During our long, dark winters back in Maine,
one of the things that brought back the essence summer faster than a black fly
bite was the taste of pesto. Each year, we would grow several rows of basil in
our herb garden and, at the warning of the first frost in
September, we would hurriedly pick all the leaves and make batches of pesto to
freeze. Then, sometime around mid-January, when we were just beginning to feel as
if winter would never end, we would take out a container of pesto from the
freezer and have a little summer-fest by the
fireside.

An aside about this
allergy: I used to miss garlic but, over time, I have discovered so many ways
of flavoring foods that if I could
eat it again I probably would choose not to. However, being able to eat it
safely would make dining out easier. When we dine out, chefs who say,
“There is no garlic in this dish,” often neglect to notice the garlic
in the Worcestershire sauce, mustard, etc. No, it isn’t deadly in those
quantities but it is quite unpleasant for several hours afterward.

So, back to pesto. When
I first visited Liguria in the late 1980s – the birthplace of pesto as we know
it – I was not able to eat pesto because of the garlic. In fact, I had given up
the hope that I would ever be able to eat it again. But, one day, while walking
through the streets of Vernazza, I came across an elderly woman stripping basil
for pesto on her front stoop. I stopped and chatted with her in my kindergarten
Italian, and asked how she made her pesto. “Basilico, pignoli, formaggio, olio, sale e una noce di burro” –
basil, pine nuts, cheese, oil and a nut of butter. “Aglio?” Garlic? I
asked? No, she said, her husband didn’t like it! For me, this was a revelation.
It had never occurred to me that I
could still make pesto – or any recipe – by simply omitting the garlic. My last
question for her was about the butter – I had never heard of that. Butter, she
asserted, rounds out the flavors and keeps it green. 

“Nonna” – my
name for my freind in Vernazza, as I never got her name and I assume she is someone’s nonna – made her pesto in a large mortar
and pestle. Pestle… Pesto… Of course! The light dawned. The name comes from
the Genoese word pestâ (Italian: pestare), which means to pound, to crush, in reference to the original method of preparation which
used a marble mortar and wooden pestle. However, the ingredients in a
traditionally made pesto are not “pounded” but “ground”
with a circular motion of the pestle in the mortar. This same Latin root
through Old French also gave rise to the English word pestle.

While I actually have a
marble mortar and wooden pestle from Liguria, it is small and I have never
attempted this traditional method. I am definitely a child of the food
processor generation (Generation Purée) and the processor works beautifully!

Sometimes I use the
butter and, at other times, I don’t. Either way it is delicious, simple and
summery. The last time I served pasta al pesto in the summer, I topped it with a few halved
grape tomatoes which I had quickly marinated with olive oil and saffron. What a
nice combination, both for taste and color!