Food from Many Kitchens

These are the recipes I grew up with: the recipes that have woven their way through the neighbourhoods of my mind, past indifference and into love. Those that have stayed while others might have fluttered away with a gentle spring breeze. These are the ones I choose to share; the ones that special people have taught me and that I have recorded, sometimes over a pot of coffee at my own kitchen table, and sometimes struggling to understand through the barriers of language on a journey somewhere.

I can remember the smell of those sweets my Cypriot grandmother gave us; their block shapes and bright wrappings, peppered with the eclecticism of South Africa, where we participated in Jewish Sabbath dinners at our friends’ homes and sucked on butter-scotch bars at Scottish fetes on days off from our Greek school.