Our dish this week is Fiadoni salati, the savory Easter pastries of Abruzzo. Ricotta and parmesan go into a thin dough cut through with white wine, then bake until the tops puff and turn gold. They come from sheep country, where cheese and eggs have always marked the days worth celebrating. Nonna Giuseppina makes them the way Atri has always made them. By tradition they wait for the evening of the Vigilia, Easter Saturday, and not a day before.

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Our dish for this week is Pasta e ceci, which has ancient roots in Roman cuisine, dating back to when chickpeas were a staple in the diets of both peasants and soldiers. This humble, hearty dish reflects Rome’s long tradition of folding legumes and pasta into nourishing meals, a practice still beloved today.

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This Sunday is Mother’s Day.

Your inbox this week is going to be full of brands telling you to treat Mom with 50% off something. We’re not going to do that. The whole reason anana exists is that the women who taught us to cook - the mothers, the grandmothers, the aunts in the kitchen next door - are the ones who matter.

So instead of a discount, we’re sending you a recipe from an 84-year-old woman in Monterotondo who didn’t even want to learn to cook at first.

Meet Nonna Silvana.

She’s lived her whole life in the same town just outside Rome. From her window she can see the old municipal tower, the one she’s looked at since she was a girl.

Nonna Silvana didn’t come to the kitchen the way you’d expect. She was a seamstress, young and busy, and cooking was something she had to figure out because she didn’t have time not to. Her aunt taught her the basics. She filled in the rest as she went feeding a hungry household.

What she discovered along the way is the part that interests us. She learned to look at what was in front of her and turn it into something her family wanted to eat. Her hand-rolled fettuccine became legendary at her table. Her family still leaves lunches with containers of it tucked under their arms.

She is exactly the kind of woman this newsletter exists for. And we’re sharing one of her recipes with you.

Read the steps. Or watch Nonna Silvana do it. ↓

🟡 Don’t rush the onion. Low heat, soft and golden, never brown. This is where the whole dish starts. If the onion is bitter, the risotto is bitter. No amount of butter at the end will save it.

🟡 Keep the broth warm. Cold broth shocks the rice and stops the cooking. A small pot on the back burner, gently simmering, is all it takes.

🟡 One ladle at a time. Wait until the rice has drunk what you gave it before you give it more. This is the only step that requires patience, and it’s the step everyone wants to skip.

🟡 Salt early, taste late. Season the broth, not the finished risotto. By the end the rice will have absorbed everything and you can adjust then.

🟡 The butter is not optional. That final knob of butter, stirred in off the heat, is what Italians call la mantecatura. It turns rice into risotto. Skip it and you’ve made a rice dish.

If anana has meant something to you this year, you've probably cooked along, forwarded a recipe to your mom, or learned a nonna's name. The best thing you can do this Sunday is gift her the gift of cooking.

Gift this to your mom.

Every gifted subscription is another nonna we get to film and another recipe written down. It costs less than a Mother’s Day bouquet. And unlike flowers, it doesn’t wilt.

✨ To every mother, grandmother, aunt, godmother, mother-in-law, and chosen-family-mother reading this and to every Nonna Silvana who started cooking because she had to and ended up feeding a whole family for years…grazie. The recipes you’re passing down are the most important ones we’ll ever cook. Buon Appetito, and Buona Festa della Mamma.✨

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Nonna Angela grew up in Palombara Sabina, the same town where Nonna Margherita still lives. She left school young, learned to sew at the castle, picked olives when the season called for it, worked construction before she retired. She has spent her life doing what needed doing. Then she started teaching.

She found her way to Pasta with Grandma after retiring, and during COVID, when the world went quiet and people sat alone in their kitchens, she was there on Zoom every week. Walnuts, almonds, chocolate, honey. The same things her mother made. She taught hundreds of people to make them.

Pangiallo is one of the oldest cakes still being made in Italy. The name means yellow bread, and the color is the point. In ancient Rome, pangiallo was baked during the winter solstice and given as a gift to encourage the return of the sun. The yellow exterior, traditionally achieved with saffron, was meant to mimic sunlight.

Apicius, whose cookbook from Imperial Rome is one of the oldest culinary texts we have, referenced versions of this cake. Romans packed it with whatever was dense and sustaining: nuts, dried fruit, honey, spices. Two thousand years later, Nonna Angela makes it with walnuts, almonds, hazelnuts, dark chocolate, and a splash of Molinar, the sweet liqueur her family has always used.

Read the steps. Or watch Nonna Angela do it. ↓

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Nonna Margherita doesn’t overcomplicate things. She never has. After 41 years working the land in Palombara Sabina, picking cherries and olives and peaches through every season, she learned that the best results come from trusting what’s in front of you. Her cooking works the same way.

This recipe is a perfect example. Thin pork scallops, a little flour, butter, sage, and the juice of two oranges. That’s it. The citrus hits the hot pan and everything changes.

Scaloppine di maiale all’arancia is one of those Italian dishes that reminds you how Southern Italy’s citrus tradition shaped the way people cook meat. It’s not fussy. It’s an easy night dinner that happens to be beautiful.

Read the steps. Or watch Nonna Margherita do the rest.↓

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There’s a moment in Nonna Silvia’s kitchen in Matera where everything slows down. She stops, looks at the dough ball in her hands, and says something we’ve heard from nearly every nonna we’ve filmed. Don’t be too precise.

It’s the kind of advice that makes perfectionist cooks nervous. We want measurements, exact folds, the reassurance that we’re doing it right. But panzerotti don’t work that way and honestly, neither does the best cooking we’ve documented across Italy.

These half-moon pockets of fried dough have been part of Basilicata’s food culture for generations. Filled with tomato and melting mozzarella, they sit somewhere between street food and Sunday food.

The dough is forgiving. The filling is simple. And once you learn it, you don’t forget it.

When we asked Nonna Silvia how she knows when the dough is ready, she pressed it with two fingers and shrugged. “It tells you.”

Read the steps. Or watch Nonna Silvia's hands do the rest.↓

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A year ago, we filmed our first nonna. Since then, we’ve been in 50+ kitchens, documented 100+ recipes that had never been written down, and made carbonara more times than we can count.

Today, we’re celebrating with some news: we’re turning on paid subscriptions.

You've been here from early on. You believed in this idea before we had proof it would work. …

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Most homemade gnocchi turn out chewy and dense. The reason is almost always the same: we try too hard.

We overwork the dough. We add too much flour. We keep going until it looks “right.” But Nonna Anna’s approach flips this instinct on its head.

Start with potatoes. Add flour only when the dough demands it, not a gram more. And here’s the part that goes a…

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In the countryside outside Rome, dinner has never been complicated.

There’s chicken, a few bell peppers, onion, wine, tomatoes and time.

This is Pollo con Peperoni, and in Nonna Ada’s kitchen, it’s been on the table for as long as anyone can remember.

The dish comes from cucina povera, the cooking of families who made do with what the land gave them.

What …

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You know those nights when you’ve been running all day and need something good on the table fast? Remember this recipe from Nonna Silvana.

It’s the perfect breaded pork cutlet. It’s golden, crispy, and ready in 30 minutes.

Meet Nonna Silvana. She admits she didn’t love cooking at first. As a young seamstress with little time, she relied on her aunt to tea…

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Big occasions like New Year's reveal which traditions fade and which endure.

In Naples, they used to throw pots out windows at midnight to clear out bad luck. Most people don’t do that anymore. But eating for prosperity on New Year’s Eve, that one stayed.

Lentils because they look like coins. Pork because pigs root forward. And in northern Italy, risotto,…

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This Thanksgiving, our team cooked with anana recipes. And we’re doing the same thing for Christmas.

Because when you have access to recipes from nonnas who’ve been perfecting these dishes for decades, why would you settle for anything else?

This week, we’re sharing something different from the usual panettone you’ll find everywhere this time of year. Thi…

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Some meals don’t need an excuse, whether it’s a Tuesday night, a quiet Sunday, or that moment when you realize you haven’t properly fed yourself all day.

Nonna Antonietta’s answer is fresh pasta with tomato sauce.

Just a little bit about Nonna Antonietta: she grew up in Lucca watching her mother Rita and her grandmothers Italia and Natalina cook for othe…

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One of life’s survival skills is knowing how to make a grilled cheese sandwich. But let me tell you about the one nonnas approve of and it’s nothing like what you’re used to.

Mozzarella in Carrozza, which is literally “mozzarella in a carriage,” because when you pull it apart, those cheese strands look like horse reins. It’s golden, it’s crispy, it’s com…

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There’s something I need to tell you about birthday traditions.

Not every family does cake. In some homes, when the birthday person wasn’t into sweets, the celebration came in the form of a frittata. A golden, generous disk of eggs and pasta that showed up on the table like its own kind of gift.

For those of us who’d rather have something savory, who neve…

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There’s a dessert in the south whose name is basically a dare.

Sporcamuss: “Dirty your mouth.” Not “enjoy delicately” or “savor mindfully.”

The Italians who invented this knew exactly what they were creating, chaos in pastry form.

Here’s what we’re dealing with: little squares of puff pastry, split open and stuffed with ridiculously creamy custard (they c…

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This weekend, you’re making pizza properly: with time, with your hands, and without worrying about how it looks.

This is pizza con patate e salsiccia (potatoes and sausage). It’s one of our favorites, and we don’t play favorites easily. This recipe comes from the border between Lazio and Campania, where someone centuries ago looked at what they had in th…

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Ask any Italian when their nonna first made tiramisu. Watch them pause.

Most will tell you stories about childhood celebrations, about this being the dessert for every special occasion. They’re not wrong - but here’s what might surprise you: their nonnas probably learned to make it around the same time they were learning to drive.

This dessert we think of…

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