Pesto alla genovese Period COrigin theory CVerified

Pesto alla genovese is an uncooked sauce in which basil, pine nuts, garlic, pecorino, and olive oil are pounded together in a mortar (mortaio). The name pesto comes from a word meaning "to pound," and it takes its name from the very technique of crushing and mixing without any heat.

The ingredients have all been part of the Mediterranean for a very long time. Basil, the lead, is an old herb rooted in this soil, and pine nuts, garlic, and olive oil were all standing ready in the kitchens of the Ligurian port of Genoa. The materials were at hand; what remained was for them to be brought together into one sauce.

The technique of pounding herbs and garlic in a mortar into a paste was itself old and widespread across the Mediterranean. The pounded cheese-and-herb pastes of ancient Rome, the medieval Genoese agliata of pounded garlic and walnuts: the genre of pounded sauces ran on unbroken. Within that genre, the version with basil as its main ingredient appears in the written record from the 1850s onward. G. B. Ratto's La Cuciniera Genovese (1863) is one of the confirmed first texts to record a basil-based pesto. As a home dish of the port city of Genoa, this green sauce took on its present outline in the mid-19th century.

This dish is trailed by an appealing origin story: that it is a direct descendant of the ancient Roman moretum. The Moretum attributed to Virgil (Appendix Vergiliana) describes a paste of cheese, herbs, garlic, and oil pounded in a mortar, and this, the story goes, is the ancestor of pesto.

But the paste of the Moretum contains no basil. All the two share is the technique of pounding in a mortar, and there is no source showing a chain of transmission that carried that technique, main herb and all, down to today's pesto. The moretum was a Roman condiment complete in itself, and no thread of two thousand years of direct descent from it survives in the sources we can now check. That the genre of pounded sauces is old, and that this basil-based dish is old, are two different matters.

Source criticism turns up a still more entertaining episode. In the debate over pesto's first appearance, the 1852 edition of Emanuele Rossi's La Vera Cuciniera Genovese has often been cited, as evidence earlier than and older than Ratto's 1863. Yet this 1852 edition is a phantom that never existed. According to the study by the Museo della Cucina, Rossi's book actually came out in 1865, two years after Ratto, and the date 1852 was an error that grew as books copied one another. The wish for an older first appearance conjured up an edition that was never there.

What remains, then, is Ratto of 1863 as the firm first text. Yet a first text is still not a birth. The year a dish appears in writing marks only the latest point at which it could have existed; the single moment when a green sauce first began to be pounded in a Genoese kitchen dissolves into a continuous tradition and cannot be pinned down. Onto an old technique of pounded sauces, basil was set as the lead in the mid-19th century, and today's pesto alla genovese crystallized. That is as far as the sources can speak.