Pasta Grannies by Vicky Bennison
And the winner of the 2020 Single Subject Book Award from the James Beard Foundation is:
Vicky Bennison for PASTA GRANNIES!
(wild applause)
I will heartily admit that I am a devour-er of the Pasta Grannies series by the brilliant Vicky Bennison. I happened on the YouTube series about two years ago when I was home searching YouTube for something to watch.
It was like taking crack.
The best kind of crack, granted- but crack all the same. I couldn’t get enough. I watched every single episode in two days. I needed more. So I watched some of my favorites over and over again. I got to know the grannies by their first names and I memorized their regions. I waited with bated breath for Ms. Bennison and Co. to produce a new one. I wondered if I would see the fantastic Livia de Giovanni, dubbed the “granny finder” by Bennison or the devilishly handsome and talented videographer, Andrea Savorani Neri flirt with the grannies as he taste tests each gorgeous plateful.
It struck a chord, you see. And the all the world felt the same way as I did. Thank goodness, because now there is a cookbook. And then there are articles. The New York Times, Italy Magazine, Financial Times, Forbes, La Cucina Italiana and Food & Wine to name a few.
photo by Emma Lee of the end cover of author Vicky Bennison in her formidable and fabulous cookbook Pasta Grannies: The Secrets of Italy’s Best Home Cooks
Bennison, who splits her time living in Le Marche, Italy and in London, England, saw that something was happening.
She saw that there were thousands of women creating pasta shapes, making dough and keeping traditional and regional recipes alive. She also saw that these women were in their nineties or eighties or seventies and even their sixties. Her thought was, before these women have passed on, we should chronicle their lives’ work in some way so it’s not lost!
Her vision was a YouTube video catalog of pastas and how they are made by the women who have been keeping these traditions alive.
The incredible women seemed overlooked in favor of some cheeky and handsome celebrity chef who - perhaps- studied with them for an afternoon. Some of these chefs took that knowledge into their famous bistros and into television morning shows, documentaries and cookbooks tossing it around as something they alone owned and created.
Vicky Bennison saw before anybody else at this level that these women, had not until this point, gotten the immense amount of credit they deserved for keeping tradition and common sense cooking alive.
We are, in some cases, taking about recipes that go back hundreds of years, preserved only by the care and the curation of maybe one or two women in a single village. The Italians and the world of cooking call this the tradition of la Gastronomia di Casalinga or recipes from the working kitchens of Italian women and the Italian housewife. They are only learned via a demonstration and discussion. If you want to learn them, you must find and work with a keeper of these stories.
What about the length of time that these recipe-stories have floated about in the collective conscience?
Take our topic, pasta. When you consider that the legend of Marco Polo’s introduction of pasta to Italy purportedly occurred in the 13th century, it’s a bloody miracle that any of it survived! But the sisterhood of the Gastronomy of Casalinga persevered and kept the secrets of pasta making for us.
Mind blowing pop-history rant…
mosaic of Marco Polo at il Palazzo Tursi in Genoa, Italy
If after 820 years of handing pasta recipes down from mother to daughter these antiche ricette survived; and if some of these women are close to one hundred years old; this means that these recipes have been handed down only about eight complete lifetimes since il Signor Polo came home with pasta from Asia eight hundred years ago! Longevity and human tenacity make this statistic fantastical. Those are some good genes…
The Pasta Grannies database of strong and talented women is just a joy to watch. And when you add that it represents the work of hundreds of women who have until now been quietly working in the background, you get the purest form of education I can think of. This passing on of life’s information by people who have lived storied and long lives. These women represent a life of artistry and culinary truth that have been well overlooked, not in Italy but in the rest of the world, until Bennison realized there was a need to preserve it. If this incredible gift doesn’t deserve a Pulizter, I don’t know what does.
subscribe to Pasta Grannies by clicking the photo!
If you haven’t subscribed to Bennison’s YouTube Channel Pasta Grannies, you absolutely need to.
In fact, I’ll wait…
(The obnoxious whistling of nonsensical tune ensues.)
Did you do it? Good for you. You are going to have a blast as you bunny-hop your way down this delicious rabbit hole.
Now for the cookbook.
The natural step from the video master series was a cookbook.
And eccola qui; here she is!
Here is a book that celebrates the truth of the Italian pasta experience. I am humbly grateful in the face of it. If you are an Italian cook at any level, this is a war horse of a cookbook that you need to have supporting you in your Italian culinary journey.
It feels homespun in the best possible way. The saucy, red color of the title and of the page edges remind me of the loved, and lovingly stereotypical, red gingham tablecloth your nonna and then your mother had.
It also feels simple. There are no bells or whistles in your face to keep you from understanding the truth, depth and utter historic nature of pasta.
“Semplice” or “simple” in Italian is not just a word, but a way of life.
Bennison is not only a visionary, she surrounds herself with a team of artists. I’ve already mentioned “granny finder” Livia de Giovanni and videographer, Andrea Savorani Neri.
Then there is the photographer…
The incredible photos in Pasta Grannies: The Secrets of Italy’s Best Home Cooks are taken by the profoundly talented Emma Lee. Yes, this wonderful book is filled with delicious food pics. And I do not mean to downplay this- the pasta is perfect. It shines all’onda or like the wave as the Italians say when referring to the very buoyant and alive movement of the finished, sauced, and ready to eat product.
In Lee’s work, it feels like some of these pictures are actually moving or that the pasta has somehow magically found its own way into the dish. The movement reminds me of those Harry Potter-esque photographs that wave and smile at you!
For me, the real joy and insight of Emma Lee’s work in this cookbook comes from her portraiture. The faces of these incredible women are marked by time and tell the story of their lives in a way that you rarely see. I could stare into the kind eyes of Sardinian national treasure, 95-year-old Giuseppa Porcu, forever wondering about the things she’s seen and the stories she could tell.
This is Lee’s gift. She seems to bring out the light in people.
This is no small feat when you consider that these particular women have lived humbly and quietly in their small towns under the radar for close to a hundred years. They cannot be used to video cameras and this sort of media attention. There is a level of shyness here that must be reckoned with. And yet, it seems, the simplicity of a photo is completely in line with their natures. And this camera, in the hands of this photographer, is magically allowed to see their souls.
The cookbook is broken up into eight chapters: Nuts and Herbs, Vegetables, Pulses (beans or seeds), Gnocchi, Pasta in Brodo, Ravioli and so on.
Certainly, these are all things Italian food lovers have heard of. But in Pasta Grannies, we literally have hundreds of years of combined experience in making this food. So this food is different simply because of its pedigree.
It feels that way when you read the recipes. The cache that these women bring to the subject seems to quietly push aside what you think you know so that you can be ready for the truth. And that truth is profoundly rooted in a tradition that has been passed down through the generations from mother to daughter with the insertion of some men along the way.
This nurturing of the belly and of the soul only survived because it was taught through the patience and quiet strength of an Italian matriarchy determined to keep her families nourished and self-sufficient.
I am a proud product of that powerful, Italianate matriarchy.
I thank my lucky stars every day that these women persevered.
Pasta Grannies is the truth, the tao of pasta making, honed into very readable collection written by several lifetimes of a collected, Italian female wisdom. I am looking forward to the next one, and the next, and the the next one after that.
Vicky Bennison is a formidable genius who has shined the light on the aggregate knowledge of the Italian nonne and the Piatti di Gastronomia Casalingua.
I am going to sit back, watch, read and heartily applaud as the accolades for this work come pouring in.
And when they do, I shall simply smile and say:
“Beh, certo.”
photo by James Culcasi
pictured above: Scottish Pasta / check out my post on October 30th!
