“At Easter my granddaughter Claudia came and says: Grandma, I’m going to make a TikTok. So I tell him: But hey, what is that for? And he says: yes, yes, yes. And my daughter, no. So I ask again what is that, to which my daughter replies that it is making meals with the mobile and recording them. And what’s wrong with that? Well nothing. So I tell my granddaughter yes, but on one condition: you have to eat what we do, which is very high but very delgaílla“.
As expected, the granddaughter of adoration bouquets I accept the deal. Now her grandmother’s account accumulates more than 43,000 followers, 234,000 likes and a video with more than a million views. It was her “her way” pepper sirloin, like everything she makes. “They took me out of school when I was seven years old when I made Communion, because she was the eldest of four siblings and had to do the cooking and take care of the house. My father had a truck I was little and I was going to buy products to sell in the food market, while my mother was in the tavern. So They gave me 250 pesetas and with that I managed to cook for everyone. No one has taught me, not even my mother because she couldn’t, God bless her. I have taught myself what I do,” she recounts over the phone.
@adora_comidas123 Pepper sirloin for New Year’s Eve. Hope you like it 🥰. #meal #lentils #grandmother #humor #for you #delicious #kitchen #New Years Eve #happy new year #sirloin ♬ original sound – Adora’s Kitchen
She is within the 2% of female TikTok users who are over 55, according to data from the DataReportal portal. A percentage that would drop to 1.5 in the case of men. These are quite small numbers when compared to the 75% of girls between the ages of 13 and 15 who use this social network, or the 63% of boys of the same age, according to the study’s count. From Alpha to Zeta, educating the digital generations, prepared by Qustodio. “The hashtag #recetasdeabuela has already generated 10.7 million views on the platform. Women who traditionally passed on their cooking secrets from generation to generation or in recipe books have found a new, simple and creative way on TikTok , to transmit their know-how and their heritage beyond the family circle”, explains the company.
To Adoration, the videos began by making his Claudia, a ten-year-old girl who moved the mobile a little too much. Now that function is performed by her grandson Francisco, who is the one who records and edits the tiktoks. Minors and young people control this platform much more, but older adults succeed, the same because few things make young people feel more at home than the sound of potatoes frying in a pan or grandmothers who, in terms of the amount of food, everything seems little.
fan phenomenon
Adora is aware that she cooks well. They all tell him. This Andalusian grandmother is used to making food every day for, at least, her husband and her six grandchildren. However, like so many other women, downplays what he has been doing in the kitchen for 60 years, a space that seemed destined solely for them, but now, with the gastronomy boom, is led by men from the outside world. With social networks, that has changed them.
There are people who recognize her on the street and neighbors who stop her to tell her that they see her, that “what good food”. “What a hey, hey, hey. Wherever you go, shopping, on the street… Anyway, yes,” he says. “Sometimes it even makes me tired, in the sense that I think that this is not important to me,” he adds.
Another grandmother who also accumulates fans is Magdalena, an influencer who fell for this TikTok thing for their grandchildren. “There are many anecdotes. On Sunday I was walking down the street and a girl got all nervous. She wanted to ask me for a photo and she was very embarrassed,” she says with a strong Galician accent.
@laabumagda Will we get three frying pans? #grandmother #meal ♬ original sound – cupcake
Mary Magdalene Carriage was born in the “village de Ferreria”, in Pontevedra, but lives in Ferrol. She did not object to the idea of her granddaughters recording videos, but she was not very aware of everything that was going to come her way. “I liked the idea. Not what I knew was going to give me all these fuss. But I don’t regret it, because I lived very nice experiences and they [sus nietas] they are also happy”. “It brought them closer, that they have to come to record videos,” adds his daughter while the telephone conversation takes place.
This tiktoker he also used to feed his entire tribe. Between children, grandchildren and in-laws, 16 people get together every so often. Now he has the intuition that he is helping younger people to be interested in traditional cooking. “I do live shows and there are people who tell me: ‘Grandma, do you adopt me? I want to be your grandson‘. I think my videos help them “, he acknowledges. It is precisely this type of content that has the most audience.
italian grandmothers
In Italy, cooking grandmothers also have their audience. Many of them have gone viral, such as nonna Silvi, a woman who exudes tremendous energy, both when speaking and when making pasta, gnocchi or sweets by hand. His video on carbonara has more than six million views. Nonna Natalina, 87, has two million followers thanks to her ability to cook and how she transmits her daily life through her grandson Luca de ella. His tiktok making ravioli has more than 53 million views.
@lanonnasilvi Carbonara ❤️ #nonna #recipe #carbonara ♬ Divenire – Ludovico Einaudi
The British Vicky Bennison knew how to see the importance of recording this gastronomic legacy. Doing a great anthropological job, she launched the project grannies pasta. Your goal is trying to find all those Italian grandmothers who make pasta by hand. Every Friday they post a video of one of them cooking gnocchis, breads, soups and the traditional cuisine of each region in their homes, which has allowed them to meet María, a 94-year-old woman who has been tagliatelle with tomato sauce in a large estate on Monte San Pietrangeli. Or Francesca, a Sicilian who cooks sausage rolls, apparently the favorite dish of the grandfather of Frank Sinatra.
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Their videos allow us to see their surroundings, their houses, those wooden tables where they work with their rolling pin -ormattarello– to roll out the dough until it is thin enough. We listen to how they passionately talk about each sauce they make, about their lives, which so many times revolved around cooking, while the chup chup of their preparations sounds in the background. We see them skillfully move their hands wrinkled by the passage of time as they follow a recipe many more years old than any of them.
“Pasta making is not going to disappear, but it is more and more a commercial activity, for chefs, pasta shops and factories, rather than a domestic one. So I thought I’d celebrate these women and their skills by filming them.“, says Bennison on his website. His gastronomic anthropology work has more than 920,000 subscribers on YouTube. Another way to ensure that his heritage is preserved.