You say pesto and I say pay-stow

Eugenia Bone is the first food writer that we've ever spoken to who pronounces pesto properly. That's PAY-Stow, by the way, not Pes-TOW. She's also the first person to set the record straight on how pesto became so popular in this country (and no, it wasn't thanks to Martha Stewart - more on that later). The author of the recently published At Mesa's Edge - Cooking and Ranching in Colorado's North Fork Valley, she has been described by more than one reviewer as the Peter Mayle of the American West. Well, that's a rather dubious distinction considering the fact we haven't noticed a particular land rush in rural Colorado as a result of her book, and we don't think she belittled or pissed off any of her neighbors, like a certain English author did. Besides anyone who came of age in NYC wearing plastic mini skirts probably has more in common with Marianne Faithful than Peter Mayle.

Eugenia has also written about food for Saveur, Food & Wine, Gourmet magazine, and numerous other publications. We spoke to her by phone in New York City.

You grew up often sharing the dinner table with the likes of Craig claiborne, Pierre Franey, and Jacques Pepin (good friends of her father Ed Giobbi). Who eats at your dinner table these days?

Well there's my writer gang, where we get together to complain about people who want to change your text. (Laughs!) Out west (at her house in Crawford, CO, population: 404) we have an intense social scene going. In fact, we do more socializing out west than we do in New York City because there are no restaurants. People go to each others houses, and we're on a dinner circuit of probably 6-8 folks where you get everyone's take on whatever is in season that month. You'll have 8 different plum desserts in July, then 8 different zucchini dishes in August, and so on. The crowd is mostly expats from the fast lane, (One of her neighbors is Joe Cocker who is raising watusi cattle) but everyone expresses themselves through cooking because you can't do it through shopping. There's nothing to buy out there, which is what people in the cities do."

Pasta Primavera, Pesto, and Martha Stewart

Pasta Primavera, was it really your dad that invented this dish?

Well, invented is the wrong word. My dad was the vehicle by which pasta primavera became nationally known in this country. He is the vehicle by which many things Italian have become common knowledge in the country. He was a very early advocate (late 60's - early 70's) of the kind of food that people now have come to expect when you say Italian cookery. Not the spaghetti and meatballs model...in fact he was one of the people who broke that model.

One of the reasons he was able to do that was, he is a very, very gifted cook, and he came to the attention of Craig claiborne, who was the greatest voice on the national media level in food during the 70's. He was the food editor of the NY Times, and he was the person who championed home cooks and home cookery in this country.

Craig had a team that he used to get the word out about different cuisines. Diane Kennedy got the word out about Mexican cuisine in this country, Pierre Franey was putting out this country French cookery, and my dad was doing the Italian thing.

So the correct story on pasta primavera is in Jacques Pepin's memoir, The Apprentice, and the less incorrect story is in Sirio Maccioni's book Sirio: The Story of My Life and Le Cirque, where from what I understand, Sirio neglects to mention my dad - but that's ok. Sirio is a great guy. We don't really care that much. Dad certainly doesn't really care that much.

But some things bum him out. For example, he created a dish for one of Craig Claiborne's big birthday parties. Like his famous New Years Eve parties, it was catered by famous chefs. In fact that's what they would do. They were this gang that got together and cooked everywhere (Pierre Franey, Jacques Pepin, Andre Soltner, etc.). They catered my wedding in fact, Jacques Pepin and Pierre Franey. It was all about the food. The bride was like the second act. I couldn't get anybody to ask me where I was going on my honey moon! It was depressing, but the food was worth it!

So the birthday BBQ that Craig had, my dad was cooking a whole lamb, and he made a pesto with mint, a recipe that hadn't yet been published in the United States. He served it at the BBQ, and Craig ran an article about it. But then, so did Martha Stewart, who said something like, "I have a brilliant idea for a mint pesto...". These chefs were all completely relaxed about giving recipes to each other, but they did like to be credited, which is why they hated Martha, at least why my dad hated her. Not only would she rip off a recipe, which is not that big a deal, but she'd claim responsibility for it, and that was kind of a bummer, because that was a lie.

Eugenia says: "When I was a kid, we used to call pesto, "green spaghetti", and it would DISGUST school friends who came over for dinner! But the first time the correct way to serve it was published in this country, which was with green beans and potatoes, it was my dad that introduced the recipe."

Eugenia Bone photo © Arthur Meehan/Houghton Mifflon Company. All rights reserved.

We interviewed Jacques Pepin recently, and asked him about the Pasta Primavera story. According to Jacques, Sirio Maccioni, who had opened Le Cirque in 1976, was looking for "a recipe for a pasta which was a bit different. Ed said that his grandmother used to make a dish called Pasta Primavera. It was a sauce of diced fresh tomatoes, a little bit of onion, maybe a dash of garlic, and olive oil, salt and pepper, kind of like a tomato salad, and a lot of fresh basil. He cooked the pasta, drained it, dropped it into the sauce, and tossed the whole thing together. So it was only one, two, spring vegetables like this, and of course, at Le Cirque they flew away with it and made it all kinds of different ways."

Click here for Jacques Pepin's version of Ed Giobbi's Pasta Primavera

Home on the range

"I agreed to buy our forty-five-acre ranch sight unseen after my husband, Kevin, came back from a fishing trip to Colorado's North Fork Valley." That's the very first sentence of Eugenia Bone's new book At Mesa's Edge. Most men would practically die and go to heaven if their wives agreed to such a thing. Months later, upon arriving at her new homestead, she has this to say: "I don't want to be too critical, but from where I am standing, it looks like we have just made the biggest mistake of our lives". Most wives would probably say, "well what did you expect!"

On her first trip west for the summer, Eugenia totes along pounds of dried pasta, cans of Italian tuna in olive oil, a brick of parmesan cheese, Arborio rice, etc., the usual larder of any serious Italian cook. She tries cooking traditional Italian dinners, but soon abandons that approach when she discovers rural Colorado's agricultural bounty overflowing from roadside produce stands. Sticking to the Italian philosophy of trying to do as little as possible to good ingredients, she's soon whipping up hearty soups made with the regional bean crop, poaching trout caught in the nearby streams, and feasting on cherries, apricots and peaches when the season hits.

At Mesa's Edge is part memoir, part cookbook. The stories and anecdotes are not only elegantly written, they're vastly entertaining. Stuck pretty much in the middle of nowhere, she notes, "I relax in the knowledge that it is thirty miles to the first stoplight �� in any direction. I take on a casual pose at the wheel and lift only my right hand's last four fingers at passing drivers. Incredibly, they wave back. The cool wave, accomplished."

With a profusion of peppers, zucchinis, and stone fruit available, Eugenia's recipes in the book have an Italian/Southwest flair to them, substituting pinto beans for cannellini and poblanos for hot Italian peppers. Her obsession with fried zucchini blossoms is contagious and almost makes you want to show up at her door for lunch when she's serving them with cilantro mayonnaise or stuffing them with refried beans.

Click here for Jesse Kornbluth's review of At Mesa's Edge.

The Herald Sun (N.C) review of.

USA Today review - "This is inspired reading."

The Farmers Market Online review.

Buy the book from Powells.com

Italian Family Dining

Eugenia's next book project is a cookbook with her father called Italian Family Dining (Rodale Press 2005). It's a follow up to the seminal book Italian Family Cooking (Random House 1971).

Since 1971 when he published that book, a lot of people have been cooking Italian food and dining at Italian restaurants, but they are not eating like an Italian. They're eating half a pound of pasta per person, mixing everything up, and putting cream in sauces. This book is going to be about how an Italian family actually dines, and the idea is that you can create a menu from the recipes, because Italians never eat just one course, they have multiple small courses. This is important, because there's dietary reasons for it, social reasons for it, and cultural reasons for it. My dad is 78 years old and he's doing the recipes and I'm writing the accompanying stories, a lot of them are hilarious because our family has huge appetites, competing appetites, and lots of interesting characters.

Life in the slow lane.

You've started a Slow Food convivium for your area in Colorado?

We have, and we are very slow. I've been accused of single handedly bring about gentrification in the valley, but I don't think so. It's one thing to write a book telling how beautiful a place is, and it's another for people to go plunk down a 100K on 35 acres of scrubby looking land. My book and my role has become something of an advocate for the agricultural product of the valley.

One last thing - we know about your screen play.
Oh my god! How do you know about that?
It's the internet, nothing is sacred!

But hey, James Gandolfini was in it! It was the weirdest gig of all. They had this Italian woman who wrote the first draft, she was very dramatic and passionate. I knew the guy, and he asked if I could re-write it to make it more of a comedy.
So much for your Hollywood career.
Yeah right!

Eugenia Bone's website.