Essay

What is your favorite food?

By Steve Ford

What are your favorite foods? That's always a good question to ask people and the answers you get might surprise you. A couple of my favorites are southern- style barbecue, and the cuisine of Yucatan, in Mexico, but sadly neither of these are obtainable in Japan.

Luckily the one food I adore above all others is Pesto Genovese. It originates in Genoa, a city in northwest Italy. I say "luckily" because all the necessary ingredients can be found without too much trouble in an average Japanese supermarket. That means I can make it at home any time the spirit moves me.

This simple, emerald green sauce is made from fragrant basil, pine nuts, parmesan cheese, olive oil and salt. Traditionally pesto was pounded with a mortar and pestle, a process that was both laborious and lengthy. Nowadays all you need to do is puree the ingredients in a food processor and presto, you've got pesto.

I fell in love with pesto the first time I ever made it. Nearly thick as butter, the sauce was vibrant green like a country landscape, and the aroma of garlic and basil was warm and bright as sunshine. When I spread some on a slice of bread and had a taste, it was truly love at first bite.

Pesto is delicious on a toasted baguette, with a few bits of ripe tomato. When a teaspoon of this green sauce is mixed with a couple of tablespoons of extra-virgin olive oil, it becomes a sublime dressing for sliced tomatoes and fresh mozzarella cheese.

A spoonful of pesto makes a bowl of minestrone sparkle when added as a condiment just before eating. And pesto-flavored mayonnaise can lift an ordinary potato salad, or an everyday sandwich into a higher realm. But I really think pesto is at its best when paired with pasta, in fact I'm quite certain it must be the staple food of the angels. This jade-green sauce is just heavenly when tossed with some hot linguini, or regular spaghetti.

Most experts say one should never use cream, or butter with pesto, but I often add a splash of cream to a pesto pasta dish, and others often add butter, so the rule is not set in concrete. Lately chefs are making pesto with many different sorts of herbs and nuts, but I don't see the point in messing with perfection, so I'll stick to the old-fashioned kind made with basil and pine nuts.

Over the years I've made pesto hundreds of times in restaurants and at home, and every time I'm amazed at how I fall in love with it again. I often wonder whether everybody has a special recipe like that, or if it's just a quirk of the food-obsessed?

Shukan ST: MAY 14, 2010

(C) All rights reserved