Wide fettuccine with Ligurian walnut sauce

Silvia Colloca's walnut sauce. Shelled walnuts blended smooth with milk-soaked bread, garlic and parmigiano into the silky Ligurian salsa di noci. Tossed through wide fettuccine, finished with olive oil and black pepper. A Genoese sauce older than pesto, often the quieter sibling.

Salsa di noci is the older, less-famous cousin of Genovese pesto, born from the same Ligurian coast and using a similar pestle-and-mortar technique on a different nut. The dish predates pesto by several centuries; walnut trees grow throughout the Ligurian hills and have been the local nut crop since Roman times, well before basil arrived in the region.

The milk-soaked bread is the structural ingredient that gives the sauce its specific silky body. White bread (crusts removed) soaked in warm milk for ten minutes until it disintegrates into a soft paste, then blended with the walnuts; the bread provides bulk and a creamy texture that pure nuts alone cannot deliver. The technique is the Italian peasant equivalent of using stale bread as a thickener (the same instinct that drives Spanish gazpacho and Italian pappa al pomodoro).

Blanching the walnuts in boiling water for one minute and rubbing off the brown skins is the small step that makes a clean, pale sauce. The skins are bitter and tannic; removing them gives a sweeter, milkier final sauce that suits the gentle treatment. Wide fettuccine is the right shape; the broad pasta strands carry the cream-like sauce in even coats. A glass of cold Vermentino or a Cinque Terre white.