What is the Grandma Cooking Trend, and Why Can’t We Get Enough of it?

In 2023, 103-year-old Italian grandmother Irma made her debut on Pasta Grannies, a YouTube channel with more than 1 million subscribers that features grandmothers in Italy preparing family pasta recipes.

Irma’s video – which has racked up 444,000 views and counting – opens with her daily one-kilometer walk through the picturesque hills south of Modena, where she’s lived all her life. She stops to gather eggs laid by her free-range chickens. In the kitchen, we see her crack four of the eggs into the well of a pile of double zero flour, scrambling them with her knobby yet still-lithe fingers.

Irma kneads the dough with impressive strength and explains in her native tongue how she started cooking when she was 10 years old. Her father had just died and her mother was too depressed to cook, so her grandmother taught her how to make pasta.

With a rolling pin – the same one she’s used for 90 years – Irma shapes the smooth, golden dough into a thin and even circle about three feet in diameter. After letting it dry for a bit, she slices the dough into fine ribbons for tagliatelle. She cooks the pasta for a couple minutes, then tosses it with a tomato and prosciutto sauce that her white-haired son whipped up while she was making the noodles.

Before dinner, Irma joins her tablemates in raising a glass of white wine. “A toast for me to be here next year as well,” she says. “I hope so, because…” she trails off and swings her palm up and down in a “cosí-cosí” gesture, accompanied by a delightful smile and chuckle.

The Grandma Cooking Content Boom

Pasta Grannies is just one example of a growing phenomenon, surely one of the most wholesome, encouraging, and inspiring cultural trends in years: grandmothers offering cooking lessons and kitchen wisdom in online videos (typically filmed and produced by their tech-savvy children and grandchildren). The internet is so replete with grandma-based content –  and avid followers eager to learn from them  – that these wise elder cooks have come to be known collectively as “grandfluencers.”

@msgrandmasgarden Harvesting my Veggies! #grandmasgarden #veggiehaul #harvestingveggies #harvestingvegetables #vegetablehaul #veggiegarden ♬ Summer day – TimTaj

@cookingwithlynjaShishito Peppers♬ original sound – Lynja

There’s also the web series “Grandmas Project,” which features cooking videos of grandmothers around the world, contributed by their grandchildren. In one installment, a young woman visits her grandmother Nan in France, where she learns to make the family’s chicken pie. “It’s your mother who was more attached to chicken pie than I was,” Nan tells her granddaughter as they whisk a flour slurry into chicken stock. “Because that was something her grandmother made for her.”

Nan’s observation may help to explain the popularity of the “grandma cooking” genre. It evokes a reverence for tradition, and underscores the vital importance of handing beloved recipes down through generations.

But the trend isn’t just online and virtual. In Staten Island, New York, the restaurant Enoteca Maria features a rotating cast of grandmothers representing international cultures (though they live in and around New York City). The women take turns each night in the kitchen preparing their authentic cuisines and family recipes for adoring crowds who have to book tables weeks in advance.

@briancantstopeating Nothing beats a Grandmothers love! Can’t wait to make it back enoteca maria #nycfood #grandma #statenisland #foodreview #lasagna ♬ Feel It Still – Portugal. The Man

And on Airbnb, you can find loads of in-person cooking classes led by grandmothers around the world. In Paros, Greece, grandmother Maria guides students through preparing a six-course menu accompanied by wine and ouzo. Another listing advertises a grandmother in Paris who will teach you to make tarte tatin and madeleines, then enjoy them “over fragrant tea or a creamy hot chocolate, while listening to grandma’s stories and admiring the views of Paris that surround the apartment”.

A Yearning for Family Connection and Comfort

The comments that accompany Irma’s video offer some insight about the appeal of grandma cooking.

“103? OMG. I miss my grandma,” one commenter wrote. “Good health to this beautiful lady.”

“I felt very overwhelmed while watching this video, started crying from the pure emotions and wiped out my tears, because nobody at home would understand why I was crying while watching a video about tagliatelle,” wrote another. “But it is actually much more than that. It is a hymn of life.”

Many of the TikTok and YouTube grandma cooking accounts started – or built serious followings – during the pandemic. At the time, members of the Gen Z and Millennial generations – who dominate TikTok engagement in general – often couldn’t visit their grandparents for safety reasons. Some also lost their grandparents to COVID.

The grandma cooking videos offered viewers a way to soothe frayed nerves and connect with family, even if it wasn’t their own. Today, the videos also tend to see a spike in viewership around the holidays, suggesting that they fulfill a yearning for family connection and comfort, if only by proxy.

“There are so many comments where people tell me ‘you remind me of my mom’ or ‘you remind me of my grandma,’ ” Costello, of @BrunchwithBabs, told People magazine in 2023. “For whatever reason, I’ve struck a chord somewhere and it wasn’t something you could ever plan. It happened organically.”

Young people aren’t the only ones moved by the videos. “She gives me hope for myself,” writes one commenter on Irma’s tagliatelle video, who identifies herself as a 71-year-old widow living in Washington state. “That is the mistake I have been making… too much sitting and not enough moving. I’m going to discipline myself more… Thanks Irma! You cheered me up!”

Of course, the grandmothers themselves benefit from the experiences. The videos, cooking classes, and dining events give them a chance to forge a culinary legacy within their own families and share and celebrate their food with the entire world. In the process, they also seem to have plenty of fun.

In 2024, Irma returned to Pasta Grannies to mark her 104th birthday by making tortelloni stuffed with Swiss chard and ricotta.

“I have to attempt teaching them,” Irma says of her younger family members. “Otherwise, when I die, who is going to prepare it?”

Later in the video, someone off camera tells Irma about how popular her first video was, and alludes to one unnamed male fan in particular. “I didn’t know I am now famous!” she laughs. Then, with a sly grin, “You have to tell him I am a widow.”

Tim Cebula is a former senior editor for Cooking Light magazine. His work has appeared in national and regional publications, including Time, Health, Food & Wine, Boston magazine, and The Boston Globe. He lives on the southern coast of Maine.