My grandmother used to say “If you knew their problems, you’d
keep yours.”
The point being, you never know what’s going on in someone else’s world, and since publishing progress doesn’t happen in weeks this is a good time to introduce you to a few of the compelling cast of twenty characters that live within the pages of Home Cookin’ – The Stories Behind The Food.
Meet Some of the Characters that Live in Home Cookin’ – The Stories Behind The Food
Hearing peoples’ stories humanizes them. Often their accounts are stranger than fiction. Each chapter is an intimate profile of everyman/everywoman subjects’ lives in addition to some of their prized recipes that they graciously share.
Enter Lolita Sayadian and László Schiller. Among my earliest food inspirations are an Italian-American housewife/grammar schoolteacher, and a Hungarian refugee. Their spirits were the benchmark of what I was trying to reproduce first as I cooked for friends, and later professionally as I cooked for royalty (both real and rock). Featured recipes: Lolita’s lasagna, and a mess-o-greens from the son of a sharecropper.
Synglitiki “Tita” Zervos aka Cool Yiayia is a Greek granny with a backstory you’d never imagine by looking at her. It took awhile but once she opened up she told me how both the Nazis and Italians occupied her tiny island, forcing relocation to a displaced persons camp outside Cairo. Her Hollywood shaped impression of America was the White House, not Gary Indiana as the wife of a mill rat steelworker. Featured recipes: Lenten Chickpeas, Dolmades
Growing up in the Cabrini Green Housing Project, Barbara Farmilant is equal parts streetwise and elegant… a nurse that’s a force of nature with tons of heart that doesn’t suffer the fool. She’s seen a distraught mother throw her child from a roof and negotiated with both gang leaders and police and found them quite similar in some aspects. Featured recipes: Fried Chicken, Sweet Potato Pone
Zaheen Aziz, maid, mother and refugee has dark, piercing eyes hinting at the story to come. Inquisitive, wise and gentle, they’re pained as well. Speaker of 6 languages, she grew up the middle class daughter of a merchant who because he helped neighbors by extending credit, came under suspicion of Ethiopian rebels and “disappeared”. All assets seized, with a stop in Djibouti before America. Featured recipes: Doro Wat, Tikil Gomen
If You Knew Their Problems, You Would Keep Yours
You think you’ve got it rough and then you meet someone whose home was bombed and relatives maimed. Hard enough for the most agile, but for a family with small children (one wheelchair- bound) it’s even harder.
This story begins in Syria but it’s American as well.
Nawar Almadani and her family fled the Assad regime and came to America for the same reasons my family fled the Bolsheviks over a century ago. Her home was torn between chaos and crisis.
“War is normal in my country (sighs). No food. No school. No work. Everything stops—except the killing and the dying.” Fearing her husband’s conscription they got to America. Featured recipes: Grilled Kibbe, Fatoush
Hello neighbors. Nice to meet you.