“Island cooking is a very frugal cuisine and makes good use of everything that can be produced on the islands,” says acclaimed food writer Aglaia Kremezi, who wrote a lavish book on island food (The Foods of the Greek Islands, Houghton Mifflin). “The cooks are very ingenious in creating all kinds of dishes with the seasonal ingredients they have on hand. And nothing is wasted.”

Pumpkin, for example, is used throughout in recipes savory and sweet—on Sifnos, it is mixed with almond into a cake excellent with coffee or tea. On Syros, a poor man’s chaviari is made mostly with olives, black and green. And patties throughout the islands come in every variation, for example, with tomatoes on Santorini and fennel on Chios.

Yet while the ingredients are homegrown, the dishes they produce are anything but rudimentary and the pride of island cooks is often as fastidious as a Parisian chef’s. When Kremezi baked a stuffed pasta called latzania on the island of Astypalaia in the Dodecanese and presented it proudly to her hostess, the good lady wrinkled her nose. “Well, I suppose you can’t do better with the summer cheese,” she sniffed.

But for the most part, islanders are invariably generous with their cooking secrets and Kremezis, who has a house in Kea and has visited the islands since she was a girl, is practically a native and feels duty-bound to preserve them. “I think some of these recipes are on the verge of extinction now that many women in Greece work, and the next generation is not that interested in keeping the recipes.”

Which would be more than a culinary shame, because the recipes also are a distillation of island history and reflect the myriad character of the 170-plus islands that adorn the Greek mainland.

The seven Ionian Islands, for example, variously ruled by the Venetians, French, and English, understandably have a more sumptuous and cosmopolitan cuisine. Corfu retains not only Venetian words in its dialect but flavors in its cooking, some of it now forgotten even in Italy. There is a stuffato stew made with quince, vegetables, and meat or poultry and a sofrito flavored with garlic, parsley and vinegar.

The Aegean Islands are similarly bicultural, especially the big islands of Chios and Lesbos, which were centers of trade and commerce for centuries.

"In Chios, as in some of the other islands, like Corfu, there are two distinct traditions," says Kremezi. "The tradition in the houses of the rich, who had books and who were merchants or were in shipping. And then there is the tradition of plain cooking in the villages, which is also very interesting. And sometimes the two intermingle."

Lesbos is famous for its poets, olive trees, and ouzo (Elytis and Sappho were natives and eleven million olive trees carpet the island) just as Chios is famous for its poet (the island claims a Homer's rock), sweet mastic which once beguiled the sultan and his harem, and its own ouzo.

But Greeks are Greeks and islanders fiercely-proud despite their common history, as Kremezi found out when she ordered Mini, a Lesbos' ouzo in Chios. "Are you from Lesbos?” came the scornful response. “Obviously you know nothing about ouzo."

And then there are the Cyclades, once considered barely habitable, even by Greeks, and where the cuisine was correspondingly spare. In Santorini (where parcels of volcanic cliff now fetch Park Avenue prices), the baking of paximadia became a high art because there was little else available. The dried bread, usually made from barley, was baked only three times a year because the island barely had wood to fire the ovens and the paximadia were easily stored for later use.

"So they had to bake breads that they dried and then they dipped in water and ate with chick peas and the fava and the various beans that are the staple of the islands," says Kremezi.

Similarly, the wonderful cheeses of the Cyclades were the product of the goats kept by the islanders because they were the few animals that could survive on the once-barren outposts.

"And then the cooking of the Dodecanese is much more spicy,"

Kremezi reports, shifting outposts and traditions, and recalling the day on Karpathos when the daughter of the local priest at Olympos showed her the art of mixing spices: "Every woman in the village has a bowl filled with an aromatic blend of coarsely crushed coriander seeds--grown and dried in the village--and ground all-spice berries, cinnamon, cloves, cumin and black pepper. Each cook has her own special proportions...making the mixture hotter with a generous amount of pepper or more fragrant with cinnamon and cloves."

The common thread, of course, among all the islands is the cooking for church holidays and celebrations, such as Easter, preceded by the 40 days of abstinence during Lent that produces some inspired recipes: Lenten grape leaves stuffed with rice; pasta with olive oil, onions and spices; tomato and onion flatbread; zucchini or chickpea fritters.

And while many traditions have influenced the islands, they in turn have affected mainland Greece as well.

"My research shows that the actual food of the mainland, especially the food of Athens and the urban food of Athens, started from the islands," says Kremezi. "Because the islands were more cosmopolitan and much more advanced long before Athens became the capital. The cooking of Corfu, for example, was a basis for the urban cooking of Athens."

Greek island cooking has now made inroads into Greek kitchens in American and Kremezi encourages people to “go out and shop for vegetables and fruits and greens at the farmer's market, so that they can get more flavorful, seasoned produce."

She says you might miss the vine-ripened tomatoes of Ithaca when making chicken stuffed with tomatoes, feta cheese, and garlic, "but then you can use sun-dried tomatoes that deepen the flavor and then you can make the dish all year round."