Aglaia Kremezi has written extensively on the foods of the Greek islands. She will be our guide to the island with perhaps the most captivating kitchen: Crete. Let’s meet Aglaia Kremezi.

Q: What makes Cretan cooking distinctive?

The basic character of Cretan cooking is the same as the rest of Greece. But since Crete is a big island that produces a lot of cheese, vegetables and legumes, its cuisine is richer than that of other islands that are smaller and dryer. The cooking is based on seasonal produce complemented with grains in the form of bread and biscuits, especially the dried barley bread called paximathia.

Q: Tell us about paximathia.

Crete is mountainous, and it’s not easy to grow wheat there, so barley has long been the principal grain. Since Byzantine times, people have been making barley bread and slicing it and re-baking it in a slow oven so it hardens and keeps for months. This is a staple food of Crete and very healthy because it has a lot of fiber. You can dip the rusks in water and drizzle them with olive oil the way Italians serve bruschetta.

In Syros, when fishermen cook fish soup, they put a sieve on top of the cauldron and put barley biscuits in the sieve. As the soup boils, the steam softens them and adds a wonderful fragrance. You put the rusks in the bowl and pour the soup over.

On the island of Santorini, people create an extremely tasty but simple sweet by grinding the rusks with dried grapes and sesame seeds or almonds and a few spoonfuls of the sweet wine of the island. They shape the mixture into little balls, and these are the candies that poor people invented because they didn’t have anything else.

Q: Why is the Cretan diet considered the model of the healthful Mediterranean diet?

We Greeks consider Cretan cooking the cuisine of the poor. But in the late 1950s and early 1960s, researchers began to study the diet of countries around the world, and they found that the diet of Crete—based on olive oil, barley biscuits, some other breads, cheese, seasonal vegetables and pulses [edible pods and seeds] —was the healthiest of all. People lived longer there and fared better. They didn’t have cancer or cardiovascular disease.

Q: Is this changing as Crete becomes more prosperous?

The model was the diet of Crete in the late 1950s, when people were really quite poor. They had meat only once a week, if that. Later, as Greece became more prosperous, Cretans started eating more meat. Today, unfortunately, people eat meat all the time, and the diet has changed a lot. Crete was the first Greek region to understand the importance of preserving old recipes, but that doesn’t mean they have preserved the diet.

Listen to Kremezi talk about a favorite Cretan pastime, the hunt for wild greens.

Q: Americans might be surprised to learn that Greeks have a large pasta repertoire.

Most people think that homemade pasta is something only Italians do. In Greece, they make homemade pasta with egg dough, or sometimes with just flour and water. In Crete they make a shape similar to cavatelli, but usually they make half-inch squares, called hilopites, and a kind of tagliatelle.

Homemade pasta is something people used to make when they didn’t have the means to offer meat to guests. But Greek pasta is usually not cooked in water that’s thrown away. It’s cooked in the sauce.

Greece’s favorite pasta dish? Click here for Kremezi’s opinion.