Ideally you’d pound your pesto standing over a knee-high marble mortal using an olive-wood pestle half your own height. ’nuff said. In Genoa and the throughout Liguria, they like it with potato gnocchi or hand-rolled trofietti - little torpedo-shaped pastas which look like the dough-scraps which stick to your hands after breadmaking. Before dressing the pasta, dilute the pesto with a tablespoonful of the cooking water. To store (before you add the cheese), pack into a screwtop jar, float a layer of oil over the top, lid tightly and keep in the fridge for no longer than a week….p.s. cook a few small cubes of potato with the pasta - the starch improves the sticking-power of the pesto.
Genoa, as I’m sure you know, is the capital of Liguria - aka the Italian Riviera, a long thin strip of steeply-indented coastline backed by the foothills of the Alps - birthplace (maybe) of Cristóbal Colón, and that stroke of culinary genius known only by the method with which it’s prepared.
That said, the exact proportion of basil to garlic to salt to olive oil that delivers the ancestral pesto genovese, as you can imagine, is a reason for pistols at dawn.
The diagnostic ingredient is large-leaf basil (little-leaf is fit only to be set on the window-sill or grown in a pot by the kitchen door to discourage flies). The garlic must be this year’s crop, the salt must be rough rather than smooth. The olive oil - Ligurian for preference - the pure untreated juice fully-ripened olives gathered before the first frosts.
As for the pinenuts - since they’re always sold ready-shelled (the carapace is rock-hard and thick) - freshness is of the essence. Buy them from a Mediterranean grocery store or deli with a high turnover, preferably Italian. However if, in spite of all precautions, the scent is a little rancid, toast them first lightly in a dry pan (don’t let them take colour).
Paid subscribers (bless your little cotton socks) will shortly be the beneficiaries of a recipe for Ligurian focaccia, as sold hot from the oven in every Ligurian bakery as the midday snack.
Check out my website, www.elisabethluard.org, for details of my cookbooks and memoirs with recipes (including a handsome new hardback of ‘European Peasant Cookery’)'.
might need a glass of chilled Montbazillac.....xxx
Good tip - thx Martina! Also true for all shelled nuts, most particularly walnuts.