Pasta Grannies: An Origin Story
How my work documenting the women keeping Italian pasta traditions alive became a YouTube sensation
By Vicky Bennison
The Pasta Grannies story starts before my beginning, with my grandfathers. One went AWOL during World War I and spent years hiding in the Burmese jungle armed with an elephant gun, prospecting for teak; the other was a manager of a cotton farm in 1930s and ’40s Sudan before returning to set up a market garden, supplying London restaurants with exotic vegetables like zucchini (unheard of in the UK at the time). He always smelled like tomato leaves and compost. It wasn’t so surprising my parents began married life in a very rural village on the coast of Kenya, where I was born. My dad trained farmers and researched things like drought-resistant beans, while my mum taught English to girls from the Indian community there; grateful parents taught her how to cook Gujarati and Goan dishes. Throughout my childhood, Sunday lunches always meant curries, with Dad’s chile, mint, and papaya sambal.
Food was what my family thought about, talked about, and always ate together. There were no supermarkets and everything had to be grown, bartered for, or tracked down. Trout was fished in the streams of the Aberdare mountains. Our eggs came from our chickens and the bacon from the agricultural teaching college’s pigs. In my teens in Botswana, cooking was what brought our neighborhood together with regular cake competitions, and communal braai steak suppers deep in the Kalahari bush under glitter ball heavens. Growing up, food for me wasn’t merely nutrition or fuel; it was family, community, and everyday adventure.
As an adult, consulting work took me all over the world. I don’t remember much about the policies and training I grappled with, but I do remember the food. Finding out what people like to cook was one sure way to make friends. Take Turkmenistan: The Tolkuchka Bazaar outside the capital, Ashgabat, was like Star Wars’ Mos Eisley spaceport, heaving with exotically dressed people buying everything from a camel to a carpet. More interesting to me were the huge heaps of basil, destined for tea, and the national rice dish, plov, stained orange from cottonseed oil, eaten as picnic with work colleagues outside a bat cave — in between vodka toasts to the British royal family.
And what has this got to do with Pasta Grannies? Well, on my trips back to London, I would turn on the telly and wonder why food writing heroines like Elizabeth David or Paula Wolfert or Sri Owen didn’t have their own series. These women were culinary explorers who sought out authenticity from home cooks in foreign lands. Surely that would be great viewing. But in the temple of television gastronomy, wise women were not the oracle; chefs had been given the role.
What I also noticed was chefs would go off on gastro-adventures while women presenters by and large stayed in the studio kitchen. (Madhur Jaffrey was an honorable exception). The older I got, the younger and prettier they became, and I’d think, “You are gorgeous, but I’ve been cooking for longer than you have been alive.” Everyone, meanwhile, cited their mothers and grandmothers as their inspiration, but where were they? I wanted to see their insights and experiences on the screen, not cooking framed only as combat or a competition.
“Someone should do something!” I would say, switching off the telly. Being absolutely not famous, well-connected or working in the food media, it wasn’t going to be me.
But then YouTube happened. Not that I noticed — I was busy renovating a home in Italy with my husband. As a distraction from the byzantine complexity of Italian building regulations, I started researching Italian food culture and I noticed it was only older women who made pasta by hand, with a rolling pin. The physicality of pasta-making demands not words or photos but video, so I picked up a camera. It showed that I had no previous experience of filming, but that’s the beauty of YouTube — it doesn’t matter. I wanted to make a record of all the different pasta styles and a domestic tradition that was dying out; women no longer have to make pasta to put food on the table. More than that, I wanted to celebrate older women.
YouTube was a place to file my episodes. For a television series, you need to convince a commissioning editor; with YouTube, you have to convince the audience directly — and Italian grandmothers making pasta is a niche subject. It’s a bit like the Tolkuchka bazaar — anyone and everyone can pitch up and show their wares; the challenge is how you get noticed.
Through persistence, it turns out. It took me three years to attract 5,000 subscribers, and I was thrilled. During this time, I zigzagged across Italy, with my Granny Finder, Livia De Giovanni, filming women (and some men) who had to be over 65 and home cooks, not chefs.
And then it snowballed. One video on an obscure Sardinian pasta, su filindeu, went viral to my surprise — it was rebranded by others as “the world’s rarest pasta” (Why hadn’t I thought of that!?). Then websites like Food52 and Facebook news pages such as Now This started to mention Pasta Grannies. By August 2018, the channel had 300,000 subscribers, and I had an agent and a book deal.
I get a kick out of using modern communication — even though social media can feel like a slightly alarming foreign language to learn — in the service of domestic culinary traditions. Pasta Grannies showcases home cooks, often from tiny villages in parts of Italy where few tourists venture, to a global audience. They are attracted by the pasta recipes but stay for the warm hug of these women’s charm and experience. People write in and tell me I have the best job in the world, and they are right. I have the privilege of meeting women whose everyday skills and stories are nevertheless special.
Vicky Bennison is the author of “Pasta Grannies: The Official Cookbook,” from Hardie Grant that comes out October 29. Follow her @pastagrannies.
