Secrets from the Greek Kitchen

Secrets from the Greek Kitchen explores how cooking skills, practices, and knowledge on the island of Kalymnos are reinforced or transformed by contemporary events. Based on more than twenty years of research and the author's videos of everyday cooking techniques, this rich ethnography treats the kitchen as an environment in which people pursue tasks, display expertise, and confront culturally defined risks. Kalymnian islanders, both women and men, use food as a way of evoking personal and collective memory, creating an elaborate discourse on ingredients, tastes, and recipes. Author David E. Sutton focuses on micropractices in the kitchen, such as the cutting of onions, the use of a can opener, and the rolling of phyllo dough, along with cultural changes, such as the rise of televised cooking shows, to reveal new perspectives on the anthropology of everyday living.

"Sutton's book, impeccably researched and lucidly presented, complicates and challenges this widespread view while also providing the tools and guideposts needed to re-think what it means to cook and the myriad reasons why it matters-in Kalymnos and elsewhere." -- Marcia Carabello Graduate Journal of Food Studies

David E. Sutton is Professor of Anthropology at Southern Illinois University. He is the author of Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memories Cast in Stone: The Relevance of the Past in Everyday Life and the coauthor of Hollywood Blockbusters: The Anthropology of Popular Movies.