Flour, water and salt (Newcomer Award 2025)

The winning entry to the Guild of Food Writers Newcomer Award 2025, written by Loukia Constantinou

I find out about a tragic death in the family over a breakfast of toast, figs and anari.

According to my grandmother, an uncle of hers, known for his effortless rhythm was at a family wedding sometime in the 40s or 50s, where he took to the dancefloor in celebration. Everyone marvelled; one man, so much so that he couldn’t bear it – his envy drove him to the stage where he thrust a knife into the chest of her uncle, and the entire village in attendance, clutching their bags of sugared almonds, bore witness to his dramatic demise.

Yiayia doesn’t mention what happened to the perpetrator, or who he was; only that she loved this uncle so much, that she named one of her sons after him – a son who, in a gently poetic turn of events also grew up to be an excellent dancer himself. Thankfully my own uncle is not as good at dancing as his namesake, since so far, his moves haven’t put him in any life-threatening situations.

It’s not clear if this anecdote is true, but I hear at least two variations of it during one or other of yiayia’s pasta making sessions. It’s not quite the holiday breakfast chat you expect, but it’s what she recalls as she prepares her ingredients: flour, water and salt. Yiayia is 95 years old, tiny and mighty, with silver bouclé hair pulled back into a bun and a parting, framing her dark olive face and its elegant waves of wrinkles. She has dressed in black since my grandfather passed away 21 years ago. Occasionally she wears odd shoes – not to make a fashion statement, but because she can’t see well enough to tell the difference. Still, her impaired vision doesn’t stop her from getting ready each morning, making herself a breakfast of coffee, olives, bread and cheese, before taking to her dough.

Flour, water and salt; she freely pours them into a bowl and mixes with her hands. There’s no weighing or measuring, barely even any looking. She relies on touch and sound to get it right. Then begins the kneading. Once the dough reaches the perfect consistency, it rests. When it’s ready, she takes a seat on the veranda, guarding the neighbourhood, while she rolls and hand-cuts it into a kind of pasta that I’ve only ever seen in Cyprus: short, thin tubes that resemble twisted toothpicks, shaped around reeds taken from the dried-up rivers surrounding the village. A matriarch in the truest sense, she has sustained generations of our family with her love and with her cooking; 5 sons, 18 grandchildren and 44 great grandchildren.

As a child of the diaspora, I visit Cyprus every summer and have done so since I was born. In recent years, I spend more time with her, at my uncle’s holiday home where she now lives – alone – but with a constant rotation of relatives checking in on her and delivering food parcels. I enjoy her company while I still have the privilege to, but I’m also learning how to make her lifegiving pasta.

I call it lifegiving pasta because I wonder if this simple daily activity is keeping her alive. While she’s absorbed in her dough, it strikes me how she fluently recounts stories about our family, from another time and another kind of world, with complete vigour. I can barely remember what I did yesterday but based on yiayia, more practice with flour, water, and salt could help.

Stretching, cutting and shaping

The house she was born in, and lived in until the pandemic forced her to move, is on a narrow street in the centre of the village. We reminisce on it while we work through a block of dough, stretching, cutting and shaping. I struggle to manipulate my piece, while yiayia’s small, disfigured hands work quickly and hypnotically – her muscle memory unerring.

A traditional Cypriot home, made of ancient, whitewashed adobe, the front door opens into a shaded vestibule leading to a long, wide courtyard. Across the back wall, a chicken coop and rabbit hutches. To the left is the outdoor kitchen and clay oven, for serious cooking. To the right, the indoor building begins. You enter through the “clean kitchen”, which connects to another five rooms, arranged in the shape of the Greek letter gamma. This layout is mirrored upstairs with a landing overlooking the action of the courtyard.

A utopian centrepiece, the courtyard is a social space, a workspace, and a space to grow a harvest for every season. Its rhythm is dictated by the movement of the sun. Grapevines stretch across a wired canopy, dappling the light in the front part of the yard. Underneath, a table and chairs for a shady morning breakfast. By lunchtime, activities move into the vestibule or indoors – away from the relentless sun. By dinnertime everything takes place at the far end, where you can rely on a steady sunset breeze.

As far as possible time is spent outside, where trees bend with a bounty of lemons, pomegranates and almonds. In the past, chickens and rabbits were lovingly bred before being pragmatically slaughtered, then exchanged for olive oil, potatoes, ewe’s milk to make halloumi – anything to feed the family. The front door opens in the morning, and most days it stays open until bedtime. It’s no surprise therefore when a neighbour or relative suddenly appears between the foliage calling her name.

We continue to work the dough, and she tells me another story.

Sometime in the early 60s she says, a smartly dressed cousin from the capital turned up unannounced with an unusual proposition that yiayia recounts mundanely, as though there’s nothing unreasonable about it at all. They sat at the morning table for coffee and sesame cookies – a detail which seems too frivolous to remember, but there it is. She says that this smartly dressed cousin from the city and his wife had been trying in vain to have children for decades. He offered to relieve my grandparents of some of the financial burden of having five sons, by taking one of the youngest ones and raising him as his own, for an excellent price.

Of course, I know she didn’t sell my dad, or any of his brothers but still, I ask what her response to his request was. “Cousin, I told him, I would be poorer if I had all the money in the world but was without one of my children,” she says.

We miss that house, with its fruit trees, outdoor kitchen and unannounced guests – even if in a past life, they were smartly dressed cousins from the city, asking to buy a son.

We carry on, stretching, cutting and shaping the dough, then spread our pasta out on a shallow woven paneri. We leave it to dry out in the afternoon heat, and in the evening cool we sift it through, removing any broken scraps of dough.

The first and last supper

Pasta cooked in stock, poached chicken, an avalanche of grated halloumi, dried mint and lemon. This is the first and last meal of any trip to Cyprus. Arguably our national dish, and certainly our national comfort food, it’s one of the only things yiayia prepares these days, since she stopped cooking regularly a few years ago. As she approaches centenarian life, the days of enormous feasts made entirely by her are gone. Her ailing body, and her worried sons keep her from the kitchen in any meaningful way, and though she can’t reconcile this, the handful of things that she can still make, continue to bring everybody joy.

She prepares this meal while I pack my bags, dropping in a few kilos of pasta, to bring back to the UK. We sit down for the last lunch and the last story of the holiday, this time something about my grandfather. As the memorial of his passing approaches, it’s inevitable that we talk about him.

He was an angel! At least, this is the only thing yiayia would have you believe about him. It’s not that he wasn’t a good man – he was brilliant in many ways – but still, I’m amused at the way she reminisces on him so selectively and rose-tintedly. He was a saint! He wasn’t a gangster or anything – he was a musician, which some might say is just as bad. A master violinist with an artist’s temperament – fussy, particular. He loved her cooking, though. And that, of course, we know is true.

My uncle arrives to take me to the airport. She forces more lifegiving pasta into my hand luggage – it’s not a liquid, it’ll be fine. I oblige, but only if she promises not to stop making it. We all need her to be here next summer too, for the blessing of another first and last supper made by her, and to hear a few more myths about the people that made us.