Nonna Vision

Imagine having a nonna  -grandmother who can teach you everything about pasta making and then some. You can thanks to the You Tube Channel, Pasta Grannies. It's everything home chefs need to recreate good Italian home cooking.

Kim Severson wrote about this amazing channel and the person behind it in yesterday's New York Times Food section.Pasta Grannies is the brainchild of Vicky Bennison, a former British business person. She had always been interested in food , seeking out local specialties when she traveled to such places as Turkistan , Siberia and Kenya. Ms. Bennison soon was writing a series of food based travel guides and then a cookbook. The Pasta Grannies came about when she and her husband, Billy Macqueen, the children's TV producer behind Teletubbies, bought a house in The Marche region of Italy fifteen years ago.  Some local cherry wine makers invited her over to dinner of rabbit ravioli. The grandmother who made it had to be cajoled to come out the the kitchen. Then there was the pasta making lesson from another local nonna.Ms Bennison became obsessed with the importance of homemade pasta in an Italian household and the women who created it. Initially she had thought to write a cookbook about these home chefs and their recipes. However pasta making is very physical. Pictures were not going to cut it. Video was needed.

She first made one video a month, posting them on YouTube as a way to organize the work and to show publishers  that it was a worthy idea.It start as a hobby but then viewership expanded to 5,000 subscribers. Then the videos started to appear on Facebook and food sites. The catalyst was an article in a 2018 Business Insider which featured an article highlighting some of the rarer pastas. A video by Cesaria, a Sardinian nonna who made filindeu, a kind of woven pasta and lorighittas, braided pasta rings , garnered millions of page views. (Cesaria was nonplussed by this and laughed her head off at her newly found fame). The videos  caught the eye of YouTube executives and even green lit a documentary on the women for their Spotlight channel. The videos are informative and show pastas , from all over the Italian Republic, from Puglia in the south to Lombardy in the north.. It's not just pasta  being made from scratch but mouth watering sauces and fillings as well. Most anyone can make the recipes at home and they're varied thanks to the regions. The women are inspiring , with age - one has reached the century mark - not stopping them. They roll out sheets with ease, cut into neat little squares or strings with a flick of the wrist. Now there is a cookbook , Pasta Grannies  (Hardie Grant Publishers 2019).

Pasta Grannies or Nonnas are a must see. Vicky Bennison has created the perfect channel for pasta lovers and home chefs. It is full of good recipes and advice from talented nonnas  from all over Italy.