CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/14/2019

Greek yiayia cooking for the next generation in Mina Stone's 'Cooking for Artists'

Featured spreads are from Mina Stone's best-selling cookbook, Cooking for Artists—inspired by the food she grew up cooking with her Greek yiayia, and on display at her new cafe, Mina's, at MoMA PS1. One of our favorite Holiday Gift Books for Food Lovers, 2019, this volume presents the dishes Stone developed as chef to galleries and artists including Gavin Brown's Enterprise and Urs Fischer, among many others. "I was twenty-four years old and had no idea what I was getting into," Stone writes in her Introduction. "I was freshly out of art school with a BFA in fashion and my own small line of dresses. I started cooking to support myself while I tried to build my label, and—long story short—I realized I crawled into bed with cookbooks much more often than with Vogue. I was never formally trained. I learned mostly on my own, mostly from cooking shows (yes!), and mostly from my eighty-six-year-old Greek yiayia, who cooks every single day the most delicious food you've ever had. She taught me to boil potatoes before roasting them, to make them extra-crispy and soft. She taught me to add the bulk of the olive oil after the food was cooked for full flavor and health. She taught me how to make chickpeas meltingly tender and transform them into the best stew with only four ingredients. She taught me how to cook in order to please people—figuring out what they like and incorporating it into the dish at hand, making more than you need, and going the extra mile."