Food Notes: 6/8

Pesto, toxic pans, alcohol-free beer, pasta shapes, and more

We made pesto.

This all started when me wife walked in from the hallway outside our apartment and said, “someone out there is making pesto and it smells great.”

My response was, “let’s make a pesto.”

We debated whether we should include green beans in the pesto pasta. I was against, my wife was for it. You can see who won that argument.

Pesto is an interesting dish in American cuisine. It’s basically everywhere now — pizza, sandwiches, pasta — a general purpose condiment. That wasn’t always the case. It’s a truly Italian invention, but not one that was especially popular during the Italian diaspora that began in the 19th century. Genoese Pesto is an old dish, but only became popular and widely known in the United States when it started being manufactured as a jarred sauce sold in grocery stores in the later half of the 20th century. I wrote a full history of pesto over at Red Sauce America, if you want the full story.

Last summer while on Cape Cod, we found ourselves at the Bookstore & Restaurant in Wellfleet. It’s just as the name suggests: a restaurant and a bookstore. This place has been around a long time, since before I was a kid. There’s actually a really complicated history dating back to the 1960s, but since 2020, the bookstore wasn’t really keeping regular hours.

I had been peaking in for years wondering what to expect. The bookstore overlooks Wellfleet’s municipal playground, so we’ve spent a lot of time here in recent years. I’ve been checking in to see if the store was open — I hadn’t been there since I was a awkward looking teenage boy.

We got lucky early last year one afternoon. The shop was open and our three-year-old was content enough in the sand that my wife and I each took a turn in the shop. That’s when I came across Pestos!: Cooking With Herb Pastes by Dorothy Rankin.

At the time I had been thinking about writing the pesto history for Red Sauce America. I had already done some research in newspaper archives and magazines, plus the usually Italian culinary history books. But I took Dororthy’s book as a sign that it was time to wrap up my research and get to writing.

It’s a unique little book with a variety of pesto recipes. What we think of today as “traditional” pesto — basil, pine nuts, parmigiano reggiano — wasn’t set in stone until rather recently. But a pesto as a category include all sorts of flavors. Dorothy includes recipes for bails mint, sorrel basil, watercress and basil, cilantro and basil, winter thyme, winter lemon thyme… you get the idea.

I didn’t bother consulting her book, which was in the basement of our apartment. Instead, I eyeballed the ingredients as I poured them into the food processor. It turned out a bit spicy so I softened it with a handful of spinach. We also added chunks of grilled chicken like some second-rate fast casual restaurant chain. And with that I get to talk about authenticity.

There’s an obsession with the idea of authenticity. The term has faced some push back and scrutiny among culinary writers, but obviously its a word that still shows up on menus. Where I’m going with this is: how many times do we have to serve pesto chicken pasta at home before it becomes authentic? Do we have to become nonnos and nonnas serving it on a YouTube channel before we consider it an authentic variation on Italian American cuisine? So many of the dishes that we think of today as authentic, whether that’s authentically Italian or authentically Italian American are derived from domestic cooks serving dinner to their families. And that’s what I meant when I told Devin Kate Pope at the Rumpus: “But I think if you eat it, it becomes authentic.”

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Nontoxic Pans Probably Also Toxic

Nontoxic cookware is one of those made-up marketing words that isn’t real, like when you buy something that’s “all natural,” reports the Guardian. But it turns a lot of the “ceramic” cookware products aren’t actually ceramic, and are probably poisoning you. The quasi-ceramic products, otherwise known as sol-gel in the trendy non-toxic cookware is kept confidential, making it harder to know what people are actually eating.

Political Bagels

Mayoral Candidate Zohran Mamdani orders the same bagel I order, poppy with scallion cream cheese. He likes his toasted, though I don’t. Jason Diamond says it’s okay though, because its rare to get an actually warm and fresh bagel these days. Brad Lander’s bagel order isn’t bad either: everything bagel, Scallion cream cheese, tomato, lox and lightly toasted. Meanwhile, Andrew Cuomo’s bagel isn’t a bagel, and he weirdly inversed the order of Bacon, Egg and Cheese into “bacon, cheese and egg.” At least nobody pulled a Cynthia Nixon listing cinnamon raisin with lox and cream cheese.

Drinking for the Flavor

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Tomatoes Love Coffee

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You Are Where You Eat

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Tasty cheeses are going to be destroyed, or at least altered, by the changing climate as animals adapt to new climate norms.