Pasta Grannies

October 21, 2019
In this ambitious cookbook, Bennison (The Taste of a Place) compiles dozens of recipes featured on her YouTube channel, Pasta Grannies, in the hopes of “saving traditions and sharing skills” of Italian grandmothers who have been making homemade pasta for most of their lives. Hailing from different Italian regions, the featured grandmas share a variety of pasta shapes in an array of sauces: Letizia from Sicily prepares tagliatelle with fava bean puree; Cesaria from Sardinia makes lorighittas (“double-hooped, twisted strands of spaghetti-shaped pasta”) with tomato-chicken sauce; Cornelia from Liguria makes pansotti; and Rosetta from Liguria makes trofie (corkscrew-shaped pasta) with basic sauce. The book is filled with fascinating anecdotes (“Rosa, it turned out, married the local priest”), and Bennison includes tips for many of the recipes (for shaping the pasta dough for raschiatelli with red peppers, she writes, “Maria rolls them with both hands at the same time for speed”). Other recipes include 93-year-old Giuseppina’s pici with garlic in a tomato sauce that should simmer for two hours, and Ada’s taglioli and bean soup. The recipes are easy to follow and include callouts to the YouTube channel for a visual guide. Bennison’s inviting cookbook of homey recipes celebrates pasta-making traditions.