Almost every weekend for the next 53 years, company would show up and breathe in the old-world Italian aromas: roast pork embedded with slivers of garlic and sage leaves or oven-fresh garlic-and-rosemary-flecked schiacciata (Tuscan flatbread). In an age when soulless minute steaks and quick casseroles were the norm, Pellegrini had a time-tested method for getting even the most finicky eater to reconsider sweetbreads, game birds, intestines, or a red pasta sauce flavored with diced giblets and the whole head of a chicken. “You’d sit down at the table and right away he’d deliver a little sermon on how wonderful the meal was going to be,” explains his youngest daughter, Toni Lucey. “He’d say, ‘Now you are about to taste the marrying of flavors like you’ve never had before,’ and talk about how the vegetables were grown in his garden. Then he’d serve some of the fabulous wine he’d made. My dad cooked what he loved, he put it in front of people with style and passion, and people went away loving it. He didn’t give them pause for thought. How could you not like it?”
It was a colleague’s wife and Pellegrini table regular who nagged him into committing some of his culinary thoughts to paper. What truly motivated him, though, was a visit to a local bookstore, where Pellegrini—by day an esteemed university English professor whose specialty was Shakespeare—checked out the state of the modern cookbook and found it shockingly inane. “I was so angered, really indignant, at the kind of crap that was being written about food, I accepted the challenge,” Pellegrini told a Los Angeles Times reporter in 1990. “In a half-humorous, half-serious way, I attacked that ill-informed attitude about food and cooking. I sat down and started writing.”
Last November, when I visited the Pellegrini family in Seattle, I asked Brent, his father’s self-appointed archivist, to show me Angelo’s basement study. He took me past the crumbling outdoor brick oven, where Pellegrini baked huge batches of bread, and down a back stairway. Right next to a dusty wine cellar was a small, damp room with a library of well-thumbed volumes by Plato and the Bard as well as copies of his own books—he penned nine more after The Unprejudiced Palate, most of them translated and published around the world, including the Guggenheim Fellowship–funded Immigrant’s Return and the 1970 Food-Lover’s Garden. Naturally, there wasn’t a cookbook in sight.
This was where, in beautiful cursive handwriting, Pellegrini, who couldn’t abide wasting anything, had composed The Unprejudiced Palate on empty pages he had torn from the backs of his student’s exam books. After finishing a section, Pellegrini, a star on his high school and college debating teams, would read it aloud with an orator’s flourish to his wife and then 12-year-old daughter Angela. Then the copy went to Virginia, who typed it up. “I don’t think he labored over writing,” his wife told me, an observation that is borne out by Pellegrini’s gracefully bouncy, you-can-do-it prose style. “I never had the feeling about my husband that he felt anything was a big undertaking. Whether it was making a vegetable garden or what, he just did it.”
The Unprejudiced Palate hit the bookstores in 1948. Reviews were glowing, even if his unapologetic account of serving his small children morning cups of caffè corretto (coffee spiked with sugar, heavy cream, and a splash of liquor) raised some eyebrows. “He wrote that I’d had enough rum in my young life to kill a circus elephant, or something outrageous like that,” laughs Angela. “My eighth-grade teacher was absolutely horrified.”
But the real bounty was Pellegrini’s fan mail, sent by everyone from teachers, lawyers, and fellow Italian émigrés to Tropic of Cancer author Henry Miller, who became a close friend. (Of the latter: “It was like a love letter, effusive,” says Brent.) Then there were what the Pellegrinis referred to as the “doorstep people,” strangers who would appear unannounced at the house, arms laden with a pheasant, say, or several just-caught steelhead, hoping for a life-changing encounter with their new guru. “It was like a pilgrimage for them,” says Seattle-based Italian sausagemaker Frank Isernio, his voice filling with emotion as he theorized about what drew the public to his much older friend. “Angelo was able to verbalize the Italian-American experience in a way we never could: the backyard garden, the braised rabbit, sharing a well-cooked meal with family and friends. He knew how to put into words that the quality of life truly starts with the food that nourishes your body and soul. I think anybody could learn from that.”
Pinterest
