pasta dinner
chicken
spinach
pasta
pesto
Parmesan cheese (
grated)
Tom White:
Instead of basil, spinach was used for this
pesto.
toast pine nuts
cool then pulse or grind nuts with wilted spinach, fresh Italian parsley and garlic
add olive oil and process until it's begging for Parmesan
dice grilled chicken breast then mix with "pesto"
boil organic spaghetti to texture preference
pour "pesto" and chicken over pasta
grate Parmesan over all.
Serve hot!
Parmesan cheese
According to legend,
Parmigiano-Reggiano was created during the
Middle Ages in
Bibbiano, in the
province of Reggio Emilia and spread to the
Parma and
Modena areas. Historical
documents show that in the 13th and 14th centuries, Parmigiano was
already very similar to that produced today. Some evidence suggests that the name was
used for Parmesan cheese in Italy and France in the 17th-19th century.
It was praised as early as 1348 in the writings of
Boccaccio; and in his
Decameron he writes:
'. . . a mountain, all of grated Parmesan cheese', on which 'dwell folk that do nought else but make
macaroni and
ravioli, and boil them in capon's broth, and then throw them down to be scrambled for; and hard by flows a rivulet of
Vernaccia, the best that ever was drunk, and never a drop of water therein.'
During the
Great Fire of London of 1666,
Samuel Pepys buried his "Parmazan cheese, as well as his wine and some other things" to preserve them.
In the memoirs of
Giacomo Casanova,
he remarked that the name "Parmesan" was a misnomer common throughout
an "ungrateful" Europe in his time (mid-18th century), as the cheese was
produced in the town of
Lodi, Lombardy,
not
Parma. Though Casanova knew his table and claimed in his memoir to
have been compiling a dictionary of cheeses (never completed), his
comment has been taken to refer mistakenly to a
grana cheese similar to "Parmigiano",
Grana Padano, which is produced in the
Lodi area.
Parmigiano-Reggiano factory - 2005
pesto
It goes back as far as the
Roman age. The
ancient Romans used to eat a similar paste called
moretum,
which was made by crushing garlic, salt, cheese, herbs, olive oil and
vinegar together. The use of this paste in the Roman cuisine is
mentioned in the
Appendix Vergiliana, an ancient collection of poems where the author dwells on the details about the preparation of
moretum. During the
Middle Ages, a popular sauce in the Genoan cuisine was
agliata,
which was basically a mash of garlic and walnuts, as garlic was a
staple in
Liguria; a name given to the
region by the
Ancient Greeks.
The introduction of basil, the main ingredient of modern pesto,
occurred in more recent times and is first documented only in the
mid-19th century, when gastronomist Giovanni Battista Ratto published
his book
La Cuciniera Genovese in 1863.
