Ode to Pesto, 1982

(Writing this at the library which just re-opened today, post hurricane) 

This is the fifth day of no power since Hurricane Irene – and while my losses are minimal and replaceable, and I'm grateful for that, I have to say I grieve the loss of my homemade pesto in the freezer more than any of my inconveniences. Basil, its main ingredient, is one of the few things I can grow without the squirrels eating it before harvest time – or before I awake in the morning. This year I went all out – I bought an extra special Romano cheese from Whole Foods Grocery at a price I don’t want to mention – it had just been cut at a Saturday morning "wheel cutting ceremony" of which there was much to-do. I bought organic pine nuts that were similarly priced – maybe more, I think. I always buy good Italian olive oil, so of course I bought more of the same. I found purple garlic which I remembered from my youth because my father used to grow it. I don’t know if purple garlic is better, but it was pricier and there was much nostalgia in buying it anyway. Those are the only five ingredients that make pesto – fresh basil, Romano cheese, garlic, pine nuts, and olive oil – but the dishes that can be made with that simple concoction are endless. 

My pesto recipe dates back to an old Bon Appetite magazine from June 1982, several years before my children were born or even considered – but the means and ways to use it have spawned with each passing year.  I’ve never skipped a year of making and storing pesto since 1982.  I assess that this year’s yield was the best I’ve ever made. 

Pesto pasta, pesto potatoes, minestrone with a dollop of pesto stirred in, pesto-baked salmon, pesto-grilled-everything, and of course pesto butter on homemade sourdough bread – these are some of the foods of which there was never any dissent among my family members at any age from toddlerhood-on-up. We all agreed for just those nights when pesto adorned dinner.

I wanted my pesto to be extra tasty this year for those times when my grown children would come home from faraway places. I wanted the memory of "home-in-agreeability" to reign for them. And I wanted enough of it to serve at all occasions – Thanksgiving, Christmas, random weekends, and all birthdays straight through to St. Patty’s Day when the next seedlings are planted. And so I even bought more basil at the farmers’ market when my own plants had exhausted themselves – more basil to make more pesto.

Now every bit of it, all my neatly stacked containers, rot in the warm dark freezer. The kitchen smells acrid and garlicky when I walk into it. I can’t bring myself to open the freezer door and throw it away yet – though it had thawed entirely two days ago. I’ve crossed the threshold of caring whether the power comes on today – my losses are tallied.

I’m not talking about the price of ingredients, a mere number that follows a dollar sign – that’s not what I tally or grieve. That’s not the value I assign to homemade pesto.  And I realize there are things far more valuable that I have not lost.  But I still think about the extra special effort I put into it this year – early morning treks to obtain quality ingredients – and all for the promise of another season when everyone might come together and agree. Pesto is the taste of agreement.  I wonder if the likes of Irene can understand that.

A woman’s heart is crazy and secretive that way – she’ll do so much and spend too much to implant a thing of value in the subconscious storehouse of memory for those who will never witness the effort or know about it or maybe even care about it . . . only, strangely, sense it by tasting . . . 

The 1982 Recipe:
2 cups packed fresh basil leaves
2 large garlic cloves
½ cup pine nuts
¾ cup freshly grated Romano or Parmesan cheese
2/3 cup olive oil

Grind it all up together in whatever way you choose – mortar and pestle, or blender.  And no, Irene, it's not the same as store-bought.

Strolling a` la Anne Spencer

I receive one poem per day via email from http://www.poets.org/ – which is nice because it’s just one poem, and it’s usually one which I would not come upon through my own devices. Yesterday’s offering was one by Anne Spencer, a contemporary of Langston Hughes and a member of the Harlem Renaissance School of Writers.  She died in 1975.  The poem is called “At the Carnival.”

Poet Anne Spencer's home in Lynchburg, VA

As I read it, I fondly recalled the day a few years ago when I strolled in front of Anne Spencer’s historic landmark home in Lynchburg, VA, and knocked determinedly on the front door to see if a tour was available – then sat on her porch, talked to her neighbors and some gardeners, took a few photos, and . . . finally, left. I happened to be in Lynchburg visiting my daughter who attended college there until her graduation in 2008.

I love going to writers’ homes and taking tours – feeling that certain feeling.  That’s what I like – feeling that certain feeling. Anne Spencer loved gardening, as do many writers.  She even had a little garden house out in the back where she would write.  I imagine she would write for a while, stroll through her rosebushes and do a little pruning work, then go edit some words out, then stroll and prune some more, rewrite . . . that sort of thing.  There were some men working in her back yard the day we were there.  I suppose they had been hired by the historic society to maintain the grounds as Anne Spencer would have liked them.  But they acted as though they had never even heard of Anne Spencer – this was just another job for them, and they were eager to be done.

My daughter was embarrassed of me that day, feeling I had pushed the envelope too far by sitting on Anne Spencer’s porch and talking to gardeners in her back yard. She sat in the car and waited for me impatiently as I strolled the neighborhood looking for someone who knew something about the Anne Spencer home and whether a tour was available.

We finally left the neighborhood and went to an historic cemetery nearby. We walked through a good portion of the cemetery’s 20,000 plots looking for Anne Spencer’s gravesite, but never found it. I later learned she was buried in a newer cemetery a few miles from there. We did learn all about African burial practices, however, and I took a few pictures of the gravesite of the most famous whores in Lynchburg, a mother-daughter team named Agnes and Lizzie Langley. They ran what was called “a sporting house” in Lynchburg during the Civil War era. They say it is uncertain as to whether the Langleys bought the elaborate grave marker with their own money or if their patrons bought it for them:

RIP, Agnes and Lizzie Langley, circa late 1800's

Then we ate some Indian food, perused a used bookstore where I couldn’t find any books by Anne Spencer but found a few other gems, and then drove to Poplar Forest which was Thomas Jefferson’s little-known summer retreat house nestled amongst 5,500 acres of . . . poplar trees. Poplar Forest is a bona fide tourist destination now, but in 2008 it was still in the process of being restored to its architectural authenticity, and we were privilegd and free to wander the house and gardens to observe the restoration in process. Jefferson said he went there "to be a hermit and to read and to entertain his absent friends." 

Thomas Jefferson's silent retreat called Poplar Forest

 Reading “At the Carnival” made me recall the spirit of that day – searching, strolling with my daughter, having fun, eating, finding things we didn’t look for, and not finding things we did look for. It was a carnival of sorts . . . and here are some lines taken from the center part of Spencer's long poem:

 I came incuriously—
Set on no diversion save that my mind
Might safely nurse its brood of misdeeds
In the presence of a blind crowd.