Filio Williams, an elderly Greek-American, rushes to Mytilene with her granddaughter Helen, to help the Syrian refugees. No one knows her origin, no one knows that the Smyrna grandmother of Filio Baltatzis was once found on the same island, persecuted and a refugee. The notebook with the recipes of the eponymous grandmother unfolds the turbulent history of the cosmopolitan Baltatzi family, as shaped by the tragic international developments that determined the fate of entire nations. Different generations of women of the same family are united in space and time, through the threads of history. Present and past become one.