When Vicky Bennison launched Pasta Grannies, she never expected a YouTube channel documenting nonnas hand-rolling pasta to become a global phenomenon. Now, the author and filmmaker is turning her lens to a grain often overlooked in Italy’s culinary narrative: rice. Her latest book, *Pasta Grannies: Eat Everything – Pasta and Beyond for the Good Life*, pulls back the curtain on Sardinia’s rice-growing heartland, where two women in their eighties are keeping rustic, rule-free traditions alive. The result? Two dishes that taste like sunshine, history, and a quiet rebellion against the tyranny of the perfect risotto.
The Island That Rice Built
Most people associate Italian rice with the misty paddies of the Po Valley, the home of arborio and carnaroli. But Sardinia has been cultivating the grain since the 15th century, introduced by Spanish rulers who recognised the island’s wetlands near Oristano as ideal territory. Today, that same landscape produces the rice that ends up in Maria’s kitchen.
At 83, Maria runs an agriturismo dining room from her home, a venture she started after being widowed young. She needed to make ends meet; she ended up making a legend. Her riso con maiale e zafferano — rice with pork and saffron — became the dish travellers detoured for. It is a risotto in spirit only. There is no maniacal stirring, no wine added by the millilitre, no anxiety about the *all’onda* wave. Instead, the pork is stewed until melting, the rice cooked in that same broth until tender but distinct, and the whole thing finished with lemon zest, saffron, and a snowfall of pecorino.
“It’s a great recipe if you are nervous about making a classic risotto with all its rules,” Bennison writes. The dish takes just over an hour, but the stock — simmered from pork bones, sun-dried tomato, and vegetables — can be made ahead. Maria’s secret weapon? A minced sun-dried tomato stirred into the soffritto. “It’s her secret for boosting umami,” Bennison notes. The result sits somewhere between a pilaf and a risotto: golden, fragrant, deeply savoury, and entirely forgiving.
A Polenta Made of Rice
Three hundred kilometres northeast, in the hilltop town of Cingoli in Le Marche, three women are stirring something equally unconventional. Rita, Adriana, and Brunhilde organise the local sagra, a food festival where they serve frascarelli — a rice “polenta” that has fed families for centuries.
Traditionally, frascarelli was served plain to invalids and new mothers, prized for its digestibility. But dressed with a punchy sauce of wild fennel, chilli, and crumbled sausage, it becomes a celebration. The method is disarmingly simple: arborio rice simmered in salted water until nearly tender, then thickened with a gradual whisking of plain flour until it reaches a soft, creamy consistency. Spooned onto a communal board — or, these days, into bowls — it is topped lavishly with the sauce.
The dish went viral on Pasta Grannies’ Instagram when the trio demonstrated the old-school communal serving. “Some viewers were horrified,” Bennison recalls, “of course, these days, everyone uses plates or bowls.” The sauce itself is a masterclass in balance: fennel fronds (or freshly ground seeds) steeped in oil with chilli and wine, sausage meat browned until caramelised, passata stretched with a rinse of water, a pinch of sugar to calm the acidity. It simmers for ten minutes. That’s it.
No Rules, Just Wisdom
What unites these recipes is not technique, but philosophy. Both women cook from a place of necessity turned virtue. Maria’s risotto stretches a modest cut of pork into a feast; Rita’s frascarelli transforms pantry staples into comfort. Neither requires a timer, a thermometer, or a culinary degree. They ask only for attention — the kind that comes from decades of feeding people you love.
Bennison’s book, published by Rizzoli at £29.95, is full of this wisdom. It is not a manifesto. It is an invitation. The recipes are edited extracts, yes, but they carry the weight of lived experience. You can taste the sun-dried tomato in Maria’s stock. You can smell the wild fennel in Rita’s sauce. And you can hear the laughter of three friends in Cingoli, stirring a pot big enough for the whole village.
Why it Matters
In a food culture increasingly obsessed with precision, authenticity, and performance, these dishes remind us that the best Italian cooking has always been adaptive, generous, and rooted in place. Maria and Rita are not preserving museum pieces; they are feeding people, today, with what the land and the season provide. Their recipes are not relics — they are blueprints for a way of cooking that values flavour over fuss, and community over convention. That is a lesson worth serving.
