Pesto in your 40s

I made a lot of bad pesto in my 20s. Really bad. Light-your-gut-on-fire-and-lose-all-your-friends bad. And what’s worse, I persisted in such mad culinary folly for years. That was how I rolled in my 20s, slow to learn and even slower to recognize a bad idea. When I thought I had something right, I just pushed, bullheaded and unrelenting, thinking that the universe would come to see things my way if I just shoved hard enough. I called it passion. The many people I offended called it arrogance. It was passionate arrogance, I suppose – not a good combination in life or pesto.

The problem was the garlic, which, if you think about it, is really just passion in its edible state. Garlic inspires love and hate, swooning and disgust. It gives only an obligatory nod to the superficial tongue before invading the back of the nose, the blood and the belly. Garlic courses through you, warming or igniting, always heat, sometimes fire. In the wrong hands – like those of arrogant 20-something with a new food processor – raw garlic can come to no good end. It’s too much too soon. How can you know what to do with this kind of passion at such a clumsy age? When I was 25, I thought passion meant intensity, and intensity meant truth, and truth was the ultimate goal -- the more of it the better. This made me a better journalist than it did a cook.

I once made a batch of pesto with an entire bulb of garlic. Passionate arrogance run amok. It was typical, I suppose, of my belief that if a little was good, quadrupling would surely be better. Oh how wrong I was. It’s a short list of life’s pleasures that are better when taken to excess – daffodils, perhaps, and maybe cherries, but not garlic. Certainly not garlic.

It took me years to realize that one batch of pesto, even a really, really big one, does not require 10 cloves of garlic. Nor does it require eight, or even six cloves. Even now I can hear the voice of my youth cajoling – surely you could squeeze six in there? No, Celina, no you cannot. I find this hard to accept for some reason. It offends my sense of how the world should work. More doesn’t always equal better? Say it ain’t so. I had to wean myself of my allegiance to unbridled exuberance, backing down one clove at time. I was stubborn in my 20s. Or maybe it was all the raw garlic addling my brain. I made it down to about four cloves, which gives you just plain-old offensive pesto, as opposed to mad scientist toxic crap.

And then, I just stopped.

Pesto fell off my kitchen rotation and out of my mind. In my 30s, I gave up on raw fire and heat for a while. Concentrated on other things, like how to not piss people off so much, how to back down and listen, how to make fruit salad and big plates of black bean and spinach burritos, mixed berry cobblers. Foods you can bring to potlucks. Foods that make you friends.

I also gave birth to three children, humbling experiences if ever there were ones. I learned about sweetness and softness and the absolute joy of peace and quiet. Life was intense enough without me jazzing it up. I still valued truth, but I valued love more. This made me a better cook than a journalist.

I’m not sure why, but I rarely made pesto. My kids loved it, and we bought it often in the summer for a quick easy meal, but I avoided concocting it from scratch. When I did make pesto, I usually went for wacky variations – almond and parsley pesto or Asian pesto with mint and Thai basil. These were more approachable for some reason. I hadn’t spent years failing at them. They didn’t remind me of all the worst parts of myself. And I had recipes for these, which managed to keep me check at least a wee bit.

I’m not sure why, but, in my 20s, I never used a recipe for classic pesto. Maybe because it seemed kind of silly to follow precise directions for a dish that only had six ingredients and one step -- blend the damn thing. I realize that maybe after my 15th batch of really bad pesto I might have relented, but, as afore mentioned, I was stubborn.

In my defense, there was more to it than just pigheadedness. Pesto is about balance, and although I never found it, I was looking. There’s a short list of ingredients, and each carries its own power. You start with olive oil – the good stuff is worth it for pesto – fragrant and fruity if you can find it. This a base so strong and rich and fertile that you could build a civilization on it – it’s been done once or twice before. And basil, summer sweet, it brings a sunshine kind of warmth. Then there’s Parmesan, sharp and salty, it tweaks you awake, shakes you a little, peppers the rich and the sweet, makes them wiggle. And pine nuts, buttery wood and softly aromatic, rounding everything, even the olive oil. And, ahhh yes, the raw garlic. The fire that should glow underneath, like a flush in a woman’s cheeks. A bit of salt because this is life after all. And there you have it.

Pesto, more than most dishes, is all about the interplay, and really good pesto needs more than a recipe, I told myself. You have to respond to the ingredients at hand, the depth of flavor in the basil, the fruit or the flower in the oil, the tang of the cheese. It’s simple, mix them so they work. Easy right? No, not easy, but worth trying for. Or so I told myself for years as I proceeded to singe everything in sight.

But now I'm 40, and I’m returning to pesto. The classic kind, done by feel, no recipe, just a whiff and a pinch and a paying attention. I can’t stay away any longer. I’m glad I took the roads I took in my 30s. I had a thing or three to learn about chilling out and laughing. And a lot to learn about not taking life too seriously. But over the past year, I’ve found vestiges of my old self returning. The raw stuff. The unfiltered, untamed fire. The passion. The part of me that knows things and doesn’t want to argue about it. It scares me a little. It’s a slippery slope back down to my take-no-prisoners, bullish ways. But there is something in there that I want now. That I need. I want the raw flame. It’s where writing comes from. It’s how the deepest groove in the middle of the dance floor finds you. It’s the heat that makes everything glow. The key, as I learned standing in front of my food processor, bulb of garlic split and spread in front of me, is to drop the arrogance, the spit and pride that sees only the value of the burn and will clobber anything else around to spread it’s reach. There's no truth in that, I know now. No real intensity. Just pain, for others and yourself in the end.

So I smashed two cloves. Pulled them from their skins and threw them into the mixer. Next to me waited a huge pile basil just picked from a friend’s garden. It would go in along with the cheese and pine nuts and oil and salt. Two cloves. They looked so lonely there in the bottom of the huge container. Would they be enough? Would it be dull, and average, and pedestrian – all the words that had haunted me in my 20s. No, it would be just fine. The garlic would liven and warm everything. The cloves would do their part, not steal the show. OK, two it was. For a moment.

But, I couldn’t do it. It wasn’t enough even though it was. With me, there’s always going to be a little excess involved. I found the smallest clove there was, a sliver almost. In it went, a pinch of rebellion. A wild toss of the head. A touch of arrogance.

But not enough to burn anyone.