Simple Pleasures : No cook’s library should be without a dogeared copy of Angelo Pellegrini’s “The Unprejudiced Palate”

It takes an act of imagination to look at the old man at work in his garden and see the young boy who trod through Tuscan fields with mallet in hand, smashing clods of earth pushed up by a horse-drawn plough. His features have sharpened with age, his nose hooking like a bull salmon at the end of its spawning run. Working in his garden with a stick in one hand to shore up a sense of balance gone awry, Angelo Pellegrini today no longer embraces the world around him with his body, but with his eyes--old, wise, piercing, laughing, loving, fiery eyes. Eyes of a Tuscan eagle. Eyes of a man who has seen 87 years of life for what it is and stated that vision for the rest of us in the best of living prose.

Of all the thousands of books written and published in America in the last 50 years about the pleasures of the table--about food, cooking, wine, and food gardening, about the value of a life lived close to the soil, about the companionship that comes with sharing a well- conceived and well-cooked meal with friends and family, about the pride inherent in uncorking a hand-crafted wine of superior quality that a friend or stranger might lift a glass in unison and sip in the magic--two stand above all the rest, both of them written in Seattle by Angelo Pellegrini.

Arguments can be made that A.J. Liebling and M.F.K. Fisher, when writing with their full powers brought to bear, set an unimpeachable standard for food writing in this country during this century. But theirs is a food literature of conviction through discovery: the thrill inherent in leaving behind the mundane foods of their own culture to encounter, for the most part, the grand tradition of French cuisine.

Liebling and Fisher, as true gourmands, make the flavors they encountered in city restaurant and country auberge explode in the reader’s mouth. Pellegrini, on the other hand, writes about the food that is in his blood, the food that is his birthright. He writes not from discovered experience, but from the spirit. As a result, the flavors he describes explode in the reader’s heart. No credible cook’s library should be without dogeared copies of “The Unprejudiced Palate,” first published in 1948, and “The Food Lover’s Garden,” published originally in 1970.

Pellegrini was 11 when he arrived at McCleary, a Mason County logging and lumber town, from his native Tuscany in 1913. “The first decade of my life had been crowded with a variety of experience,” he writes in “The Unprejudiced Palate.” “I had already worked for wages and as an independent enterpriser. I had known the sting of the peasant’s whip and the horror of being chased by men who guarded their orchards with pruning hook and scythe. I had seen a maniac slit the throat of the village cobbler as he sat at his last in the August sun eating watermelon. A neighbor had dropped dead at my feet as we worked together breaking clods of earth in the plowed field. . . . I had known the meaning, if not the words that express it, of the struggle for survival. . . . I had seen, too early in life, the terrible meaning of black despair.”

His mother was illiterate. His father was the peasant son of a peasant farmer, a sharecropper eking out a miserable living on a miserable little plot of farmed-out Tuscan soil. When Pellegrini’s father had the opportunity to come to America and establish a home against the day he might send for his wife and five children, he seized the moment. For a peasant, Tuscany held no future beyond bitterness. America encouraged hope.

Young Pellegrini left behind a life of carefully defined social boundaries in a village where the mayor, the priest and the schoolmaster held themselves above all others. In passing any of these three on the street, it was expected of young Pellegrini that he would stop, remove his cap and bow to his betters, out of respect and tradition. When he arrived at McCleary on the small logging rail line his father had helped build, he arrived in a town and a land where no man bowed to another; a land, he soon discovered, where anything was possible.

He spoke no English, so he started school in first grade despite having finished third grade in a far superior Italian school system. Within eight years Pellegrini graduated high school among the best scholars of his class. His grasp of his new language was so dynamic that he graduated as an undefeated champion on the high school debate circuit. He continued a long and brilliant career in debate at the University of Washington, graduated there, then pursued an academic career within its halls.

He remains today a professor emeritus of English at the University of Washington, maintaining an office with walls lined with the books that have enriched his life. On a shelf above his desk can be found the third-grade Italian reading primer he brought with him on the boat to Ellis Island.

“From my days as a student onward I have been driven by a great knowledge, to know, to get to the bottom of things,” Pellegrini says. “From my more limited point of view and much more humble resources, I can identify with Bertrand Russell, who said in his last days, so to speak, that there had been three great motive powers in his own life. One was love. Just full-throated earthbound love, none of that business up there in the clouds. The other was the desire for knowledge. He wanted to go to the ultimate reality of things, and that was really a driving passion that he never let go of. The third was a compelling, continuing desire to alleviate human suffering. Russell put it all together toward the end of his life. He said, and I am summarizing here, ‘Remember the human family, and forget everything else.’ ”

While America was a land of great promise, it was not a land entirely of open arms. As Italian immigrants, Pellegrini and his kind were looked down upon by “real Americans” as fit only for brutish labor, and certainly unfit to sit at a proper household’s table. Under such relentless pressure to distance himself from his heritage and culture, to blend in with the rest of the crowd, it is to Pellegrini’s credit that he retained his native language, embraced and embodied his native culture and has taken it upon himself to pass on as much of this as he can to the rest of us. It comes to us as food, as nourishment for souls grown weary and thin. He is the champion of the dinner hour, of family values, of cooking with pleasure and eating with satisfaction.

Both of his parents were fine creative cooks who stirred into the pot their enormous respect for food and the struggle it takes to bring it to the table in appropriate quantities. “You might say it was genetically determined that I would become a buongustaio ,” Pellegrini remarks in his cracked, rough voice. “In America, when we got here, in this land of abundance, every dinner my parents cooked was a distinguished dinner, what we would call a gourmet dinner today.” He was lucky. When he started cooking for himself, he already knew the smell and taste of good food. His father taught him about wine, how to drink and enjoy it, how to make it, and Pellegrini in turn taught his own children--two daughters and a son.

Pellegrini cites a friend’s badgering as the impetus for writing “The Unprejudiced Palate.” She wanted a cookbook from Pellegrini the English Professor, from Pellegrini the Eccentric Scholar who maintained a big garden and pressed a ton of grapes each fall for wine and cooked in a way no one else then managed to cook. She wanted recipes to copy at her own stove. What she got instead was a book that describes a loving approach to food.

“There were a few things I could do really quite well,” Pellegrini explains. “But my God, to write a cookbook? You have to know how to make macaroni salad. Me? Make a macaroni salad? Bull! Macaroni salad should be forgotten. Wiped out. But this lady kept insisting. So I went to the bookstore and looked at a popular, so-called chatty cookbook of the day, and I was so angered, really indignant at the kind of crap that was being written about food, I accepted the challenge. In a half-humorous, half-serious way I attacked that ill-informed attitude about food and cooking. I sat down and started writing.”

When he had finished, when the book had been published to fond reviews and great popularity, he had created far more than the recipes his friend had imagined. On the strength of “The Unprejudiced Palate,” a Guggenheim Fellowship was awarded to Pellegrini so that he might further explore his heritage and the curious route he had taken in becoming an American. Few--if any--cookbooks have ever generated quite such interest.

To this day, “The Unprejudiced Palate” remains radical among cookbooks for eschewing any and all measurements. Pellegrini describes ingredients and ways of cooking and ways to achieve end results. He assumes a certain intelligence and hopes to bring out the natural cook in the reader. At a time when the use of garlic was considered scandalous in American cooking, he encouraged the adventurous cook to examine the worlds of risotto and polenta, of braised chicory and turnip greens, of tripe soup and braised rabbit--all exceedingly contemporary notions.

He wrote lovingly of his mother and how she prepared for the family table the frogs he captured as a boy. And he proclaimed the virtues of small songbirds roasted on a spit over hardwood coals. The hungry peasant is never far from Pellegrini’s table, even today. But Pellegrini’s peasant understands that the same food that brings survival in the worst of times can, in the best of times, bring poetry of a palatable nature to a simple life.

“The bleak winter months have passed,” Pellegrini wrote in 1948, “and the earth is relaxing under an incipient sun. Beneath the kitchen window, the wild violet is in bloom, the azalea, the tulip and the daffodil are swelling with life. The chicory planted in the fall is sending succulent shoots through the softening crust of ground. The first green onions will soon be ready for the table. Bleached and hidden in the mulch, the dandelion is waiting for the frugal immigrant. The sap is rising in the peach tree and the blush of life is visible in its buds.”

The blush of life. It is there on the page, put there by a man who has understood and appreciated its simple, essential qualities. Few writers accomplish as much in a lifetime. Fewer still ever write something and see it remain as timeless as life itself. And there is Angelo Pellegrini, old man in the garden, planting each spring the seeds of forever.