Though Pellegrini occasionally indicated measurements in his recipes, he often omitted the kinds of specifications we take for granted—what cut of meat to buy, oven temperature, length of cooking time. It’s as if certain passages of his books are challenging us, saying, “If I get you started, can you figure out the rest?”
Recently, I had my butcher help me choose a rack of long, meaty St. Louis–style spareribs for one of Pellegrini’s meal suggestions. Then, following Pellegrini’s directions, I let them soak for hours in a marinade of red wine, Tabasco, and very finely chopped garlic, sage, onion, and rosemary. I put the ribs under the broiler, basted them often, and when I decided they looked done, I pulled them out. They were okay. But they were nothing like the earthy, deliciously spicy Pellegrini ribs his daughter Angela made for me in Seattle. I called her up to ask what had gone wrong. When I expressed surprise at her answer (she oven-bakes baby back ribs in a garlicky tomato and balsamic vinegar–based sauce), she let out a friendly laugh. Her father, she said, taught everyone in the family—herself, her mother, her two siblings, the five grandchildren—how to cook his signature dishes, yet each one prepares them differently. And each insists theirs is the classic Babbo version.
Perhaps the sketchy guidelines in The Unprejudiced Palate were a sign that Pellegrini wanted the reader to become versed in what makes up the meals we eat. “He wasn’t so interested in recipes,” is how Alice Waters puts it. “He was interested in ingredients and a passion for cooking.”
But all it takes is one look at a videotape Brent made of his father back in the late ’80s—one of almost a dozen he shot hoping to compile a visual record of his father’s cooking and gardening techniques before it was too late—and it’s clear that Pellegrini had rigidly fixed ideas about certain things. Mincing, for example. In Brent’s bobbling footage, Pellegrini is captured using a small, sharp cleaver to slice a slab of salt pork into unimaginably microscopic pieces.
At the time, Pellegrini was waging a losing battle with prostate cancer. Bell’s palsy had crumpled the left side of his face, and he was forced to talk out of one side of his mouth. Pellegrini’s masterful basso profundo had been reduced to a disconcerting gargle. In December of 1991, just a few weeks after his death at the age of 88, more than 300 mourners would gather at the University of Washington faculty club to memorialize the Pellegrini they preferred to remember: a vibrant, curious family man and educator who was forever a food-loving Italian immigrant and an embodiment of the American Dream. On that stormy day Brent told the crowd, “I really thought he was immortal.” Just then, a bolt of lightning flashed and thunder rumbled through the room, prompting Brent to quip, “There he is.”
But in life Pellegrini himself never needed so operatic a display to communicate his belief—his insistence—that what we eat was something to be enjoyed, and something to be cared for. His books bear that out, as do the affectionate anecdotes his family tells about living with someone who took nothing about food for granted.
“One of my jobs was to mince the parsley and, mind you, we minced it until it was a paste,” says Toni, with a laugh. “But it was never enough. I’d say, ‘Damn it all, Babbo! This is as far as you can go with it,’ and he’d say, adamantly, ‘It needs a little more.’”
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