Titina Vuotto is the Italian grandmother you wish you had. The one whose secret ingredients you long to know, whose hands you want to watch make pasta.

At 73, Vuotto teaches cooking classes in a state-of-the-art kitchen inside the family's Italian grocery store and import business in Morrisville called CapriFlavors.

Vuotto and her family came to the United States 12 years ago. She left her home on the beautiful Isle of Capri, a vacation spot for the rich and famous, because her children wanted to live in the United States. Here, she shares her family's incredible culinary lineage and beauty secrets involving pasta water.

Who taught you to cook?

"My grandma. I was 5 in the kitchen. I cut the pasta. In this period, we had only the long, the tube. This was 70 years ago. I had to cut the pasta for my grandma. She make a beautiful thing for me. She saved all the water from the pasta. Then in the afternoon, I make my bath in my pasta water. The starch from the water make the skin very, very soft."

Have you always been in the food business?

"In Italy, I had three restaurants. My husband own a hotel. We had two restaurants in the hotel, one on the roof of the hotel and one on the swimming pool. Then I had a place on the beach in Capri ... So I start when I was 5 with my grandmother at Marina Piccola in the restaurant on the beach. In 1950, my mother invented the Caprese salad, the tomato and mozzarella." (Caprese salad is an Italian classic: layered tomato, mozzarella and fresh basil drizzled with olive oil and salt. Vuotto says her mother, Margherita, created it at Trattoria da Vincenzo on the Isle of Capri.)

Do you miss it?

"The place, yes. When you decide to move and have a new life, you need to go. Costanzo [her husband] buy me a beautiful house on a golf club, but I don't want to stay there at home. I decide to come here with him. He bought the place. Little by little, we decide to make a kitchen. I start to make a cooking class. Now seven years. The business is very, very good. A lot of people on waiting list for my classes, all fully booked. I have two classes on Monday and Friday with single people. Then I have a lot of team people from Glaxo, Pfizer, Cisco, all the big companies. They come here. We cook together and then enjoy the meal. When they come in the kitchen, I am Mama Titina. They enjoy it like a family."

Describe your cooking students.

"[The women] come not to learn how to cook. They come to have a nice evening, a nice glass of wine, they bring the wine. They are interested but the husbands have more curiosity than the wives. The wife likes to talk with the other women and drink wine. The men are always in my kitchen and they cook with me."

Are you ever going to retire?

"I don't think so. I can't stay home. For me, it's a job. I love my job. I was always in the kitchen."