Pasta Grannies: The Secrets of Italy's Best Home Cooks

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The nonne featured in Bennison’s book Pasta Grannies: Comfort Food represent the many places and traditions that she and her team discovered as they trekked through Italy. Bennison credits her “granny finder” of six years, chef Livia De Giovanni, with discovering their talent. De Giovanni partners with Bennison in approaching mayors and community organizations in regional areas, then discusses the book and YouTube concept with families to ensure that there is agreement from all about the nonne taking part in filming. It’s a team of four, including cameramen Andrea and Luis. She lived in a very remote, rural part of Liguria in the mountains, and there’s so many villages that have been depopulated, and people have gone into cities. The resilience of these women came through in a lot of the stories. The fact is that in poor society, money isn’t the currency, labor is. Society functions through helping each other.”

Featuring easy and accessible recipes from all over Italy, you will be transported into the very heart of the Italian home to learn how to make great-tasting Italian food. Pasta styles range from pici – a type of hand-rolled spaghetti that is simple to make – to lumachelle della duchessa – tiny, ridged, cinnamon-scented tubes that take patience and dexterity.

Pasta Grannies was the glorious consequence of Bennison’s move to Cingoli, Marche, northeast of Rome, on the Adriatic Sea facing Croatia. Making a home there, amid the mountains and the sea, enabled her to travel around the regional and rural towns to meet with grandmothers and to film them telling their stories and sharing their recipes for Bennison’s YouTube channel. “With Pasta Grannies, we go all over Italy, but we don’t end up in the touristy areas because that’s not where you find old-fashioned cooking,” she explains. But, I say to Bennison, there is something magical about the texture, the aesthetic, and weight of a cookbook that remains so enticing, a quality that is missing from a search engine-generated recipe. As for the allure of Pasta Grannies, Bennison is succinct: “People come for the pasta but stay for the grandmothers.”

Make the egg pasta dough as described in Silk handkerchiefs with basil pesto from Liguria, below, swapping one egg for 55ml of water. Leave the dough, covered, to rest for at least 30 minutes. The layout is very concise, and complemented by beautifully wholesome photos of the nonne in action or of their completed dishes. Bring a saucepan of salted water to the boil and cook the tagliatelle for a minute or two; you want it to be al dente. Use a spider to scoop it out and dump it into the sauce. Saute everything for another minute, and ladle in a bit of pasta water into the pan if the mixture looks a bit dry. When you have good ingredients, you don’t have to worry about cooking. They do the work for you.” – Lucia, 85 To make the sauce, add a slug of olive oil to a large saute or frypan and place it over a medium heat. Add the onion, carrot and celery and fry gently for 7-10 minutes until soft. Add the garlic and dried red chilli flakes and a pinch of salt and cook for another minute or so, making sure the garlic doesn't brown.Put the clove in a mortar with the pine nuts, then pound with the pestle and grind the two together into a rough paste.