Spinach Pasta — The Recipe That Kept My Hands Busy When My Heart Couldn’t Be Still

My father died in January.

I have been trying to write that sentence for eight months, and it still doesn’t fit right in my mouth. Nikos Papadopoulos — seventy-two years old, built like a man who spent thirty years diving for sponges off the Gulf Coast of Florida, hands the size of dinner plates, opinions the size of the Aegean — was at the bakery on Dodecanese Boulevard in Tarpon Springs when his heart stopped. Just stopped. The way a clock stops sometimes, not because anything broke, but because the spring finally ran all the way down.

My mother Voula found him on the floor, surrounded by sheets of phyllo dough and the smell of honey. I drove from Tampa at ninety miles an hour, which he would have hated. He was a man who believed in following traffic laws, in order, in doing things correctly. I got there in forty minutes. I don’t know what I expected to find when I arrived, but a part of me — the part of me that is still five years old and standing on a step stool in that bakery kitchen — expected that he would be fine. That he would be sitting up, waving me off, saying in Greek, “Why are you here? Go home. Go sell a house.”

He was not sitting up.

My name is Eleni Papadopoulos. I am forty-three years old. I was born and raised in Tarpon Springs, Florida, which is a small city on the Gulf Coast that is famous for two things: its sponge docks and its Greek community, which are really the same thing, because it was Greek sponge divers who built this town a hundred years ago and Greek families who have kept it alive ever since. My father’s family came from Kalymnos, a small island in the Dodecanese, in 1968. His hands smelled like the sea my whole childhood. His voice smelled like ouzo on Sundays. He was impossible and I loved him the way you love something that is woven into the fabric of who you are — not always easily, but permanently.

I am a real estate agent in Tampa now. I have two children: Alexander, who is sixteen and deeply unimpressed by everything, and Sophia, who is thirteen and deeply impressed by everything, and together they form a perfect ecosystem of adolescent chaos that keeps me from thinking too much on the evenings when the house gets quiet. I sell houses during the day. I cook Greek food at night. And apparently, now, I write about it — because it turns out that after your father dies, you need somewhere to put all the things you learned from him that you’re suddenly terrified of losing.

The food is the thing I’m most afraid of losing.

My mother Voula cooked the way Greek women of her generation cook: from memory, without measurements, with a confidence born of making the same dishes a thousand times. “How much oregano?” “Enough.” “How long does it bake?” “Until it’s done.” I stood on a step stool next to her from the time I was five, watching her hands move through dough and filling and sauce, trying to memorize the weight of things, the smell of things, the look of something that was right. I never mastered the phyllo — Voula’s phyllo is a miracle of faith and muscle memory that cannot be taught, only inherited, and it skipped me — but I learned everything else. The béchamel for moussaka. The egg-lemon for avgolemono. The honey syrup for baklava. The slow-braised lamb that my father loved so much he would eat it cold from the refrigerator at midnight if he thought no one was watching.

And pastitsio. God, the pastitsio.

Every Greek family has a pastitsio. If moussaka is the dish you make when you want to impress someone, pastitsio is the dish you make when you want to feed someone’s soul. It is pasta — thick, tubular pasta, like a fat bucatini — layered with a rich, spiced meat sauce fragrant with cinnamon and allspice and a little red wine, then blanketed under a béchamel so thick and creamy it barely qualifies as a sauce. You bake it until it sets into something you can slice, something structural, something that holds its shape when you cut into it and holds your shape when you eat it. It is the most comforting food I know. It is the food Voula made when the world needed steadying.

She made it when Dimitri, my brother, broke his arm falling out of a tree in 1982. She made it when my Yia-yia Despina had her hip surgery in 1989. She made it the weekend I came home from USF to tell my parents I was marrying Mark Sullivan, who was Irish Catholic from Tampa, and my father did not speak for three days and then came to the kitchen and ate two helpings of pastitsio and said nothing, and we all understood that the crisis had passed. She made it when Mark’s real estate empire collapsed in 2008 and I moved back home to Tarpon Springs with two babies and no money and more shame than I knew what to do with. She just made the pastitsio. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to.

She made it after my father’s funeral in January, for fifty-seven people who came back to the house after the service at St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Cathedral. She was in the kitchen at six in the morning, making the meat sauce, browning the beef, pouring in the wine. I stood in the doorway watching her and thought: this is the bravest thing I have ever seen a person do. Her husband of forty-eight years was dead and she was making pastitsio, because that was what you did, because that was how you took care of the people sitting in your living room crying, because the food was the only language left when words stopped working.

I went home to Tampa that Sunday and I made pastitsio. I made it for Alexander and Sophia, who ate it standing at the kitchen counter because teenagers don’t sit down to eat unless you physically require it. I made it and I cried into it, which, for the record, did not affect the flavor. The béchamel doesn’t care about your grief. The béchamel just becomes. Thick and white and warm, smelling of nutmeg, covering everything.

This is my recipe. It is my mother’s recipe, which is her mother’s recipe, which came from Kalymnos and traveled across the Atlantic and landed in a bakery kitchen in Tarpon Springs, Florida, and has been feeding my family ever since. I have measured it out for you because Voula won’t, and someone has to. I have written it down because I am forty-three years old and my father is gone and I understand now, the way you only understand things when you lose them, that the recipes are not the point. The stories are the point. The recipes are just how we carry the stories forward.

Make this. Feed someone you love. Use more olive oil than you think you need. Add the cinnamon — I know it sounds strange if you didn’t grow up eating this, but trust me, the cinnamon is the whole thing, the cinnamon is Tarpon Springs and Kalymnos and fifty years of Sunday dinners at Yia-yia Despina’s house, and you need it. You need all of it.

Kali orexi, koritsi mou. Good appetite. Everything looks better after pastitsio.

The pastitsio is the heirloom, the one I’ll guard forever, but this is the recipe I actually make on the hard nights — the Tuesday-after-the-funeral nights, the I-forgot-to-eat-until-eight-p.m. nights. It is simple and fast and green in a way that makes you feel like you’re taking care of yourself even when you barely have the will to boil water. Twenty minutes, one pan, and suddenly there’s something warm and creamy in a bowl in front of you, and that is enough. Sometimes enough is everything.

Spinach Pasta

Prep Time: 10 min | Cook Time: 10 min | Total Time: 20 min | Servings: 3

Ingredients

• 8 ounces pasta of any type (we used rigatoni)
• 2 tablespoons salted butter
• 4 garlic cloves, finely minced
• 2 teaspoons dried oregano
• 1 cup milk
• 1/4 cup heavy cream
• 1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
• 1/2 tablespoon all-purpose flour
• 5 cups (5 ounces) fresh spinach, roughly chopped
• 3/4 teaspoon kosher salt
• Fresh ground pepper, to taste

Instructions

1. Cook the pasta. Start a large pot of generously salted water to a boil. Add the pasta and boil until al dente (check a few minutes before the package instructions indicate). Reserve about 1/2 cup pasta water, then drain the pasta and return it to the pot. Toss with a little olive oil if the sauce is not yet ready.
2. Make the sauce. Meanwhile, heat a large pan over medium low heat. Melt the butter, then add the garlic and oregano and cook for 30 seconds to 1 minute until the garlic is lightly browned and fragrant. Add the milk, heavy cream and Parmesan cheese and cook for 2 to 3 minutes until the cheese has melted. Add the spinach and salt and cook 2 to 3 minutes more, until the spinach is wilted.
3. Thicken the sauce. In a small bowl, mix the flour with 1 tablespoon pasta water. Pour it into the pan with the sauce, then stir until it thickens.
4. Combine and serve. Add the drained pasta to the sauce and toss. If necessary, add a few splashes of pasta water as necessary to make a creamy consistency. Top with fresh ground black pepper and serve. Enjoy immediately; leftovers last refrigerated for up to 3 days.

Nutrition (per serving)

Calories: 369 | Protein: 15g | Fat: 12.3g | Saturated Fat: 7.3g | Carbs: 49.7g | Fiber: 3.1g | Sugar: 5.2g | Sodium: 509.3mg | Cholesterol: 32.2mg