The 11th edition of Lingerie on Film is here with film by Joana Avillez, Julia Trotta, Julia von Boehm, Miwa Susuda, Molly Rogers, Patricia Iglesias Peco, Quinn Wilson, Sandeep Salter, Zoe Latta, and Nell Verlaque. On the occasion of the series release, we spoke to each contributor about their taste and perspective, pulling at the thread of what colors their lives. Our fifth to share is Mina Stone, a cook, author, and restaurateur.
Mina Stone grew up between Boston and Aegina, and the distance between those two places shaped everything.
Boston was where she learned to be alone. Long stretches of time she filled with the Marx Brothers — she became obsessed, took up the harp because of Harpo, practiced until the instrument made sense. Boredom was the curriculum. You learned to live inside your own head, to make things from nothing, to find the shape of yourself in the quiet.
Greece was the opposite of quiet. Her grandmother's house in Aegina was full: food, argument, reconciliation, sleep. Meals stretched long and then longer — makaronia me kima, the meat sauce perfumed with cinnamon and cloves; fried eggs in olive oil, the edges crisped gold, served with cold cucumber spears cut thick and salted. Her grandmother's kitchen was not a place of recipes. It was a place of abundance and certainty, of knowing exactly how much lemon, how much salt, and never measuring either.
The political conversations would rise to a boil and then dissolve into laughter. Afterwards, breezy naps. Then, eventually, the table again.
The Gita Underwire Bra and Gwyneth Panty in Bluet.
The summer she was fourteen, she spent time in Madrid with her friend Jackie. Jackie's aunt taught them gazpacho, tortilla española, homemade mayonnaise, pan con tomate — the foundations of another cuisine built on simplicity and restraint. It was there, not in Greece, that cooking first became hers. "As soon as I started cooking it felt like a language I understood without having to study very hard," she says. Like the harp. Like solitude. Something clicked open and stayed that way.
Her first book, Lemon, Love & Olive Oil, followed that thread back to its source: to Aegina, to Piraeus, to the belief that a meal built around a few true things — lemon, olive oil, salt — is not a spare meal. It is the most intentional kind. Buy the olive oil in the three-litre tin, she will tell you. Use it in quantities that feel almost reckless.
Cooking for Artists came from a different kind of intimacy. For years, Mina cooked lunch every day at the studio of artist Urs Fischer — gallery dinners, studio meals, the slow accumulation of feeding people who were in the middle of making something. One day Fischer said: let's make a cookbook. They did. What she wanted it to hold was not technique but atmosphere. A natural approach, practical ingredients, the meal as it actually happens. When she cooks, she has to reach toward something she can't quite name — it's what tells her when to add more lemon, when to pull the pan, when the thing is done.
Time is the other ingredient she keeps coming back to. Time to cook, time to write, time to host.
"Keep it simple, but properly seasoned."
What makes a meal memorable, she says, is the commitment to really sitting down. The effort to talk to each other. The feeling, driving home afterward, that something good happened around that table — maybe someone played a game with the kids, maybe the argument got interesting, maybe the food was just right. She thinks about that last feeling often. It is the one she is always cooking toward.
Lingerie on Film #11
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Right now she is in Greece, fixing up her grandmother's house in Piraeus. She swims most mornings in a blue and teal Araks bikini she has been reaching for every day since the weather turned warm.
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