6 Questions with Christina Xenos

  1. What is your most treasured possession?

    I live pretty light and try not to collect things. When I travel rather than trinkets, I mainly bring home loads of dried herbs, teas, honey, jams, and other ingredients to help me recapture what I was eating on my trip. But I have amassed quite a cookbook collection — especially Greek cookbooks — that continue to inspire me. That, and my mother just found a blanket that my grandmother wove before she left her village in Crete. She actually cultivated the silk she used in it from her own silkworms that she tended to. It’s amazing to me that I have it more than 100 years later.

  2. This isn’t your first trip here. What’s one of your favorite memories of Greece?

    If I had to pick one specific memory, it was when I was in my 20s and visiting Milos for the first time. I was staying with family friends and we were walking back from lunch at a local restaurant. All of a sudden this guy rolls up in a pick up truck and my friends say, “Get in! That’s your cousin!” I spent the rest of the day driving around the island with him, meeting all my cousins and hearing family stories and generally filling in the gaps from when my grandfather and great grandfather left the island in the 1920s.

  3. Will MO/AD travelers get a taste, or a glimpse, into your family history on this trip?

    Absolutely! I’m lucky to have family roots all over the island. On this trip we’ll visit Chania and Rethymno where my grandmother and grandfather respectively immigrated from in the early 1900s. Crete was barely even a part of Greece then; it only united with Greece in 1921. I enjoy visiting their villages whenever I’m back, and trying to visualize them living there.

  4. Greek coffee. Tell us about how it’s different (and better).

    Greek coffee culture is the perfect illustration on how Greece sits in the middle of east and west. Our traditional Greek coffee — the grounds we slowly heat over embers that are sometimes spiced with cardamom — brings you to the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa. And then you have all of your espresso beverages that are more in step with the Western Europe. But in the summer iced coffee is pervasive. Whether it is the whipped Nescafe Frappes (that’s right, we invented it and Dalgona coffee has nothing on us), or Freddo Cappuccinos, Greeks live by their coffees. The only question is: How many can you drink in a day?

  5. Who is someone you’d love to cook with, past or present?

    My grandmother Chrysanthe passed away when I was really young, and even though I have some wonderful memories of cooking with her, I’d love to cook with her again. I’ve been fortunate enough to talk through some of her recipes — like her Melamakrona Christmas cookies and Manti dumplings — with my aunt and every time I cook them I remember her.

  6. If Greece was a dish, a feeling, a fruit, it would be…

    Spanakopita, freedom and possibility, pomegranate