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

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She loves growing her own vegetables and cooking from scratch. She even makes her own flour using locally grown whole wheat; it has a wonderful nutty aroma, but don't worry, you do not need to do this! We tested her recipe using 00 flour. If you do want to copy Nadia and use your own wholewheat flour, then sift the flour first, to remove the flakes of bran, otherwise your silk handkerchiefs will be more hessian in texture.

Bennison has captured the lives and recipes of 60 popular nonne (grandmothers) whom she met while traveling Italy, meeting and interviewing Italian grandmothers for her Pasta Grannies YouTube channel. While you could admittedly Google gnocchi, this denies food the essential quality of being a language of nourishment, culture, tradition, and nuance. Take Pina’s Chestnut Gnocchi With Walnut Pesto, for example. The 91-year-old nonna’s recipe is distinct for sourcing ingredients from her home in Liguria. It is one of the delectable reasons for daily indulgence in Bennison’s duty to share the grannies with the world. Pour a slug of olive oil into a large casserole dish. Heat this over a medium heat for a couple of minutes then start browning the beef a few pieces at a time. Once all the beef pieces have a bit of colour, return them to the pan along with the vegetables. Delivery with Standard Australia Post usually happens within 2-10 business days from time of dispatch. Please be aware that the delivery time frame may vary according to the area of delivery and due to various reasons, the delivery may take longer than the original estimated timeframe. Discover 91 year-old Pina's chestnut gnocchi with walnut pesto, lovingly made with ingredients she grows around her home in Liguria; or 99 year-old Marietta's special tagliatelle recipe, which is not really a recipe at all but a reflection of her vegetable garden, the Calabrian countryside and the changing seasons. As well as meat, seafood and vegetable pasta recipes, chapters cover pizzas, pastries and pies, rice and pulses, dairy and herbs, nuts and spices. The pasta very soon became a vehicle for celebrating women of a certain age,” she says. “I feel strongly that food isn’t just the preserve of the young. Women over 65 were underrepresented in the food media, and I wanted to celebrate their experience. No classical TV channel would commission something with no jeopardy, no macho-style throwing of the pans around.”Each recipe is taught by a different granny - or nonna - as one would say in Italian. The reader is given a little introduction to the nonna and where she’s from. We are also given some interesting facts about the dish or the unique ingredients. Learn how to make pasta like Italian nonnas do. Inspired by the hugely popular YouTube channel of the same name, Pasta Grannies is a wonderful collection of time-perfected Italian pasta recipes from the people who have spent a lifetime cooking for love, not a living: Italian grandmothers.

After about 10 minutes the meat will browned and will have crispy edges. Remove the pieces from the pan and set aside. Use the lovely fat to sauté your courgettes over a medium heat for 4 minutes or so until the pieces are soft. There are recipes for vegetarians, as well as seafood or meat lovers. Readers are also spoiled with a sprinkling of traditional pizza, pie and pastry recipes.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. I eat pasta four times a day when I’m filming because our ladies don’t cook for YouTube; they cook for us, so of course, we have to sit down to a meal,” Bennison says. 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.

Once it's kneaded, place the dough in a bowl that fits the size of your ball and cover it with a close-fitting lid or dampened cloth which has not been cleaned in perfumed detergent; air is the enemy of pasta, and you don't want it to dry out. Let this rest for at least 30 minutes. 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. As for the allure of Pasta Grannies, Bennison is succinct: “People come for the pasta but stay for the grandmothers.”The layout is very concise, and complemented by beautifully wholesome photos of the nonne in action or of their completed dishes. I love the use of herbs, the pestos, and pansoti, which is a walnut salsa served with raviolo pansoti, which are stuffed with foraged wild greens so you get this bitterness along with the walnuts. We’ve also got some very good pies from Liguria.” Pour in the water, then add the greens. Give them a good stir and add the tomatoes. Chop up the herbs so you have a good 2 tablespoons and stir this mixture into the sauce. Continue to simmer for 20 minutes or so.

Wash and dry the basil leaves thoroughly. Add a handful at a time to the mortar, with a pinch of salt, then pound and grind the leaves into the paste. When you’re poor, eating meat is a great luxury and one that you don’t turn down. For many of these women growing up, they ate meat twice a year, but they don’t call themselves vegetarian,” she says. “For these women, growing up, everything mattered. They were the workforce of the family, working in the fields, making food from scratch at an early age. Everything is used. Excess pasta is turned into a frittata or a soup, and you eat modestly. If you place importance on food, you cherish it. It’s a way of bringing family together.” Bennison’s father worked in agricultural development, so the family was based on a farm in Kenya for much of her childhood in the early 1960s. Traveling, exploring, and learning about food and its cultivation is evidently in her blood. Indeed, Bennison was a management consultant in international development for most of her career, which entailed a constant itinerary of places, faces, and novelty. Food was both a comfort and her avenue to a shared language in far-flung places: “Food was the unifying theme. The first thing I’d do when I arrived in a country [that was new to me] would be to go and look at the markets to see what was on offer and how people were eating.”

The whole point of recipes is that you make them your own. The publishers like me to put a lot of detail in [the book], but trust yourself. Of course, you can substitute. Follow the recipes, but if your taste buds tell you something different or if you can’t find something, swap it out. You will make it something wonderful.” 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. Mandilli di saea" translates as silk handkerchiefs; these large pasta squares should be very thin and light. And our Pasta Granny who shared her recipe with us is artist Nadia, who lives in the mountains of Liguria near Lumarzo. She is keen on living in harmony with nature; she won't even disturb spiders' cobwebs because she says "they have a job to do". And she is in the right spot to enjoy her surroundings: from her kitchen-sink window she looks out at the edge of a forest and regularly sees deer and the occasional wolf.