Last September, the paperback rights to the late Angelo Pellegrini’s The Unprejudiced Palate, which has been in print in one form or another for more than half a century, quietly reverted back to his 94-year-old widow, Virginia. Hardback rights had reverted to Angelo in 1991, and the book is now officially out of print. But rights and circulation are two different things, and as long as word of mouth exists in chef and foodie circles, Pellegrini’s 1948 back-to-the-earth manifesto will continue to be a must-read, just as it was in the early ’80s, when M.F.K. Fisher urged Alice Waters to pick up a copy. What sucked Waters into Pellegrini’s memoir-cum-cookbook were his beliefs about what constituted the good life: cooking fresh, well-prepared food; growing your own vegetables; and plying dinner guests with glasses of homemade wine. “It was so full of opinions I utterly agree with—simple, basic ideas that seemed new when he spoke them—it just grabbed my heart,” says Waters, who, like Fisher, struck up a friendship and a correspondence with Pellegrini, neglecting to ever mention to him that she found the title of his book confusing. “It’s the ‘Unprejudiced Palate,’ right? I can never remember because it seems so prejudiced to me.”
Most of Pellegrini’s very specific views regarding food and drink can be traced back to his peasant childhood in Casabianca, a tiny hill town in Tuscany. As Pellegrini explains in The Unprejudiced Palate, his family was so poor that a plate of broiled pilchards would be stretched over more than one course. First he and his parents and siblings would take turns rubbing their polenta on the fish. Once the polenta had been consumed, its “condiment” then became the slightly ravaged entrée. Pellegrini was only ten when his father landed a job on the railroads in the Pacific Northwest and moved his family to McCleary, Washington. For the rest of his life, as Pellegrini sought to duplicate the cooking he grew up with, he never got over the United States’ abundance and how often it was either squandered or not even cultivated. The same plot of land his neighbors reserved for a clipped front lawn was where Pellegrini planted and harvested a mini-farm’s worth of vegetables, fruit trees, and culinary herbs. Those same neighbors would often find Pellegrini and his young son, Brent, at a small nearby swamp capturing as many plump frogs as they could haul home in burlap sacks. At school, classmates would gape as Brent and his two older sisters, Angela and Toni, pulled out one of their father’s messy sandwiches of pork loin and sautéed turnip greens on a lumpy homemade roll. When their classmates discarded half-eaten lunches of peanut butter and jelly on soft Wonder Bread, the Pellegrini children gaped right back.
“If I did that, my dad would have thrown me out of the house,” says Brent, whose father—called “Pelle” by adults and “Babbo” (Italian for “Daddy”) by everyone else—was still never above playing with his own eccentric image. “The kids in the neighborhood didn’t know what to make of it; they thought we ate everything strange. So Babbo would lift up a two-by-four with slugs all over the bottom and tell my friends that’s what we were having for dinner.”
Pellegrini had been made to feel different ever since he arrived in America, in 1913. The more thoughtful students at McCleary Elementary School might have remembered him as a bright 11-year-old put in the first grade because he spoke no English. The schoolyard bullies were from immigrant stock, too: second-generation Norwegian, Irish, and German. But because Pellegrini was fresh off the boat, they nicknamed him “Spaghetti” and made it clear that they thought Italians were beneath them. “We were forbidden to associate with American girls,” he recalled with outrage on a Discovery Channel documentary about Italians who had made a new life in the United States. “If one ventured to go out with an American girl, she’d have to be of poor white trash derivation. Being such, she’d have a brutal brother who’d clobber the hell out of you. Who dared?”
What Pellegrini’s teachers saw, though, was an earnest student who quickly mastered an accentless version of the language and rose to the top of his class. Eventually, he would go to the University of Washington and by 27 was on the faculty there. That was when he laid eyes on a beautiful 20-year-old coed from Salt Lake City named Virginia Thompson. Four years later, they wed. Soon, she would be introduced to entertaining, Pellegrini-style. On the morning of their first dinner party, her husband scotched her carefully organized menu, demoted her to sous-chef, and promptly set in motion a meal plan of antipasto, cardoons, and a main course that startled her: honeycomb tripe. Recalling the occasion in an article for The Seattle Times in 1991, Virginia wrote: “Hiding my shock, I responded, ‘I’m at a loss. I have never cooked tripe; I have never knowingly eaten tripe. To me it has been only an expletive. What do you do with it?’ ‘That is not your worry,’ he replied. ‘Just watch and you will see what I do with a piece of first-class tripe. And when you have eaten it, cara mia, you will regret the tripeless years of the past.’” It was 2 a.m. and many bottles of homemade Zinfandel later when their half dozen friends departed and Virginia tackled a kitchen piled high with dirty dishes. One of those empty plates, naturally, was hers.
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