How a simple dish from Crete connected me to forgotten childhood memories

They told me the best food in Greece was in Crete.

That all the island's traditions had remained intact because it was the biggest one and people lived there all year round — not like the smaller islands, where people only stayed for summer.

That there was lots of agriculture because the climate was conducive to growing just about anything. Not just Greek vegetables — tomatoes, cucumbers — but tropical fruits now, too — mangoes and avocados.

If the best food in Greece was in Crete, then the best food in Crete was at Ntounias.

Editor's note: Since this story was written, Greece has been hit by wildfires, with Crete placed on high alert.

The definition of slow food

The restaurant Ntounias resides in a mountain village called Drakona, 40 minutes from the city of Chania. In the images I googled, the road leading there seemed to circle the face of a mountain, the village at its peak.

The tiered limestone of the surrounding mountains seemed to reflect the light, no matter the time of day.

The food at Ntounias was slow in every respect. Everything was grown on-site: cheese was made using milk from the animals they reared; an indigenous variety of wheat was grown to bake their bread; they didn't use electricity to cook, only fire.

In my research, I'd watched a YouTube video where the owner used traditional clay pots to fry potato chips in olive oil. Four pots had been presented in a row in front of the restaurant, raised in a wooden structure atop burning branches — they looked holy.

In the video, Stelios, the owner, was wearing a white T-shirt smudged black with soot. He was doing his best to smile at the tourists filming as flames danced around him and oil splattered in the pan. I'd thought at the time that it looked like my kind of religion.

I'd tried to contact the restaurant for weeks with no reply. I sent emails and left voicemail messages. I'd even messaged their poorly moderated Facebook page; I could see they'd seen it.

I booked a trip to Crete anyway, before the summer season started, with no real alternative plans to working there.

When I arrived at the restaurant, although the owners seemed perplexed at my offer to work for free, they dragged my bags into the guesthouse anyway. I was working by the end of the day.

Nutty, chewy and sour

In the restaurant, dishes cooked each day were governed by what was available in the garden and what we had on hand.

Those clay pots were loaded mostly with vegetables to be braised in olive oil and left to simmer on the fire.

The restaurants speciality was goat kleftiko — small parcels of goat with olive oil, lemon and herbs in baking paper, roasted slowly in the wood fire oven.

Once the dishes were ready, I made a point of going through them and tasting each one.

One morning, I opened a pot of stewed eggplant, tomato and some kind of grain. The grain was course, nutty, chewy and sour. It was trahana. The taste was disarmingly nostalgic, but I wasn't sure why.

A lost memory rediscovered

Trahana is a type of cracked wheat. In spring, when there is excess milk production, the wheat is soaked in milk and then dried out to preserve it. The resulting product adds richness to soups and dishes.

I became obsessed with the grain and how to cook it. Each day I'd eat this same dish, trying to connect my feelings to the taste, but they would always be slightly out of reach.

I reported back to my family what I was eating and doing, sending photo messages to my father of all the dishes. He laughed at me.

"Trahana" he said, "Ella, you used to eat that all the time."

Then sent me a photo of my Yiayia drying the grain on sheets in the backyard. As a child, it turns out, we'd had it in chicken broth.

The memory was lost from my mind, but my not my body.

Ella Mittas has built her career in food working under Brigitte Hafner, Annie Smithers and Ismail Tosun in Australia, honing her skills in London, Tel Aviv and Istanbul. She is also the author of Ela! Ela!