Is it a sign of the times that it's neither Rachael Ray nor Giada De Laurentiis, but rather a 93-year-old great-grandmother named Clara Cannucciari who is the hottest cooking show host around? She's not even on the Food Network and she cooks in a kitchen that looks like it was last redecorated when Richard Nixon was president.
Great Depression Cooking With Clara, a series of 10 videos shot by her filmmaker grandson, Christopher, shows her skillfully preparing the humble Italian-American fare she remembers from that other cash-crunched era — pasta with peas and potatoes, egg drop soup, pepper and egg sandwiches.
"It was cheap, and it was nourishing," Clara Cannucciari said recently from her upstate New York home. "My mother used to make (the dishes) during the Depression. These are all simple things to make."
Born in Chicago to two Italian immigrants, she quit high school after her sophomore year and worked filling Hostess Twinkies in a factory. She married Dino Cannucciari, an opera singer, in 1948 in Rome, and then had a son, Carl, in 1950. She now has four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
As her Web site states: "The magic of Clara is that she can turn lemons into lemonade and potatoes into just about everything else. She had a childhood that most of us can't imagine, but she was able to make the best of it and turn those trials into lessons we can all learn from."
The videos have become an Internet phenomenon, and Clara is suddenly fielding media requests from all over, including ABC and CBS national news programs.
Her grandson describes the project, begun in 2007, as "oral history with a twist." Clara had a following from the start, he said, but added — with a laugh — that the worsening recession inspired him to step up production in November.
Christopher Cannucciari said he has heard from fans that much of the videos' appeal comes from how they capture "the experience of hanging out with your grandmother."
But let's not forget Clara's frugal approach to cooking, a strategy for survival. Her stories about great poverty — in the winter, she said, the family buried food in the snow because they didn't have a freezer — are bittersweet, yet fascinating.
As Clara recalls in one video, "Everything was terrible," she says of the time. "But we had good food."
Information from the New York Daily News is included in this report.
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