It's not pesto. And it's not a garnish. No, when Anna Jones writes about "smashes" in her new book, A Modern Way to Cook, she's talking about a new way with herbs, one that isn't as saucy as a pesto or herb oil, and is definitely more integral to a dish than a few chopped parsley leaves thrown on top.
What are these smashes? At first, I thought they might be a British thing. (Jones is a Londoner.) Turns out Jones made the term up. She described her thinking behind the term in an email. (Her spellings are British, naturally.)
"I realised that a lot of my cooking was centering around a flavour-packed collection of herbs, bashed up in a pestle and mortar or blender, mixed with nuts, garlic, chile, oil, citrus, Asian flavours—whatever suited the food I was making. I guess they kind of live in the same world as pestos but aren’t necessarily rooted in Italian cooking or flavours; that’s why I thought they needed a new, more open name."
iI pressed Jones on the pesto comparison a bit. I'd been surprised when, while making Jones's Black-Eyed Peas With Chard and Green Herb Smash with friends, I stuffed an entire bunch of cilantro into a blender with two whole green chiles, a couple cloves of garlic, a handful of walnuts, some honey and lemon juice, and just two tablespoons of oil. It will never blend, I thought. But it did, and soon my friends and I were spooning this thick, vivacious, spicy-yet-cool paste over our beans. It added not just one dimension to the dish, but five or six.
Still, I asked Jones about the lack of oil—was that a health decision?
"I don’t think you always need a lot of oil," she wrote me. "Just enough to bind. Often I’ll use citrus juice or even a splash of water to get the consistency I want, which means the herb flavour is fresher and our bottles of good olive oil last for longer."
Smashes are all over Jones's book. There's a sandwich with hummus, carrots, and a kale/sun-dried tomato/lemon juice smash, and a (perhaps more familiar) avocado-olive-tahini smash, which gets spread on flatbreads. If the smash has a single distinguishing factor, it's that it is thick—more spreadable than pourable.
And they might be more versatile than any pesto can be. "I use herb smashes all over the kitchen," Jones wrote in her email. "As dressing for salads, to toss through warm roasted veg, spread on sandwiches, to spoon over roast feta or ricotta and of course to toss through noodles or pasta. The list in my house is endless. I even make sweet ones to adorn fruit at breakfast or for a quick dessert using sweet-flavour-friendly herbs like mint or basil, a little vanilla or smashed peppercorns, honey, nuts, and a tiny trickle of a good buttery olive oil or melted coconut oil. We ate this all summer over just ripe stone fruit, but as the seasons change it’ll be figs, then blood oranges."
