While researching Italian cuisine for a possible book, British food writer Vicky Bennison came across a number of handmade pasta recipes and traditional cooking skills that seemed in danger of disappearing. Modern women are too busy to spend their days in the kitchen (what about Amatriciana in the pressure cooker?), she was told, so these recipes and techniques were not being passed on to younger generations. Unable to bear the idea of letting these culinary treasures vanish, Bennison spend five years filming Italy’s nonne—grandmothers that are, by common knowledge, the gatekeepers of authentic Italian food—as they prepared regional pasta recipes in their kitchens.
Along the way, she ended up recording 250 women from all over Italy that had spent their lifetimes cooking for their families. Among them was 100-year-old Letizia from Trapani in Sicily, the oldest participant, who proudly showcased her tagliarini with fava bean purée. Bennison ultimately posted the videos on a YouTube channel that—to her surprise—quickly became an internet sensation, garnering nearly 430,000 subscribers.
Now, Bennison is spotlighting 75 of these recipes in a new book, Pasta Grannies: The Secrets of Italy’s Best Home Cooks, published by Hardie Grant and released in the U.S. on October 29th. Some of the dishes featured in its pages are easier to make—such as Nonna Giuseppa’s pici—while others, like Nonna Anna’s lumachelle della duchessa (a ridged, cinnamon-scented tube pasta), may require more patience and dexterity. But while a few of the cooking skills may be harder to master, as one of the featured ladies, Nonna Lucia, says, “When you have good ingredients, you don’t have to worry about cooking. They do the work for you.”
Ingredients definitely take center stage in the sauces, which are mainly made with products local to the nonne’s communities. For example, Nonna Cornelia, who lives by the Ligurian coastline, uses seven varieties of herbs for her pansotti with walnut pesto, picking them when they are still young. Nonna Marica picks her porcini mushroom in the Tuscan region of Garfagnana, and uses them to top for her fresh made strapponi, ragged bits of pasta that also called stracetti. Meanwhile, Nonna Maria, a farmer in the Basilicata town of Sant’Angelo, finds sweet red peppers in her garden to prepare the sauce for her raschiatelli, also known as cavatelli.