bears even more little red plums, called koromila, that are only slightly larger than cherries and unutterably sweet. I have bestowed dozens of kilos on friends, some of whom were not overly enthusiastic but one of whom even carried some off to the UK to make chutney there. They have a multitude of uses, and this dessert, besides being delicious, is also extremely easy, easier than pie.

Ingredients

1 kg/2 lbs plums of your liking

sugar, 2 tablespoons for the fruit and about ½ cup (120 grams) for the batter. I prefer unrefined sugar.

lemon juice

⅔ cup (160 grams) flour

2 tablespoons baking powder

pinch of salt

1 ⅓ cup (320 ml) milk

3 eggs, beaten

1 tablespoon olive or other vegetable oil, plus a little more for oiling the baking dish

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 180 C/375 F. Lightly oil a Pyrex or other baking dish, about 14 inches in diameter. Cut the plums in half and discard the pits. Place the plums in the dish and sprinkle some sugar and lemon juice over them. Sift together the flour and baking soda into a bowl. In another bowl, beat the eggs with the milk and sugar and then add them to the flour and stir until smooth. Pour the batter over the plums and bake for at least 30 minutes or until the top is lightly browned and the batter is firm. Good either hot or at room temperature and even better served with vanilla ice cream.

To order copies of Diana’s Farr Louis’ newest book, A Taste of Greece: Recipes, Cuisine & Culture, from Amazon, click on the book cover below.