Pesto

Pesto may have become more popular than is good for it.

Marcella Hazan, Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking

A few years ago my husband offered to plant some kitchen herbs for me. “What would you like?” he asked.

“Basil?” I responded tentatively.

Three years later, the basil plants are merrily shoving the tomatoes aside, ignoring the cilantro, and rolling over our attempts to cultivate chives.

Many are the cookbooks suggesting people like us freeze our basil gluts in ice cube trays. Then, come the winter months, or what passes for them these days, we’ll feast on pesto in January.

Yes, that’s parsley in there.

I never do this, and never will. For me, basil, processed into its close friend pesto, accompanies summer dishes like corn, squash, chicken, and best of all, tomatoes in all their glory. It is not winter food.

Not a tomato. Check back in a few weeks.

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I confess my pestos are ad hoc affairs, assembled by eye, hand, and taste. This makes composing a recipe challenging, if not impossible.

The novice pesto maker is well advised to know that pesto is all about basil. The remaining ingredients–parmesan cheese, garlic, salt, pine nuts, olive oil, butter–play supporting roles.

True Genoese pesto is made with pine nuts, and before food prices rivaled mortgage payments, I prepared it that way. No longer.

No nuts. Olive oil.

This said, if nutless pesto appals you, walnuts make an admirable understudy. I’d avoid hazelnuts or peanuts, as their flavors are too strong here.

Unlike Skordalia or ailoi, Pesto isn’t a vehicle for garlic. Marcella Hazan’s pesto recipes, in Marcella Says and Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, suggest an abstemious two cloves. Elizabeth David, no miser where garlic is concerned, suggests “one or two cloves” in her pesto recipe, which appears in both Summer Cooking and Italian Food. Having said this, pesto does contain raw garlic, which makes itself known, just not in the overarching manner of a grand aioli.

True pesto calls for Parmigiano-Romano cheese. This ambrosial stuff was expensive before the pandemic. Now it is, to borrow a wonderful English expression, eye-wateringly expensive. Like all artisanal foods, Parmigiano-Romano is worth the price.

Unrelated photo of baby onions.

Should Parmigiano-Romano be out of your reach, I suggest purchasing the best Parmesan you can. In my case, this means a mixture of American and Italian Parmesans. I confess the American Parmesan is pre-ground by my market. But my market is Berkeley Bowl, and I have severe carpal tunnel syndrome.

I buy the Italian parmesan in wedges. Rather than grate it–see above–I use a vegetable peeler to shave off the amounts needed. Don’t sniff. It works.

Pesto is traditionally made with a mortar and pestle. See severe carpal tunnel, two paragraphs up, for why I use a mini-processor. Lacking either of these, pesto may be made using a sharp knife, a mezzaluna and a deep bowl, or a blender.

Yes, that is parsley. It was use it or let it spoil.

However you decide to make your pesto, it will keep for weeks, provided it is in an immaculate container and covered with an air-excluding layer of olive oil.

To serve pesto, remove it from the refrigerator about ten minutes before eating. Dip a clean utensil into the container. Serve. Return for additional helpings, always using a clean spoon.

Pesto on toasts with mushroom salad, eaten last week.