Recipe: Pesto Trapanese with aubergine

Visiting Trapani last week, I tasted the celebrated almond pesto with the local pasta ‘busiate’, a kind of long thin corkscrew shape named after a local grass ‘busa’.

I’ve had Pesto Trapanese before, which is similar to the classic Pesto Genovese but with less basil, added tomatoes and locally grown almonds rather than pine nuts. In Trapani, it is served, in virtually every restaurant, with fried aubergines. I cooked  it for my cousins who came for lunch yesterday including actress Anna-Maria Everett, who is the most Italian of us all, looking the spit of my nanny Savino. She is a fluent Italian speaker, having been brought up by her Italian-born mum, a chef from the age of 12, who never went to school, so she couldn’t read or write.

At one point we gathered in my bedroom to look at my nan’s bed.  My daughter inherited nanny’s metal bed. She hasn’t enough room for it, so it’s at my place. The last two nights my granddaughter Ophelia stayed with me, and when she wakes up from her cot, I take her into nanny’s bed with me. As we lay there I thought, she’s in her great great grandmother’s bed.

I remember my nan’s bed so well. It’s very high and so can store boxes underneath. In her day, in the council flats in Holloway, she, a true Neapolitan, sold cigarettes and matches from her door. (Not such a stretch to having a home restaurant). I was thrilled as a child to be told to get packets of Woodbines from beneath her bed. I felt useful and adult.

The cousins stood around the bed yesterday and all of us remarked at how huge it looked when we were children. In reality, it’s a small double. I’m not sure if the bed was English or was brought over from Minori as part of her trousseau. She married at 16 and moved to England, starting several restaurants in Islington. Her name Assunta was too weird and so she was always called Mary by locals.