Since I was able to grow some nice basil this summer, I managed to make some homemade pesto myself, at least for the sake of taking a good picture and to not feel like a poser.
Pesto is, without doubt, one of my favourite pasta sauce (sugo); I know that is blasphemous to not make my own pesto and buy instead the ready one, but basil and pine nuts are far from being cheap, and I take great care in choosing at least a good pesto, when I need to.
Trenette alla Ligure my girlfriend ordered in a restaurant in Sestri Levante
Pesto is one of those foods that you can trace back in centuries even to the ancient Romans civilization, where they used oil based sauces like garum, and the first official mention of pesto dates back to nineteenth century: easy, humble and fast to make sauce to season pasta, the cheap food consumed by the masses.
Pasta alla ligure is simply pasta with pesto, usually trofie and traditionally enriched with boiled potatoes and boiled long beans: the delicious flavour of pesto is given by the salty cheese grated, usually Parmigiano and Pecorino Romano, the coarse salt used to beat the basil leaves in the mortar, the sharp note of fresh garlic, and the rich aroma of basil, completed by the nutty flavour of toasted nut pines and the strong scent of the olive oil.
It’s easy to see that it’s a very essential dish, without any goal other than fill the bellies and taste as delicious as possible even if using a little bunch of very down to earth ingredients.
And those are the Trofie alla Ligure that I cooked for myself
I would eat pesto out of the jar, or even better out of an original mortar, but I try to restrain; however, when in a hurry, or in a culinary down, I always find it very heartening, whatever the season or the people I’m sharing the dish with.
Again, I know someone could consider blasphemous to not use the proper pasta type for every dish in Italian cooking, but honestly, pesto is good with virtually any pasta format, so it’ more of a purist and cooking nerd thing then a real life issue.
