My nonna and her pasta, on YouTube?
Vicky Bennison, a 60-year-old British woman with a background in international development, never intended Pasta Grannies to become a minor YouTube hit or to make stars of Italian nonnas who couldn’t care less about their influencer status.
She simply wanted to create a culinary Noah’s ark to capture a way of life before it disappears.
“I keep thinking: ‘Don’t die before I get to you,’” she said.
Since Bennison began her project nearly five years ago, she has recorded more than 250 women (and a few men) doing what they do every day: rolling pizzoccheri from buckwheat flour to toss with Alpine cheese made only in Valtellina; twisting semolina dough into sagne ritorte to hold the horsemeat ragù popular in Puglia; marrying hand-torn strapponi with porcini mushrooms from a Tuscan forest.
More than 70 are featured in the cookbook Pasta Grannies: The Secrets Of Italy’s Best Home Cooks, which British publisher Hardie Grant will release in the United States on Oct 29.
With 420,000 subscribers, the Pasta Grannies YouTube channel is nothing compared with heavy hitters like Kabita’s Kitchen, an Indian cooking channel that has 5.7 million subscribers. The Pasta Grannies Instagram page is relatively modest, too, with 181,000 followers.
Still, for Bennison, who considers monitoring page views and mastering metrics a necessary evil, the numbers are a testament to the modern appeal of a fading kitchen art as practised by the last generation that had no choice but to make pasta by hand.
“There wasn’t a shop you could just pop around to when these women were younger,” she said. “And when there were, dry pasta was a middle-class thing. You had to have an income to buy it. They made pasta for survival.”
The videos, which feature styles of pasta and sauce that often don’t extend past village borders, are a soothing eddy of Old World expertise and heartfelt respect in the wild waters of digital food media.
There are no Tasty-esque quick cuts or performative tosses of sautéing food. If the camera lingers as the grannies knead dough or cut bits of onion into a pot with their plastic-handled nonna knives, it’s because there is something to learn.
Videos are shot in home kitchens and side yards, with minimal styling and natural light. The subtitles are utilitarian. No one measures anything, but Bennison does her best to fill in the blanks with instructive narration.
Bennison’s crew is small. She and a videographer, Andrea Savorani Neri, shoot the images. Neri’s neighbour in Faenza, Livia De Giovanni, is her granny finder and the ambassador to the women and their families. “She is essential for closing the deal,” Bennison said.
She first made about one video a month, posting them on YouTube as a way to organise the work and show publishers that the idea was worth investing in. “It was more of a hobby, really,” she said. Three years into it, she had about 5,000 subscribers. “I remember thinking how well I was doing.”
Then her videos started to show up on Facebook and food sites. In August 2018, Business Insider posted an article highlighting some of the rarer pastas, like stretchy Sardinian filindeu and intricate lorighittas, prepared by Cesaria, a 95-year-old woman from the Sardinian village of Morgongiori.
The traffic came so fast that Bennison thought at first that her site had been hacked. Cesaria was getting millions of page views. “Everything went ballistic,” Bennison said.
(She went back later to show Cesaria her video and tell her how popular it had become. “She had no idea she was world famous. She just laughed her head off.”)
The videos caught the eye of YouTube executives, who greenlighted a short documentary on Pasta Grannies for a series on the platform’s Spotlight channel, which highlights feel-good tales about people who use YouTube to further their passions.
Although Bennison appreciates the attention, she said she increasingly finds herself “a slave to the YouTube algorithms”.
But she needs the platform: YouTube ads pay about a third of the US$800 (24,200 baht) or so it costs to make each video, which includes a cash appearance fee for each granny. So far, she isn’t paying herself.
“With my book advance and my pension, I kind of just about break even,” she said. “As a business model, I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.”
‘‘There wasn’t a shop you could just pop around to when these women were younger