Four days after his mother Julia died, comedian Gus Constantellis found himself crying in front of the cheese crackers at Trader Joe’s. The store was out of the frozen meatballs he liked, but amid the grief and panic, he remembered something: He knew how to make his mother’s keftedakia.
Constantellis went home and cooked the small Greek meatballs, the first dish his mother had taught him to make. He posted a video about the experience, mentioning that the two of them had once hoped to write a cookbook together. His followers urged him to finish it without her.
“I started really writing it right there,” Constantellis says. “Every day I was working on it as if it was part of my grieving process.”
The result is My Greek Mom’s Recipes: She Died. I Wrote This Cookbook (Rock Point), a collection of 75 recipes interwoven with stories about his mother, his Greek American childhood in Brooklyn, and the complicated business of mourning someone who could roast you and feed you in the same breath. Constantellis will celebrate its publication at Bluecashew Kitchen Homestead in Kingston on September 11 with food, cocktails, comedy, and a book signing.
Constantellis, a stand-up comedian and writer, became a social-media phenomenon during the pandemic with videos impersonating his Greek mother. When his actual mother began appearing in the videos, she developed her own following. She had lived in the United States for four decades without learning English, and Constantellis became her translator and comic partner.
“I’m softening, I’m reworking—we’re doing the comedy together,” he says. Eventually, his mother took greater control of the videos. “She was like, ‘People are fucking listening to me, and I like this. I have something to say, and I’m fucking funny too.’”
Those videos captured her formidable energy, but the cookbook gives Constantellis room to portray the fuller, more complicated woman behind them. He wrote with the candor of someone who assumed no one would ever read the pages, treating the manuscript almost like a diary. “I wanted it to be real,” he says. “I wanted it to be what actual people’s families are like. That’s more authentic than me just being like, ‘Everything was great.’”
Reconstructing the recipes required its own detective work. Like many immigrant cooks, his mother measured by instinct, offering instructions such as “a handful,” “as much as it takes,” or simply “use your eye.” Constantellis worked with his aunt Zoi over FaceTime, approximating quantities as she cooked, and enlisted a professional recipe tester to help turn the family’s accumulated intuition into reliable instructions.
One breakthrough came while Pigates, Greek almond shortbread cookies. Working in his mother’s kitchen, Constantellis kept adding flour to the dough until it suddenly took the right shape. “I instinctually knew from helping her out as a kid,” he says. “I was like, ‘This is it.’”
Cooking his way through the book also gave him a fresh understanding of his mother’s exasperation. After spending an entire day preparing food, he caught himself insisting that he would eat it that day, the next day, and for as long as necessary. Suddenly, her outrage when the family wanted Chinese takeout made perfect sense.
The book’s blunt title reflects the family’s habit of placing jokes and death side by side. Constantellis originally proposed My Dead Mom’s Recipes, which his publisher rejected. The eventual title preserves the essential mixture of mourning and dark humor he inherited from his mother, a woman who might attend a funeral and casually announce that the deceased had been an asshole.
The September 11 event at Bluecashew begins at 6pm with Greek-inspired drinks and tastings from the cookbook. Constantellis performs a short stand-up set at 6:45pm, followed by a signing and meet-and-greet, with music by DJ E-cology, AKA Eli Soul Clap. Admission is free.
