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.
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.”
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.’”