How Area Chefs Are Immortalizing Their Elders Through Their Recipes

While everyone loves their grandmother’s cooking, these nonnas, abuelas, and bubbes have lately been a great source of chef inspiration at local restaurants.

John Shields, chef-owner of Gertrude’s Chesapeake Kitchen at the Baltimore Museum of Art, serves the very same crab cakes he learned to make from his grandma, Gertie. At Little Donna’s in Upper Fells, chef-owner Robbie Tutlewski’s grandmother, Donna Wranich, taught him to make the pierogies, pies, and palacinkes (Serbian pancakes) that now appear on the menu of the restaurant named after her. The granny trend is also in full force at Cosima, where chef Donna Crivello’s menu is an homage to her Sicilian grandmother, Cosima, for whom the Woodberry restaurant is named.

“We’d go to nonna’s house every Sunday for dinner,” says Crivello. “One time, I peeked inside her bedroom—and there was the bed covered with a white sheet. On that sheet were all her perfectly round ravioli dusted with flour—and that’s what we had for dinner.”

While Crivello prefers to rest her ravioli, pictured above, on sheet trays, the recipe is essentially unchanged. “I don’t know what was in her dough—likely egg and flour—which is what I do,” says Crivello, “but the filling was ricotta. I keep it simple, the way she did it. I stick to the basics, starting with flour and eggs for the dough and a filling of ricotta and egg, plus Pecorino cheese or Parm and parsley.”

Sadly, Cosima passed away long ago, so the chef can only guess what she might think of her granddaughter’s culinary shrine.

“She would be honored to know that we named the restaurant after her and are still talking about her,” says Crivello with a laugh. “But she might say, ‘That’s not the way I do it.’”