Alexander Tully offering $500 on Airtasker for your secret pasta sauce recipes after losing nonna’s

AN enterprising Gen Y home chef is shunning cookbooks for people’s real-life links to the past through pasta in her search for a spaghetti sauce to rival the family favourite perfected by her late grandmother.

AN enterprising Gen Y home chef is shunning cookbooks for people’s real-life links to the past through pasta in her search for a spaghetti sauce to rival the family favourite perfected by her late grandmother.

Alexandra Tully, 30, from Alexandria is offering $500 via online marketplace Airtasker to someone who will reveal their own secret family recipe.

Her beloved nonna passed away a few years ago and try as she might, she can’t find the formula to replicate her peerless pasta sauce.

Ms Tully has had nearly 150 responses to her post.

Alexandra Tully is offering $500 via Airtasker to anyone who can replicate her grandmother’s secret recipe. Picture: Dylan Robinson

“I didn’t know where else I would find a huge amount of people that would know how to do this,” she said.

“I was expecting four or five replies because it seems like such a niche thing to ask people and I didn’t think so many would relate to my story.”

Responses have ranged from someone who thinks their mother’s Filipino spaghetti sauce would be better than Nonna’s Italian version and a woman offering her moussaka recipe so Tully could create her own family traditions.

Ms Tully believes her request has resonated with so many people because of nostalgia.

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Alexandra with her late grandma Elsie Taylor, who died a few years ago. Picture: Supplied

Do you have an amazing pasta sauce that is worth of the $500? Picture: Dylan Robinson

“I think everyone can relate to home cooking if you’re lucky enough to grow up with it,” she said.

“It pulls at the heartstrings because of the memories it evokes.

“I would always go to Nonna’s place after school and the smell of the sauce as I walked through the door is something I want to recreate for my family.

“I recently got married and I think it’s what triggered this.”

Tully’s nonna, who came from the northern Italian town of Lu, would make an amatriciana sauce, but Tully said she was open to looking at other regional recipes.

The ad she posted onto Airtasker. Picture: Supplied

“There is something universal in regional cooking,” she said.

“As cliche as it sounds, it’s the heart in it. I have a tonne of recipe books and can follow them to the letter, but still won’t get it right.

“I’ve put it to together from memory, but can’t put my finger on what’s missing because nonna never used exact measurements; it was always a little bit of this, a little bit of that.

“She would cook by the look, feel and taste of a dish.

“There’s something I’m missing whether it’s an ingredient or a timing thing and I need someone to show me what it is.”

She will decide on a teacher on Friday. You can apply via airtasker.com/pasta