Food & Film: Binge Watching Italian Style

Italian Lessons With Food

Two of my favorite programs about Italian food couldn’t be more different from each other. One is the charmingly modest project of an Englishwoman with a vacation home in Le Marche; the other is a slick multimedia platform created by an Italian catering and consulting company led by a native Roman who, rather ironically, got his start in a wine bar despite being a teetotaler. Both host their videos on YouTube.

While Pasta Grannies is in English (with subtitles translating the cooks’ conversations and instructions), Italia Squisita offers both Italian and English subtitles. I now opt for the Italian ones, in my ongoing quest to train my ear to the breakneck tempo of spoken Italian—which, like their driving, is at warp speed.

Italia Squisita: Glossy and Gourmet

The multimedia platform, currently run by Vertical SRL, extends beyond video content. It offers a snazzy print magazine with bilingual text, annual subscriptions, and five cookbooks (also available in an English version) covering pasta, pizza, vegetables, traditional dishes with contemporary twists, and rice. I’m tempted by the rice book, given that I tend to neglect this particular starch—despite Italy’s remarkable variety of it.

The videos range from beautifully filmed recipe demonstrations in elegant restaurant and professional kitchen settings (very soothing to watch) to amusing takedowns of how iconic Italian dishes—like pizza or spaghetti alla carbonara—get butchered in foreign kitchens. There are also fascinating comparisons between a classic dish and a “gourmet” or more evolved version. While some of these grand interpretations can feel a tad overwrought, I’ve genuinely improved my own cooking thanks to some of these videos. For example, the one on Risotto alla Milanese changed how I make it, and their Rösti  tutorial finally helped me conquer that deceptively simple Alpine dish of grated and fried potatoes.

Pasta Grannies: A Labor of Love

Vicky Bennison began Pasta Grannies as a side project over a decade ago, back when YouTube was just a handy way to store personal videos. At heart, I believe she has always been a storyteller—a homespun one at that. With a Master’s degree in Business Management, she has worked everywhere from Siberia to South Africa; written well-regarded food and wine guides for Corfu, Mallorca, and Andalucía; and spent much of her life immersed in different food cultures. Though British, she splits her time between Margate in the UK  and Le Marche, Italy—choosing the latter partly because Ancona was the transfer point for trips to her parents’ home in Greece.

Her fascination with local food cultures was nurtured by her childhood in Africa, where her father researched drought-resistant crops and taught farming techniques, while her mother taught English to the Indian community. She recalls those formative years with great fondness, writing in Medium:

Food was what my family thought about, talked about, and always ate together. There were no supermarkets, and everything had to be grown, bartered for, or tracked down. Trout was fished in the streams of the Aberdare mountains. Our eggs came from our chickens and the bacon from the agricultural teaching college’s pigs. In my teens in Botswana, cooking was what brought our neighborhood together with regular cake competitions and communal braai steak suppers, deep in the Kalahari bush under glitter ball heavens. Growing up, food for me wasn’t merely nutrition or fuel; it was family, community, and everyday adventure.

This unpretentious series features Vicky, her cameraman, and her “granny finder” friend, traveling across Italy to showcase elderly women who create magic with little more than flour and water (and sometimes eggs). There is no dramatic musical score, no glossy food styling—just a brief introduction to the region, the home of the featured nonna, and a little, somewhat repetitive, non-denominational background music.

The Women Behind the Pasta

What impresses me most is that these humble stars must be at least 65 years old, and many are much older—some even past 100. Unlike today’s home cooks, they never bought ready-made pasta; that was an unaffordable middle-class luxury. As Livia De Giovanni—the granny finder and neighbor of cameraman Andrea Savorani Neri—has pointed out, many of these women had only the most basic schooling before they were needed to work in fields, factories or as maids and cooks in wealthier homes, restaurants and hotels.  They learned to roll pasta by hand as children and cooked meals with whatever was available, often very little.

Vicky Bennison has since published two cookbooks and is venturing into branding. I have the first Pasta Grannies book… somewhere among my infamous 109 boxes in storage in a Milan warehouse. The recipes, while fun to explore,  aren’t always precise—these women have spent a lifetime cooking by eye and instinct. As for the pasta shapes, I strongly recommend watching the videos; I’ve needed multiple viewings (and trials) to master trofie and lorighitte, to name just two.

She has also launched a Pasta Grannies Club, offering more in-depth videos, podcasts, and other joyful encounters with these unassuming, hardworking women—the ones who, quite literally, one by one, fed a nation.