Skip to main content

Cookbooks 3: :Lorel Nazzaro, also John Cage


3.     Lorel Nazzaro. Each summer our garden flourishes with beds and pots of basil. Italian basil is the sweetest and best for the purposes of pesto. Snails lose interest once the stalks have grown and when full grown the leaves can be picked off to let out new leafage. Supplemented with occasional basil bunches from the shops, we live on pesto until the autumn. Lorel Nazzaro’s ‘Pesto Manifesto’ (Chicago Review Press, 1988) contains many recipes, even Green Eggs and Ham, but only one pesto recipe, to be found on page 9, which she titles The Recipe. I have copied it out below © Lorel Nazzaro. Her family are Neapolitan, so out of respect I will not engage here in the annual spat over who invented pesto, Naples or Genoa. That’s their problem. Variations on the basic mixture should apply John Cage’s amiable directions: “Combine everything in a cuisineart. Then taste and adjust amts., a little more of this or that, a little less being out of the ? … Experiment, never settling on any one of them.” (‘The Sun & Moon Guide to Eating through Literature and Art’, Los Angeles, 1994, page 55) A cuisinart is an American food processor. Because Cage was macrobiotic however, instead of Parmesan he uses miso. If you wish to be experimental like Cage, I guess it’s worth the try.    
 
Recipe. Lorel Nazzaro writes that you blend thoroughly in a blender or food processor 3 cups of firmly packed fresh BASIL LEAVES, 2 large cloves of GARLIC, 2 tablespoons grated PARMESAN CHEESE, and seven-eighths of a cup of OLIVE OIL. Never use the basil stalks, it’s all about what’s in the leaves. Pecorino or some other stronger Italian hard cheese is okay, while Grana Padano makes a softer pesto. After blending, add half a cup of PINE NUTS and blend some more. At home this is all usually done as the pasta is boiling, so the pesto is mixed directly with the pasta after its drained. Freshness is all. Lorel says this makes 12 ounces, though we just use whatever basil is available and modify the ingredients accordingly. My only warning is not to use too much cheese as this can overwhelm the magical factor, the basil.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why did Dante write The Divine Comedy?

This is one of two short papers given by Philip Harvey at the first Spiritual Reading Group session for 2014 on Tuesday the 18 th of February in the Carmelite Library in Middle Park. He also gave a paper on that occasion, which can be found on the Library blog, entitled ‘A Rationale for Purgatory’ . Nadezhda Mandelstam recalls in one of her books how her husband, the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, would say that when reading poetry we can spend a great deal of time discussing what it means, but the first and main question about a poem is not what does it mean, but why was it written. That is the place to start. Here are eleven reasons that I offer quietly to help us think about this poem: Why did Dante write The Divine Comedy? You may have other reasons and these are invited. We will spend most of our time today looking at meanings, but also at why. I wrote these out as they occurred to me, so there is no priority order. 1.      He wrote the poem because of Florence. Many o
4 comments
Read more

The Walk (Seamus Heaney)

This poem was read aloud at Janet Campbell’s funeral in Hamilton in Victoria in December 2006. Janet was a great lover of poetry all her life, a great reader of poetry, and she read everything of Seamus Heaney. Indeed, when she worked in Melbourne or London bookshops Janet would grab hold of Faber pre-publication copies of Heaney if they came into the backroom, and disappear for days, copying lines onto postcards for her friends, transferring lines into her lifetime of diaries. Diaries that were also a lifeline. Janet read everything, but Heaney was one of the regulars. Seamus Heaney keeps a tight line. He is rarely though completely opaque and the way into this poem is the word ‘longshot’. We only find in the second of the two poems that we are being asked to look at two photographs. Or, at least, poems that are like photographs. Or, better still, strong memories that have taken on in the mind the nature of longshots. The two poems in one are reminders of close relationships.
Post a Comment
Read more

The Poetry of Rowan Williams

Rowan Williams delivers the twelfth John Rylands Poetry Reading last year   This is a paper given by Philip Harvey in the Hughes Room at St Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne on Sunday the 6 th of December as one in an Advent series on religious poets. The original title of the paper was ‘The text that maps our losses and longings’. Everything Rowan Williams says and writes reveals a person with a highly developed sensitivity to language, its force, directness, instantaneousness, its subtlety, indirectness, longevity. A person though may speak three languages fluently and read at least nine languages with ease, as he does, and still not engage with language in the way we are looking at here. Because Rowan is unquestionably someone with a poetic gift. By that I don’t just mean he writes poetry, I mean he engages with the life of words, their meanings, ambiguities, colours, their playfulness, invention, sounds. We find this in those writings of his that deliberate
Post a Comment
Read more