Pesto | The Sauce of Having Nothing

A jar at the Chiavari market, the arithmetic of Italian sauces, and why Liguria's most famous export

At the farmers market in Chiavari, under the porticoes where the town has been selling vegetables every working morning for the better part of eight hundred years, we bought a jar of pesto from a local producer for pennies. Not figurative pennies. The jar cost less than the focaccia and coffee I was holding while I paid. And standing there with both in my hands, I remembered the shop windows of Portovenere, where we had lived a few weeks, and where jars half that size sit behind glass for tens of euros, next to flyers for pesto-making classes in which tourists pay three figures to be handed a pestle and made to crush basil with garlic and nuts, which is to say, to perform for money the single cheapest act in Italian cooking.

Both of those prices are telling the truth about something. Just not about pesto.

Here is the thing about Italian sauces that nobody explains to you, because to an Italian, it does not need explaining. They are machines for eating carbohydrates, and they are small m…