Culinary Concoctions and Musical Montages (F&M I)

San Francisco is one of the great culinary cities in America. It is also a mecca for classical music. Like most sentient beings, I love both food and music, but I rarely think about them in conjunction with one another. From time to time, Kimball and I have thrown around the idea of coordinating food with music. How wonderful would it be to attend a house concert of Schubert's piano sonatas followed by a Viennese meal? A recital of works by George Antheil coupled with dishes from the Futurist Cookbook? Pieces for odd ensembles with unusual culinary combinations? The possibilities are limitless! So in that spirit, I am now inaugurating a new kind of entry on my blog: I will describe a dish or meal that I'm cooking or eating and the music that, in my mind, best fits with the food.

With my hat tipped to Kimball, I am writing my very first Food & Music entry about pesto, which I first made in his company a number of years ago. I decided to make pesto this afternoon because my basil plant was beginning to look a bit overgrown. I started off by making the very same mistake that I always make when concocting pesto: I threw in about ten times more garlic than I actually needed. After tasting the amalgamation of basil, parsley, parmesan, pinenuts, olive oil, and garlic and being overwhelmed by the burning sensation in my throat, I started adding more ingredients to temper the taste. My pesto ended up as a mixture of the aforementioned elements along with a host of other foods found in my fridge and pantry: cilantro, spinach, sundried tomatoes, and flat-leaf parsley. Surprisingly, it tasted great! It was sweeter than my usual version, thanks to the tomatoes.

So, I suppose the obvious pairing here must be Puccini arias; they're Italian and sophisticated, but not so much so as to intimidate the average eater...I mean listener. But considering my pesto-making debacle this afternoon, I'm going with something else: the Argentine tango. As Al Pacino says in Scent of a Woman, "No mistakes in the tango...not like life...You make a mistake, get all tangled up, just tango on." So it is with pesto!

Check out my New Column on Examiner.com

I've just started writing for Examiner.com, which is an online news source, centered in several cities throughout the US.  I'm contributing articles about classical music in San Francisco and the greater Bay Area.  You can check out my column here!