Ingredients

For the filling of the fish pie

• 2 leeks from Thursday’s street market, you know, the one by St. Pelagia’s church

• 1 small dry onion

• 3 soupspoons of olive oil

• 1 egg from the thirty-third descendant of the fresh-out-of-the-shell chicken you chased around the yard when you were but a chick yourself, Grandma’s towel whipping behind you—careful, the mother hens will gouge out your eyes like mothers do

• 1 sweetspoon of dill from the windowsill pot

• salt in handfuls

• last but never least, fish

For the pie

• as much flour as it takes, sieved as many times as it needs, for pebbles and regrets always worm their way into the sack

• 2 sweetspoons of vinegar

• 3 glasses of lukewarm water

• more olive oil

Directions

First step

Grandma washes the leeks in a plastic bowl, her crooked fingers peel the onion layer by layer. The pan sizzles and the oil withers up the greens. With its smoke filling the cramped clean kitchen, you’re smaller than the strands of dill drying on the towel. An octopus tentacle stares across you with more eyes than you can count. Grandma found no fish this Thursday.

It’s alright. The taste of ink will grow on you by the time you’ve replaced her at the kneading, the table and her apron and your hands and her bent head sprinkled with flour.

Second step

The city’s fish vendors will try to sell you their bigger catches. Don’t be fooled. You’re looking for atherina, anchovy, sardines. Squids, shrimps, octopi will work too. But any fish not caught by your Grandpa will have to be cleansed by salt first.

Beat the egg until it’s seafoam and it will tie the filling well enough. And for St. Pelagia’s sake, do not use tap water. You’ll never get the phyllo shards out from your stabbed gums, your softened teeth.

Final step

After Grandma’s funeral, you can add some fishblood to the filling. Fry the pie flutes in her vigil lamp’s oil and none would be the wiser. Don’t mind the tears of your estranged aunts and cousins on the crust. Hug them tighter than your phyllo’s wrapped, find the smell of burnt oil in their fingertips.

It’s the last time you’ll come together to eat her fish pie. When you come back for your funeral, it will taste all wrong.