Depression-era recipes served up with heaping helpings of tales about life during hard times have turned 93-year-old great-grandma Clara Cannucciari into a YouTube sensation.

The popularity of “Great Depression Cooking With Clara,” her series of seven-minute frugal-cooking videos peppered with memories of life in the 1920s and ’30s, has led to national media appearances and an enormous fan base. Young and old are eating up Clara’s stories about how her Sicilian immigrant parents fed two kids with little money and a lot of potatoes and pasta.

“It has turned into quite a lot more than I intended,” says Clara’s director/cinematographer grandson Christopher Cannucciari, who embarked on a “labor of love” two years ago to capture some of the recipes and stories “of our most entertaining family member.” He then decided to put them on YouTube to share with the world.

Now a DVD compilation of the eight YouTube cooking sessions plus three new ones and behind-the-scenes footage is nearly complete, and preorders are being taken on Clara’s website. There are also plans for a cookbook.

Straightforward and plainspoken, Clara instructs her audience in the ways of penny-pinching but nutritious meals from the tough years, including egg drop soup (diced potatoes and onions, eggs and grated cheese over a chunk of homemade bread), rolled sugar cookies (a Sundays-only breakfast treat), and what she calls “poorman’s feast” (rice and lentils served with lemon-infused, paper-thin beef fried in olive oil.)

Things were “different in those days,” she says on one video as she prepares a dish in her modest, spotless kitchen. “But now when I think about it, they were interesting.”

Clara tells viewers about the long, cold winters in Melrose Park, Ill., where she grew up, describing how everyone dressed in nearly all the clothes they had and sat in front of the stove to stay warm. She shows family snapshots and speaks of burying the rare slab of meat her parents were lucky enough to acquire in a snow bank by the fence to keep it cold. She also admits to faking illness sometimes so her mother would prepare the family curative: lemon beef.

Clara appears to be a natural who loves the camera as much as it loves her. She opens her segments with “Welcome to my kitchen” and then launches easily into the recipe of the day. “That’s the magic of editing,” laughs Christopher, who acknowledges that his grandmother wasn’t very happy about being recorded while she chopped and stirred and kneaded. She gamely did his bidding so the family would forever have her image doing what brought them all such pleasure, but now she has insisted on taking a hiatus from cameras and media interviews.

“And that’s that,” Christopher chuckles.

Clara has always known her own mind. After dropping out of high school to help support the family, she remained unmarried—despite several offers—until well into her 30s. Then she made eye contact one day with an Italian opera singer who was part of the Vatican choir touring the United States. They spoke, they corresponded, and several months later she agreed to go to Rome to become his wife.

The couple moved back to the Chicago area and had a son (there are now four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren), and Clara served for decades as the hostess for family get-togethers. Her hearty Italian meals were legendary, but every once in a while she would prepare some of the Depression-era specialties her mother invented and tell stories of how things were back then.

“I’ve always thought of her as strong-willed, opinionated, independent, an amazing cook and a great storyteller,” says Christopher. Now millions of complete strangers apparently regard her similarly. “I can’t get enough of this” one fan wrote in a blog. “She rocks.”

Clara’s immense popularity seems to have bloomed from a confluence of two things: the need for cost-cutting measures during the current recession, and her ability to reach people with her matter-of-fact and somehow comforting recitations of how things were when the nation was in worse financial trouble than it is today.

“She’s sort of America’s grandmother” says Christopher, who reads all the fan comments on her Facebook page, prints them out and takes them to Clara, who has no computer or interest in joining the tech revolution. “The notes and comments mean a lot to her.”

Clara keeps quite busy in the little upstate town of Skaneateles, N.Y., where she and her late husband moved years ago to be closer to their son and grandchildren. She attends church every morning, breakfasts with friends, then plays cards most afternoons. And, yes, she still prepares special meals for company.

She accepts this unexpected fame with “a little embarrassment,” says Christopher.

Although she’s mystified by the hoopla, when fans write that she’s giving them ideas for surviving these times, “she’s happy,” says Christopher, “happy she can help.”

Sharon L. Peters is a writer in Colorado Springs, Colo.