‘Raw’ sauces like Pesto are amongst the oldest recipes we still eat today.
They’re also some of the most flexible and versatile pasta sauces you can make.
Probably the most important thing to grasp when you’re preparing pesto is that no two meals you make will ever be the same. Even of the same kind of pesto. Fresh ingredients like herbs and basil, oil and garlic will vary in taste and quality. You’ll add a little more of this, a little less of that. And soon you’ll get the hang of everything hinging on how you balance the flavours, in any pesto you do.
But that doesn’t make pesto difficult. In fact I think putting a pesto together is some of the most fun you can have in the kitchen. Getting the balance of ingredients right really teaches you to take notice of the flavours in the sauce and you’ll end up being a better cook because of it. But I bet you a slice of pizza that you won’t want to open a jar of bought pesto ever again.
who invented pesto?
Spend a few minutes Googling ‘who invented pesto’, or similar search phrases and you’ll get to one date and name: Giovanni Ratto and 1863. That’s the date that Ratto, a Genovese chef, published what’s now come to be recognised as the first recipe for modern(ish) pesto. Consequently, Ratto is often referred to as the ‘inventor’ or father of modern pesto. Except I don’t think he was. Definitely not in the ‘fell off my toilet and invented time travel’ sense. I think that it’s almost certain that pesto made with herbs would have already been regarded as an established, traditional condiment in Liguria (and possibly across Northern Italy) by the second half of the 19th century, and I think what Ratto did was to document a popular regional dish of that time. In his excellent ‘A Brief History of Pasta’, Luca Cesari highlights a recipe published in Florence from 1841 which appears to be a clear precursor to Ratto’s 1863 version of Pesto Genovese. And I think that for a recipe to make it into print in 1841, we should consider the possibility that that combination of ingredients may well have been in common use for some time before then. Giovanni Ratto’s is certainly the earliest recorded recipe labelled ‘Pesto Genovese,’ and the one that is closest to what we call pesto today, so let's not take anything away from him for bringing it to us. But I think that celebrating Ratto as the ‘inventor’ of pesto is a little much - it ignores millenia of food preparation, traditions and inter-cultural cooking influences. The basic technique of preparing ingredients with with a pestle and mortar is one of the most ancient known to us, going back probably to the Stone Age. For me, the foods in the next section are the landmark recipes in the evolution of pesto. Just glance at the key ingredients of each - that’s the fascinating historical path to what we call pesto today.
pesto in the ancient world
Skorothalmi The Ancient Greeks made Skorothalmi, a sauce prepared in a mortar made with soaked bread, garlic, walnuts and almonds. It was eaten with bread or vegetables. The modern Greek dish Skordalia, which adds potatoes, oil and vinegar, is a direct descendent. Morétum (Ancient Rome) The Ancient Romans ate what we’d describe as a cheese ‘spread’, made with cheese, garlic and vinegar, and served this with bread. Of course, some Roman territories and people could well have been exposed to the Greek Skorothalmi, adapting and passing on recipes based on this. Agliata (Genovese, Middle Ages) Agliata still survives today and there is evidence of it emerging in Liguria / Genova in the 1300s. Again, the ingredients alone point to links to Skorothalmi. And let’s not forget that, just as in previous centuries, peoples eating and passing down recipes or variations of recipes for the Greek Skorothalmi or the Roman Morétum might well have ended up influencing the recipes travelling through the maritime trade hub of Genova. Agliata is simply bread, garlic and vinegar and was used from the Middle Ages to add flavour to or help preserve other foods. The popularity of the recipe would not have been possble without the trade links of the maritime republic of Genova. In Britain, too, in the Middle Ages, it was common to use bread as an ingredient to thicken sauces; there are many surviving recipes for variations of ‘bread sauces,’ often made with vinegar, that were used as condiments for roast meats. These have become the modern (and appalingly bland) British Bread Sauce. By the time the Middle Ages were becoming The Reniassiance, Agliata had evolved with flavours or colourings being added from a variety of herbs, fruits and spices including saffron, parsley, chard, grapes and even cherries. Fascinatingly, in the 15th century we find cooks like Cristoforo di Messisbugo also suggesting that these types of Agliata be used ‘over Macaroni.’
and then there were nuts
Salsa di Noci (Liguria / Near East, 1300s -1500s) I’ve read a number of accounts of a mortar-based, nut sauce arriving in Genova in the Middle Ages from the Eastern Mediterranean, possibly from the Near Eastern countries. Modern Salsa di Noci is milk-soaked bread, walnuts, garlic, oil, cheese. Some variations even add herbs (marjoram), and here’s my theory. I think that if nowadays we might consider adding marjoram to recipes for Salsa di Noci, it’s surely a possibility that a few creative cooks in the past considered the same thing. At some point in the previous 1,000 years, during the emerergence of Morétum, Skorothalmi and Agliata, someone somewhere may well have tried adding herbs, perhaps even basil, to those sauces too. That would have been very, very close to modern pesto, but food historians have yet to find documentary evidence of that! I’ve heard anecdotal accounts of soaked bread in early recipes for Pesto Genovese, so for me Salsa di Noci is the pivotal moment in the evolution of modern pesto, even though we have to wait another few hundred years for written evidence of combinations of ingredients that bring us closer to modern pesto.
renaissance green sauces
‘Salse Verdi’ (1350s - 1500s) The Renaissance is in fact a fantastically interesting era for the use of herbs in cooking. Possibly not a great era for public health and day to day survival, with bubonic plague killing about half the population of Europe and despots and random 'royal' thugs subjugating the rest; but still really quite fascinating for the evolution of pesto. In the Renaissance we have the first mention of basil as a herb used to add flavour in the early 14th century, as part of a condiment for roast meats (previously basil had actually been regarded as a toxic herb in medieval Italy). Then, in the mid 15th century a recipe from Maestro Martino da Como for ‘Macharoni alla Genovese’ gives us the first written evidence of a basic pesto which combines herbs and cheese (my recreation of this is the shot above). Maestro Martino’s is a mortar-prepared recipe with rocket leaves, aged parmesan, saffron and olive oil. Crucially, it is also one of the first examples we have of a herb-based pesto recipe for use with pasta. Having cooked a version of this dish, I find it incredible that that the mix of herb + garlic + pinoli didn’t happen sooner. My version was amost certainly more modern in texture and more ‘saucy’ than it might have been in the 15th century. By the 16th century we find recipes for ‘Salsa D’Agresto’, which still survives today and, whilst it normally excludes cheese and doesn’t normally include basil, seems once again to be moving inthe direction of modern pesto. Salsa D’Agresto is a mortar-prepared sauce of green grapes, walnuts, almonds, onion, garlic, parsley, breadcrumbs. Some historians have suggested that Agresto/green grapes actually dates from Roman times and has links to the sweet and sour flavours of Arab cuisines, where recipes could have incuded the addition of honey too. The modern Piemontese and Tuscan modern ‘Salsa Verde (parsley, anchovies, capers, vinegar/lemon juice, pinoli, garlic, soaked bread, egg yolk) sauces are direct descendents of the early Green Sauces, as is the British Mint Sauce, which, in a spectaclularly forgettable, minimalist way simply combines vinegar and chopped mint.
modern pesto
‘Original’ Basil / Genovese Pesto (19th Century) As I’ve already mentioned, Luca Cesari’s ‘Brief History of Pasta’ quotes an 1841 recipe for ‘Genovese Lasagne’, which appears to be the first historical mention we have for pasta dressed in a basil sauce (a recipe for Genovese Salad, dating from 1830, Cesari states, includes a ‘sauce’ made from a ground mixture of dried fish roe, vinegar soaked bread, basil, pepper, oil and lemon juice). The 1841 pesto for Genovese Lasagne is made in a mortar with garlic, basil, ‘Roman or Dutch cheese and a little spice’ and olive oil. On paper this appears to be a direct precursor of Genovese chef Giovanni Ratto’s 1863 recipe, which is the first to actually be labelled ‘Pesto Genovese’. Ratto’s recipe included Dutch cheese and parmesan, butter, garlic, olive oil, basil. Ratto notes that if basil is unavailable, marjoram or parsley may be used instead (before commercially grown basil in greenhouses, you would have been lucky to eat pasta with basil pesto outside the short season in early summer). Notice too the lack of pinoli and the substitute herbs in Ratto’s recipe. Imagine a parsley pesto! Modern Pesto (20th Century onwards) The ‘official’ modern recipe is now basil, parmesan, pecorino, pinoli, olive oil and garlic, of course with the proviso that it can only be ‘proper’ Pesto alla Genovese if you use the right kind of Genovese basil from Pra, only if you use the right kind of mild Ligurian olive oil, the correct proportion of pecorino (Sardo, not Romano) to parmesan, and of course ONLY if you make it with a pestle and mortar. And that, frankly, is where I lose patience with the purists. In my recipes for pesto in this book I talk a lot about ‘pragmatic pasta’ - which is my term for cooking pasta dishes in the most economic way, perhaps not with the officially endorsed or sourced ingredients, but with the best trade-off between time and effort, price and flavour. If you can’t get basil from Pra, get it from the supermarket. It won’t taste quite the same, but the differences really are quite subtle, and certainly less obvious than if you were to follow Giovanni Ratto’s 1863 recipe. I can taste the difference between pot-grown basil grown at different times of the year in the UK and packets of basil leaves grown in Kenya and sold in UK supermarkets. If you can’t taste those differences, or if they’re not that important to you, just go ahead and get your basil where you like and concentrate more on the balance of flavours in your pesto, and how you cook and dress your pasta. Which brings me to the whole point of this historical interlude. I do think it can be fascinating and inspirational to look back at the recipes that have evolved into the ‘pesti’ we know today. I’ve certainly found that ‘cooking cold’ and preparing a pesto to use on its own or as a base sauce can be a real eye-opener in terms of how you cook pasta. Not just in relation to technique, but in terms of the phenomenal variety of flavour choices open to you. Pick the herb of your choice, the cheese of your choice. Pick a favourite vegetable or nut, whack them in a blender and off you go. The only rules are to think about the flavour that works for you. And stuff the purists and their labels.
