She featured in videos where she shared her traditional cooking tips and secrets. The Country Foods channel has well over a million subscribers and over 200 million video views, thanks to the culinary talents of Mastanamma. She passed away at the ripe old age of 107 but the world's oldest YouTuber will remain in many hearts the world over.
The BBC described this grand old lady from Guntur in Andhra Pradesh as India's YouTube chef granny, in the report following Mastanamma’s death. Her grandson and a friend started the channel in 2016 and it became an instant hit.
In 2017, she had said that she was 106 years old. Though there was no birth certificate to testify to this, the lines on that weathered face seem to substantiate the tall claim that Mastanamma was the oldest YouTuber in the world.
She does things the old fashioned way: sourcing fresh fish from the nearby river, peeling produce by hand or using a rudimentary old knife. She sits on the ground out of door and uses a wood fire stove to cook. The traditional banana leaf works as a plate in many of her videos.
Here she collaborates with the channel 'Nawab’s Kitchen Food for All Orphans' to make a traditional, hearty mutton biryani. She uses lots of whole spices, long grain rice, ghee, fried cashews, fried onions and some lovely saffron (almost drooling here) and then seals the container in the traditional dum style with dough. Toothless granny goes on to enjoy the fruits of her labours in the end. “Granny is better than Gordon Ramsey” says one comment.
This is one of her most popular videos where she hollows out a watermelon and seals it to cook a spicy chicken dish inside. Her videos are leisurely. They give you glimpses of the gentle pace of rural life around. There are no precise ingredient proportions, though most ingredients are named on screen. There are few of or no words spoken; mostly just background chatter and some generic music, but it all works. Granny clearly enjoyed her food; mashing up her chicken by hand so that the absence of teeth would not present a problem. Granny had great screen presence!
Mastanamma passed away after a six month illness. This video shows glimpses of a humble life, some of her most popular videos and recipes and some interactions with granny. She tells us how 4 of her 5 children are now dead. The video also depicts her final journey; the celebration of a full life well lived and then the final moments as the flower bedecked coffin of the world’s oldest YouTuber is lowered into the ground.
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