Pasta grannies are passing off factory-bought pasta as handmade.
The alley of Via Arco Basso in the southern Italian city of Bari is famous for pasta grannies who spend their days toiling over a special kind of pasta. The ladies have been hand-rolling semolina orecchiette pasta with little ears for decades. But now, authorities are stepping in after allegations of fake pasta being sold to tourists.
White boxes of commercially made pasta were found in wheelie bins outside the city, raising alarms about the practices employed by the elderly sellers. Pasta maker Nunzia Caputo is one of the famous grannies who makes orecchiette at home and sells it in the streets of Bari. She was featured in a video in 2020, where she presented the art of making this special pasta.
She weighed in on the controversy dubbed “orecchiette gate” and told The Telegraph, “They shouldn’t have done it and now it’s given us all a bad name. My grandmother taught me to make orecchiette when I was five. If you are from here, if you come from this tradition, then you need to be honest, transparent.”
Authorities are introducing a range of measures to address concerns about counterfeit pasta. For starters, sellers will need to wear hair nets and gloves while working and undergo regular health and hygiene checks. They must keep their workstations clean and complete a four-hour training session to earn a food safety certificate. The authorities also want the grannies to buy new refrigerators to keep their pasta separate from the food stored in their fridges. A database of all pasta sellers will be created, and a stamp of authenticity will be added to guarantee that the pasta is handmade.
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One rule hasn’t gone over well with the grannies in particular. They will no longer be allowed to make pasta outside, where it could become contaminated by dust or flies. They must work in their own kitchens, something the grannies refuse to accept. Their kitchens are cramped, and the heat in the summer can be suffocating. A pasta maker in her 80s said, “If they continue with all these demands, insisting we conform to the regulations, I’ll just pack up and stop work.”
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This isn’t the outcome that city councilor Pietro Petruzzelli wants. Petruzzelli hopes to stop this practice, but he’s also afraid that if the grannies stop making pasta, Bari will lose some of its soul. Bari attracts a large number of tourists, and the demand for this pasta has increased considerably, resulting in the grannies being unable to keep up. Pasta-making is hard work, but because tourists might not know the difference between store-bought and handmade pasta, it is easier to deceive them, a local journalist explained.
Although Italians are proud of their pasta, hand-rolling it every day is a thing of the past—it is less time-consuming to buy it from a supermarket. However, grannies in Italy are sharing their skills not just with their families but also with a wider audience. Pasta-making classes are popular throughout Italy, and tourists love them. If you can’t travel to Europe, there are YouTube videos of nonnas teaching viewers how to knead, roll, and shape pasta (along with other traditional recipes).
