What is Love? 10 Grannies share their lessons with me

What I learned about love when cooking with the world's grandmothers

Locked in a bathroom, hot tears streaming down my face and my heart on fire after listening to my best friend’s grandmother describe the moment her husband of sixty years had died in front of her, I realise how important the project I’ve embarked on is. Unwittingly, I’ve been picking up relationship advice from marriage experts for the past decade. Not couples counsellors - I’ve actually just been hanging out with a load of grannies. 

Matriarch Eats began as a personal project, to finally gather all of my Greek grandmother’s recipes, interspersed with her insights (sometimes philosophical, other times blunt and cutting) on life. It soon snowballed into collecting recipes and life lessons from grandmothers of the world.

For my first book, Grand Dishes, I travelled from the UK, to Greece, France, Spain, Italy, Croatia and Poland to cook with grannies of all ages, backgrounds and ethnicities for a weekend each time. I never could have imagined what I would learn about love from the experience. There's an intimacy to be found in someone's kitchen. Invited into these grandmothers’ homes for a weekend, from a Sicilian farm to a cacti-populated private island in Croatia, sharing simple tasks in a kitchen filled with the smells and flavours of a dish loaded with special memories, I form a bond with every woman I cook with. 

That bond, quite naturally, has led to questions I’ve been churning over and over. 'How did you know when you’d met the right person?',  'What makes a happy marriage?' or 'How do you decide when you’re ready for children?'

In my late twenties, I looked to these grandmothers for the answers my friends and I haven’t lived long enough to give to each other. 

Open, willing and with so much wisdom, the answers came over a boiling pot, a finely chopped onion or a well-laid table. Each of the women I cooked with had a unique experience in love. Some had been with only one man their entire life (a concept completely alien to us, by now.) Others mixed up their boyfriends, confusing their memories of various men but always sure on the lessons they had learned from them. One found her true love in her seventies and still claims to be completely mad about him. The one, overwhelming and resounding view that unites all their responses is that a lasting relationship requires a willingness to compromise.

Could it be that we expect far too much from our modern relationships? As suggested by countless theoretical studies on monogamy since, are we putting too much pressure on our partners to be everything, lest we end up with someone that isn’t ‘the one’?

In my twenties, I was attempting to squeeze the man I was with into a mould that fairy tales, novels and Disney films had led me to create for him. I wanted a man who would be my intellectual equal, lover, and best friend. I wanted him to be monogamous for life and remain sexually thrilling, all while being great dad material. Many add financial success onto that wish list, too. If our partners don’t match up to this criteria, then we’re ready and willing to jump back into the dating pool, blindly expecting Romeo to be out there in the sea of topless muscle men and puppy-cuddling profile pics.

I now realise that we don’t know how to hold on to a good thing anymore, or even realise how good that thing we have (or had!) is. Love is not a feeling I should attach to the first six months of a relationship, or to ascribe to someone who sets my body on fire. I now believe it takes a joint willingness to accept the others’ imperfections and to hold hands and run with them regardless, to be in love.

Most of all, what these grandmothers have taught me is you don’t find true love, you maintain it. Read on to share some of my favourite bits of their wisdom, all told in their own words.

Mercedes, 88, Madrid