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I carefully lifted one thin sheet, draping the unwieldy dough in my hands until it clung to the butter-slicked sides of the pan.“Bravo, koukla.”She applauded my “skill” while she moved quickly to butter every inch. “Again,” she said.
We repeated the pattern over and over. Me, flicking through sheets of pastry, her telling me it wasokay, okaywhenever my fingers got too clumsy and I tore one in half, or a drop of butter prematurely glued two sheets together.
Working with phyllo was like making biscuits on a meta level. Instead of grating in the butter and fluffing it into the flour with a dough fork, it was like a microscope had zoomed in as we perfectly placed the fat between layers with the utmost intention.
After fifteen layers of butter and pastry, my mouth watered. Other women had already placed their baklava pans into the ovens, and the fragrance was blossoming. Nutty, buttery bliss floated through the air, warmed with winter spices.
I closed my eyes and when I opened them, several of the women were frowning in my direction.
Yia-Yiá stilled my hands as she gestured to a beat-up silver bowl next to me. “Next you put the nuts.”
“All of them.”
“No. I say when.”
Granny was the same. Never measured. Never even had a clue what a cup of something would’ve looked like. “What’s in this?” I sprinkled the nut mixture over the bottom layers of the baklava.
“Eh, walnut, sugar,garífallo. Pós les garífallo?”She asked the woman across from us.
“Cloves,” the woman spat.
Another quiet chorus of Greek erupted around the room, the women careful not to make eye contact with me.
I ignored them to focus on my task. I was hard pressed and determined to do good work. To make Yia-Yiá tell mebravoagain, even though I wasn’t doing anything very difficult. To call mewhatever word she’d called me, assuming it was an endearment. It’d been so long since I’d worked together in a kitchen with family, I wasn’t going to let a bunch of salty women rob me of this moment.
Yia-Yiá and I finished the other million layers of dough, and butter, and nuts. Then she slapped a dull-looking knife down on the stainless-steel work surface.
“You cut,” she said.
I nodded as she demonstrated the diamond pattern she wanted me to follow. It took a while to get the hang of cutting through the different layers and textures, the soft strata of pastry, the knife-halting walnut chucks that wanted to rip through the pretty top film, but in the end, my lines were surgically straight.
Even the woman eyeing my work across the table shrugged her shoulder, gesturing to the woman next to her.
“What about the honey?” I asked. I’d never made baklava, but I’d eaten plenty enough to know the small amount of sugar we’d put between the layers of pastry wouldn’t be enough to create that glorious eruption of sweetness in every bite.
“After we bake, we put the honey.”
I placed it in the oven.
“Twenty minutes, then we check the color.”
“Baking by color. That’s how my granny did it, too.”
“You’re not Greek.” The woman across from me accused, with narrowed eyes. “You don’t do your cross in church. Where is your family from?” Her accent was decidedly less pronounced than Yia-Yiá‘s, but she was still what Gus calledGreeky Greek, as in from Greece.
“I’m from East Tennessee. The mountains. A ridge so small it’s not even a town. But my granny moved us here when I was seven, after my mom died.”
“Na zisete na ti thimáste,”she said. “May her memory be eternal.”
“Zoese isas,”said another.
“Life to you,” Yia-Yiá translated, patting my hand.
“Your husband’s Yia-Yiá is from the mountains. FromCríti... Crete," she said like an American. “Very beautiful. Different from here.”
“Yes, during undergrad, I did a semester on an archeological dig at the Palace of Knossos. Birthplace of the Minoan Civilization.”
“Ah, you’ve been to Greece. You speak Greek? I don’t think so. No?”
