I’m on set with first-generation Italian-American Rossella Rago and her 86-year-old maternal grandmother, Romana Sciddurlo, to talk about the evolution of her popular online show Cooking with Nonna. By “set,” I mean the humble basement kitchen in Nonna Romana’s house in Bensonhurst, where Rago spent countless hours during her childhood watching her grandmother prepare meals for their family. The fridge is covered with tattered recipes handwritten in Italian, and the embroidered white tablecloth brings back memories of Sunday dinners at my own grandmother’s former house in Flatbush.
As we sit down to chat over espresso and pastries, Rago explains that this Brooklyn neighborhood was an enclave for Italian immigrants from Mola di Bari in Puglia, where both of her parents were born. Her family lived in an apartment in her grandmother’s home until she was 8, and she describes it as a wonderful upbringing. “Nonna was always downstairs, so if we needed anything, we would just come down,” Rago recalls. “You miss that sort of multigenerational living arrangement when you don’t have it anymore—you don’t realize how comforting something like that is until it’s over.”
When she started college at St. John’s University, she moved in with Nonna Romana. And it was here that the idea for Cooking with Nonna was born in 2008 when Rago was a junior. During a family dinner, her father asked her what she really wanted to do with her life. “I blurted out, ‘I should have a cooking show! That’s the greatest job in the world!’” she recounts.
They joked about it and agreed that it would be fantastic to have a show celebrating Italian grandmothers. “We talked about calling it Cooking with Nonna, and a week later my dad told me he bought that web domain name! We had no idea what we were doing, but we figured we should try to do something with it,” Rago says. In June 2009, the show launched on the website and YouTube and has since become a beloved resource, with over 740,000 followers on the Facebook page alone.
The episodes highlight recipes from Nonna Romana and other Italian grandmothers around the country. Rago cooks together with them, often in their own homes, and shares their histories with these dishes in the process. She also has written two cookbooks, featuring classic and holiday recipes from about 30 nonne.
“Writing the books made me aware that everyone has a story, and each one is so important, so being able to tell the stories of so many ladies, about immigration, hardship, essentially about survival…I can’t imagine having to deal with half the things these women have gone through, and how modest they are.”
She feels the recipes are just as essential; even if you have a vague idea of your grandma’s bread recipe, for example, it’s not typically something you could recreate. So when she gets recipes from nonne who have never specified exact measurements for the ingredients, or who explain their specialties to her over the phone, she develops them into precise recipes that can be repeated forever.
“I think food opens the door for us to have this bigger conversation, like who are we and where did we come from, and when people make the food that they grew up with, or that they remember their mother or grandmother making, they feel this very big connection to who they are. That one act really makes them feel like they belong to something, so it’s very important for people to cook together, to have dinner together. It’s really powerful.”
Now 32, Rago says it’s been an interesting and sometimes challenging path for her as a young female in the food industry championing these women in traditional roles. “It was often hard to be taken seriously. Women in the industry have always had kind of an uphill battle…even though I come from a background in which women cook more, in media it’s often men who are at the forefront, like in many food travel shows.”
She stresses that there were definitely periods when progress seemed slow, and that a figure-it-out-as-you-go attitude contributed to the success of Cooking with Nonna. Case in point: she expanded the brand to include a product line of kitchen accessories, apparel, pasta, and more. But that development was not something she had ever planned.
“I didn’t just wake up one day and decide I want to sell things to people; it happened because my grandmother became an 86-year-old influencer of sorts—a video of her grating cheese led to comments like ‘I want that cheese grater’ and ‘Where do I get that cheese grater?’ And if you have the means and you think outside the box, you get the cheese grater and start selling it.”
Even with the many facets of Cooking with Nonna today, including group tours in Italy, Rago says she is still happiest when she is cooking. Her favorite thing to make with her nonna is fresh pasta, and orecchiette, the classic pasta of Puglia, in particular. “You just zen out when you make pasta; it’s something so relaxing for me. Orecchiette is the pasta that feels like home for us.”
Rago now lives with her husband in Bay Ridge, not far from Nonna Romana. I ask her how her relationship with her grandmother has deepened over these years, and she responds, “Even though I’ve asked her stories so many times, every time she tells them, I swear I learn something else or catch something new. Last Valentine’s Day she was telling someone on the phone about the first time she saw my grandfather, and I’d never heard that story before, and I remember being floored by it!”
She adds, “It’s so important to ask someone like my grandmother, if you have an aunt or a relative, you should ask them everything! Go through old photos and ask who all those people are in the photos because sometimes you don’t think of it until it’s too late. Sometimes I look at a picture and I’m like, was this in Italy or was this here, and who’s this guy, and I’m so grateful that I have her to ask, and that she is here.”