Tucson couple behind 'Pasta Grammar' YouTube channel release cookbook

Eva Santaguida looked like she was going to turn green when her husband opened the pizza box from Domino’s.

“This is not a pizza. I’m sorry. No, no, I’m sorry,” she sputtered in a thick Italian accent as she lifted the pie to reveal a ring of oil in the box. “That is not pizza.”

She then goes into the kitchen and whips up her own scratch-made pizza, from the fresh dough and seasoned tomato sauce to slicing fresh mozzarella and adding fresh basil.

After taking a bite, her husband Harper Alexander gushes, “That’s amazing. That’s a pizza.”

“Italian Tries DOMINO’S PIZZA for the First Time” was one of the early videos the couple posted on their four-year-old “Pasta Grammar” YouTube Channel. Since it went up on Feb. 10, 2020, it has garnered almost 2.3 million views, one of the most popular among the 324 videos they have posted to date.

The recipe for that pizza can be found on Page 70 of the couple’s months-old cookbook, “The Italian Family Kitchen: Authentic Recipes That Celebrate Italian Homestyle Cooking” (Quarto Publishing Group USA).

“In the beginning, when Eva was cooking, we didn’t even release recipes online because I didn’t even think of it as a cooking channel,” said Alexander, who moved to Tucson with his wife in 2021. “But as Eva did more and more cooking in the videos, we had more and more people saying, ‘Can we get the recipe?’ That’s when we started our recipe blog, where everything that Eva cooks in the videos, we would release a recipe so that people could cook at home.”

The videos started as a pandemic hobby for Alexander, who worked as a cinematographer in Hollywood until the pandemic put his job on hold. He would introduce Santaguida to quintessential American dishes or junk food and film her reaction.

“Eva being Eva … wouldn’t criticize something that she found here without also showing how to make it properly,” he said. “So in the course of making these videos that for me were honestly just kind of a joke, I started to experience all this amazing food.”

Before he met Santaguida, his diet consisted of microwaveable frozen meals and fast food. His idea of pasta was boiling boxed noodles in a small pot of water with salt and opening a jar of store-bought sauce.

Alexander was drinking a protein shake when the couple met in Maine at his parents’ home. Santaguida had met the parents in Italy when they took an Italian class from her in Umbria.

“His father is a very good cook. He was preparing a dinner with the classic Maine lobster,” she recalled. “(Alexander) didn’t sit at the table because he was drinking a protein shake. I still remember the color was green, and I thought, OK, this guy has a problem because he can prefer a protein shake, green, instead of a fresh lobster. He has a problem.”

Alexander said the “Pasta Grammar” videos document “me discovering something that I have come to absolutely love about my wife, which is her food.”

It’s apparently something viewers of “Pasta Grammar” also have come to love. Since its launch, the videos have had more than 54 million views, including several — 2020’s “How to make Lasagna Like an Italian,” a video where she tries to replicate Gordon Ramsay’s carbonara recipe, and last month’s video where she took her parents to Costco — that topped a million. Videos sharing secrets about Italian cooking and ingredients, from olive oil to scratch-made ricotta cheese, routinely find an audience in the hundreds of thousands.

Early on, they thought about self-publishing a cookbook, but the idea fell by the wayside as the couple focused on “Pasta Grammar” and their twice-a-year culinary tours of southern Italy, taking large groups from around the world to eat their way across Italy, including a stop in the small village in Santaguida’s native Calabria where she grew up.

That changed in 2023 when they signed with a publisher. Santaguida spent that summer at home in Italy, testing and cooking alongside her mother and other nonnas and drawing from family recipes and those that Italian cooks just inherently know.

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“We decided to do 100 Italian recipes that a person who never heard about Italian food should know if he wants to know something about Italian food,” Santaguida said during an interview in the couple’s far northeast-side home. “So it goes from Sicily to Milano. It’s a journey through all of Italy.”

The Calabrian dishes are family recipes, but the recipe for pasta alla carbonara found on Page 116 is the one most Italians cook at home and the one you’ll find in nearly every restaurant in Rome. The recipe for lasagna alla bolognese (Page 120) is the most widely used recipe for the dish, Santaguida explained.

“All these dishes in Italy, everyone knows how to cook. If you go to Italy and ask for a person on the street, can you make for me a lasagna? Yes, they can,” she said. “So it’s not something that we actually borrow from a chef; it’s something that we learn growing up.”

“The Italian Family Kitchen” is organized the way Italian meals work, with chapters on fried appetizers, bread and pizza, ragu, pasta — the longest chapter in the book — meat and fish dishes, side dishes and desserts.

Before you get to the recipes, Santaguida and Alexander take you into an Italian pantry, where you should have, at minimum, Parmigiano-Reggiano and Pecorino cheeses, semolina and fine-ground all-purpose flour, fresh garlic, bread crumbs, capers, olives, anchovies, basil, parsley, very good oregano, red chile peppers and a good olive oil.

In the kitchen, they recommend you have a mandoline for razor-thin slicing, a good-quality chef’s knife, terracotta cookware, a pasta machine if you’re not keen on rolling the dough by hand and a large wooden cutting board that can double as a dough board.

The first thing Alexander bought Santaguida when they moved to Tucson was a mattarello, a narrow but long wooden rolling pin for rolling pasta dough.

There are also chapters on making homemade pastas and gnocchi and the proper way to cook pasta, from the temperature of the water to how to drain and serve it. Another section breaks down how to make a simple tomato sauce and a besciamella, used as a building block in a number of baked pastas.

What you won’t find among the recipes are dishes like America’s go-to spaghetti and meatballs or chicken parmigiana.

“You will never see in an Italian table a plate of spaghetti with chicken cutlet at all, never, or with any kinds of meat” aside from meat ragu, Santaguida insisted.

“There’s actually a good reason for that,” Alexander added, “and that’s because if you know how to properly eat spaghetti, you can’t cut something on top of it without cutting your spaghetti.”

If you ask her, Santaguida will give you an earful when it comes to American Italian food, from her likes — Cioppino seafood stew, stromboli — to her dislikes — our liberal use of garlic, pizza with too many toppings.

“In Italy, pizza is a very simple, basic food,” she said. “It’s flour, water, yeast, some tomato, good tomato sauce on top, and maybe some cheese if you like cheese, or some anchovies if you like anchovies. It’s so simple and so good and so healthy.”

Italian pizzerias serve “peperoni” pizza, but “peperoni” with one “p” is not the spicy sausage we find in America.

“Americans or the English speakers, they come and say, ‘Okay, I want this.’ Then … they bring you a pizza with bell peppers, and you complain because you want the salami,” she said. “And it happens all the time. So if you want the Italian ‘pepperoni’ pizza, you should ask for ‘pizza alla diavola.’”

Alexander and Santaguida will be at the 2025 Tucson Festival of Books March 15-16 on the University of Arizona Mall on campus. No schedules have been released, but Alexander said he believes the couple will do a cooking demonstration on March 16.