In my family, we do not have secret recipes passed on from mother to daughter. Which is actually okay, because the instructions are usually on the side of the box. But it's always made me a little envious, my friend's big kitchen recipe binder, full of the handwriting of her mom, and her grandmother, and her grandmother's mother. It's stuffed with notes and pictures and torn-out pages from magazines and yellowed newspapers and index cards, a narrative about their food, their daily lives, handed down and down and down, covered in thumbprints and spots. It's a gastronomical history of her family, and it's very beautiful. Do you have something like this? Do you wish you had one? You can fake it.

Via 101 Cookbooks comes this recipe for fresh, hand-chopped Italian pesto, which she learned at the knee of a real live Italian grandmother, from Italy. You need a very sharp knife, a week and a half to set aside for chopping, and super, super fresh ingredients. But it looks worth the time and the effort, because you're left with something that looks and tastes like it should be a precious family heirloom. It's a time-tested recipe to slide into the whole binder full of them, which you're going to hand over to the next wave of amazing cooks in your family.