Pasta Grannies is more than a website or a cooking channel, it’s a community. When I started Pasta Grannies a little under 10 years ago, that was at the core of what I wanted to achieve.
I believe cooking is a conversation, a way of transferring ideas to one another, making memories, sharing experiences. And in the spirit of keeping that conversation open with members of the Pasta Grannies community, every month, we field five questions from our Pasta Grannies fans. I take the time out to answer them and celebrate the magic of shared experiences through food, specifically, my favourite food — pasta! So send us your questions, and every month we’ll round them up here. I’ll answer them for you, our Pasta Grannies community members.
What are you working on at a moment? Are there any plans for another cookbook? If so, when will it be published?
Yes, I’m currently working on the third book, and I’m a little over halfway through! I spend my time between London and Italy and head to my house in Marche when I am trying to remove the distractions to write up all the recipes.
I’m in the middle of book three — halfway through writing it Every day I count the number of recipes that I’ve written! It’s building! It’s going to be published in 2026 so a little while to go yet but the process of book publication is a really long one! Even though I’ll submit the text in July, it takes forever through various editing, turning into various book formats and gets printed and sold around the world. Then, eventually, after all that, it ends up with you! I hope you’ll enjoy it when it eventually gets published. It’s a collection of recipes — a lot of them are still pasta — but there’s a little less emphasis on fresh pasta this time. It’s mostly those recipes that are fast, you can make midweek, as well as recipes for celebrations and special occasions.
So how did you end up in Italy? What was it about Italian food that appealed to you above all other cuisines?
I’ve always loved Italian food! My first time to Italy was at the age of five with my parents. Eating spaghetti in Venice was my first experience of Italian food and I’ve been going back ever since. I chose Marche as a region because it was cheap! Tuscany gets a little bit expensive to buy property. It’s not as well-known a region of Italy: it has mountains and sea and lots of history, and it’s a lovely, lovely part of the peninsula.
How did Pasta Grannies start? And, what did you do before you were running Pasta Grannies?
It was my idea 10 years or so ago. When I was in Italy, I noticed that it was only older women who were making pasta by hand. I’m lucky enough to have a home in Italy and so in that region kept noticing it was only women over about the age of 80 that were getting up at five in the morning in the summer to avoid the heat so they could make pasta for their families and local communities. I thought ‘you know what, it really would be nice to make a record of that generation for whom pasta making was a way of life rather than a choice or a hobby.’
I thought it was going to be a book (and it is a book) but decided that the physicality of pasta making was such that it needed to be filmed. So back then, there was this fairly new thing called YouTube and I thought…we’ll put it there. We didn’t really know what we were doing, we just followed the passion. If you go back to the beginning of the channel the videos there you’ll see there’s one camera — it’s me absolutely rigid! So yes, that’s how Pasta Grannies started 10 years ago. And before that? I was a Management Consultant, specialising in something called International Development. It took me to weird parts of the world — and not so weird parts of the world too. I had lots of adventures doing other things, but food was the common thing across all my travels. I would always start off in a new location in a local market to see what produce was there and explore how were people cooking it. Something I’ve taken with me to Pasta Grannies and beyond.
How do you get the recipes from grandmothers correctly who cook everything by hand?
Well, we have to sort of guess a lot of time. We have we become expert guessers! Then we test the recipes; we have a recipe tester, Julia. So before anything goes in the book we try it out and make sure that we’ve guessed any measurements correctly (and of course adapt, adapt, and re-adapt if not — until we are confident it is perfect!).
If you could move anywhere else in Italy where would you go?
That’s a good question! Actually, I’m very happy with where I live. Though, sometimes an International Airport would be quite helpful — so maybe Lazio!? There’re so many places in Italy I am really fond of. It would be hard to actually come to a decision about where else I would go!
Do you have a question you’d like me to answer? Email me hello@pastagrannies.com.
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