Netflix's "Nonnas" celebrates grandmothers’ cooking. Why do these dishes have such unique power to comfort us?
‘‘Food is love, and as long as I have their food, I’m gonna have them,” says restaurant owner Joe Scaravella of his loyal customer base. Joe, played by Vince Vaughn, is the protagonist of Nonnas, a new film loosely based on real-life New York restaurant Enoteca Maria. The Netflix comedy-drama follows Joe as he establishes a trattoria – a traditional establishment, except that the chefs are all grandmothers.
Joe’s cooks are Italian matriarchs: bossy, loud, loving, opinionated and immensely proud of their cooking. But grandmothers from all cultures are just as passionate about feeding the family, even though modern grannies may not spend as much time in the kitchen. A Jewish bubbe’s chicken soup; a Hindu granny presiding over a Diwali feast; Sunday lunch at nana’s house – food is still the ultimate gift of love.
When we meet Joe in Nonnas he is deep in grief. Having lost his grandmother and his mother, he longs for their nurturing influence, and recalls the hours he spent alongside them in the kitchen, watching their endless preparations, breathing the comforting fumes of tomatoes, oregano, olive oil and – above all – garlic. He wants to open a restaurant in their honour, which will also be a tribute to the Italian family and the recipes passed down through the generations.
The team of elderly women he recruits as cooks are the source of much of the film’s warmth and humour. They squabble, shout and discuss their lives, while chopping, filleting, stewing. Nonnas is a celebration of ageing, as we see these women rejoice in their lives. One of the matriarchs, played by the formidable Susan Sarandon, takes every opportunity to declare her idiosyncratic wisdoms, including that beauty isn’t about looks. “Is it our hair, our faces, our bodies?” she challenges the other women. “No, it’s a feeling.”
The film focuses on the challenges of setting up the trattoria, which at first isn’t welcome in the Staten Island neighbourhood. It stops short of exploring how Scaravella’s real restaurant developed after that. Now a culinary landmark, Enoteca Maria offers both an Italian menu and an international one, cooked by a rotating cast of grandmas from around the world – Poland to Sri Lanka, Turkey to Peru. Because, while different cultures might take food more or less seriously, grandmothers from across the world use mealtime as a sacred ritual.
Before introducing the global menu, Scaravella created Nonnas of the World – a virtual, crowdsourced recipe book to which anybody could upload their grandmother’s story, three photos and a recipe. It is part of a rich canon of books exploring the special gift of grandma’s food. Rachel Cooke’s latest book, Kitchen Person: Notes on Cooking and Eating, is full of comforting memories of her British grandmothers. “Staying with my granny was like being at a spa,” she writes, “except every treatment comprised a meal or (if we were between meals) some other tempting foodstuff. She had a morbid fear that someone might be hungry and would do anything to assuage it, mostly by making sure it had no chance to get going in the first place. Her questions were delightfully wheedling. ‘Would you just like a little biscuit?’ ‘Could you manage a sandwich?’ ‘Are you sure you’ve had enough?’”
This passion for feeding the family does seem to be universal. “‘Have you eaten?’ Indian mothers ask their children and husbands when they return home,” the novelist Amindita Ghose wrote recently in the Guardian. Tea, she explained, is more than a drink, more than a meal. It’s an event. “If we visited two homes the same evening, we had to eat twice, so as to not offend the host … My grandmother’s tea-time specialities were the kucho gojas [deep-fried sweets] and koraishutir kochuri [fried bread stuffed with peas].”
Andrew Fiouzi, writing in MEL magazine, extolled not just the wonders of his Persian grandmother’s cooking, but the world of senses and memories it evoked. “There is no good English translation for the Persian term dastpokht. Literally, it translates as ‘hand cooking’, but its meaning is more akin to ‘style of cooking’ or ‘mastery of cooking’. The term is, by definition, person specific, and it announces that the food created by the individual’s hands is, by extension of their being, unique. It’s also the only possible way to explain why my Persian grandmother’s cooking – her dastpokht – is, for me, singular, because describing it to you is like trying to describe a ghost with any level of certainty. Sure, I could start by referencing some of the rich, uniquely Persian flavours and ingredients, like crushed, roasted walnuts simmering in turmeric-coated chopped onions and reduced in pomegranate molasses … But none of it would really matter, because scientifically speaking, the greatness of her cooking goes so far beyond the simple spectrum of palatability.”
Most of us, like Fiouzi, have a memory of a food that takes us back to childhood. One reason that these memories are so vivid, according to Susan Whitbourne, professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Massachusetts, is that they involve all five senses. “You’re not just using your sight, or just your taste, but all the senses and that offers the potential to layer the richness of a food memory,” she says. The situation also plays a part – where you were, who you were with, what the occasion was – adding power to the nostalgia. “So the food becomes almost symbolic of other meaning. It’s not so much the apple pie, for example, but the whole experience of being a family, being nourished.”
In the collection Grand Dishes: Recipes and Stories from Grandmothers of the World, one of the writers, Mina Holland, remembers that whenever she visited her granny, “I always asked for kedgeree: all buttery onions and milky rice and smoky haddock and plenty of hard-boiled eggs from toothless-Fred-down-the-road’s hens. In that oft-cited Proustian way, each time I had it, I’d not only appreciate that portion, but reappreciate portions past … Her kedgeree, and many other things she cooked, seasoned my childhood with salt, fat and love, and made food into so much more than fuel – it took on an imaginative quality.”
Food can provide a powerful connection to ancestral roots. The novelist Margaret Wilkerson Sexton credited her grandmother with introducing her to her own Creole heritage – especially through the food. “She was known for her cooking, her fried catfish, potato salad and jelly cakes. Her specialities were shrimp étouffée, red beans and rice, gumbo, stuffed mirlitons, jambalaya and pralines,” she recalled in the Observer. Now that she has a daughter of her own it’s the food they share that brings back her beloved grandmother. “She helps me chop the yellow and green onions, roots through the pantry for bay leaves. When we’re done, I watch her eat before I taste the food myself. It feels like there’s something I’m fishing for that I can’t name.”
For musician David Gordon-Shute, his German-Jewish grandmother’s food also offered continuity. “She was not a very good cook,” he remembered, “but her one contribution to Christmas lunch every year was an amazing red cabbage which she cooked in the classic Jewish way. She died a few years ago but I still try and recreate it when we host Christmas at home.”
Grandmothers’ dishes can be passed down, but it’s not always easy. Many women of that generation didn’t write down recipes, and it’s difficult to reproduce food from the taste memory alone. Even when they exist on paper, they aren’t always shared. In Nonnas, Joe asks Roberta, a friend of his grandmother’s played by Lorraine Bracco, how to make her gravy. She snaps, “If I knew exactly it wouldn’t have been your Nonna’s gravy, would it? It’s the secret that makes it special.” And when he asks about her sauce, Roberta sneers: “That’s like asking a woman to show you her mutande! [Italian for underwear].”
But some women are happy to share. Mastanamma, perhaps the most celebrated grandmother cook, had no problem offering her recipes to the world, from her home in rural Andhra Pradesh. Filmed and promoted by her media-savvy nephew, Mastanamma rocketed to fame in 2016 with a YouTube clip of her cooking an aubergine curry. She was 105 years old at the time, and went on to gain an audience of more than a million subscribers before her death two years later. She would cook on the open fire, instead of using a stove, and liked cooking fish because she could source it fresh from a nearby river.
How many of today’s grandmothers can match Mastanamma’s standards? And to be honest, how many would want to? In Britain, many grandmothers are still active and busy. The retirement age is higher, but many of us want to continue working, or even start a new career. We might use our spare time volunteering, running marathons or climbing mountains. So we’re not going to spend all day in the kitchen, cooking traditional delicacies. We’re also less likely than previous generations to live close enough to our family that they can nip around for lunch.
Even so, there is still something special about a grandmother’s food – not so much the quality of her concoctions, but more so the context, the comfortable feeling of being surrounded by familiar smells, textures, details, and all those sensory associations with family and love.
Grandma’s food doesn’t have to be delicious, or even palatable. That’s not the point, according to the food writer Anthony Bourdain’s Grandma Rule: “Like Grandma’s Thanksgiving turkey,” he explains in his memoir Medium Raw. “It may be overcooked and dry – and her stuffing salty and studded with rubbery pellets of giblet you find unpalatable in the extreme. You may not even like turkey at all. But it’s Grandma’s turkey. And you are in Grandma’s house. So shut the fuck up and eat it.” Because you’ll miss it when it’s gone.
This article is from New Humanist’s Autumn 2025 issue. Subscribe now.