Angelo Pellegrini: A Dinner with Pelle

Angelo Pellegrini: A Dinner with Pelle
https://pellegrinifoundation.org/a-dinner-with-pelle/

This extended appreciation of Angelo Pellegrini was originally published in the February 17th, 1982 issue of Seattle Weekly. Ouside Pelle’s own writings, it remains the best portrait we have of the man and his influence.

THE FIRST TIME I had dinner at Virginia and Angelo Pellegrini’s house, Virginia wore a red dress and good shoes. “Pelle” wore a red flannel shirt, gray sweat pants, white socks, and sturdy brown slippers.

Virginia met my companion and me at the door with surpassing warmth and welcome. There were hugs and kisses in the doorway, the chill of a winter evening behind us, the heat of a bountiful fire in the living-room fireplace ahead. Pelle, I reckoned, was in the kitchen, and I went there immediately.

I found him well balanced in front of the stove, feet wide apart, both hands gripping the handle of a long wood paddle that he was using to stir a tall pot of polenta. There were two smaller pots, both covered, on the stove. In answer to my inquiry, he lifted the lids and explained the contents. One contained greens—mustard, chard, chicory—simimering in broth. The other contained the sauce for the polenta: tomato conserve, sweetbreads, sausage, chicken, boletus mushrooms.

In Michigan. where I was reared in farm country we ate cornmeal mush occasionally. . . . Where Pelle lived until he was nine, the peasants ate cornmeal mush, or polenta, almost daily. Coarse fare, polenta was so often on the table because it was plentiful and filled the belly. Pelle remembers it, he has written, as “that insipid and bloating yellow nightmare.” The peasant women of Tuscany flavored it as best they could. Too often, Pelle said, the flavoring—or, rather, “stench”—was provided by the lowly pilchard, an ugly little fish from the Mediterranean that came cured foully in barrels. The pilchards, two or three per meal in the Pellegrini household, were broiled, sprinkled with olive oil, and placed on a plate in the middle of the table. Family members took turns dabbing slices of polenta on them. When thepolenta was gone, the pilchards were divided and swallowed.

Pelle gave the polenta another stir, releasing corn-scented steam, lifted the paddle to judge the condition of the mush clinging to it, and then told how his grandfather, as grandfathers do, attempted to convince the peasant lad, Angelo, how relatively well off he was. When he was a boy, Pelle’s grandfather related, a single pilchard was suspended by a string above the table and the family knocked it back and forth with slices of polenta. Then the pilchard was taken down, carefully wrapped, and put away until the next meal.

At the Pellegrinis’ that night, the polenta, flavored not by pilchards but by the hearty sauce, was superb. The wine, a 1976 cabernet sauvignon, was excellent. There was good talk and much laughter. Pelle raised toasts on his and Virginia’s behalf to their guests. And he also gave thanks, by way of a toast, to the return to the family dinner table of their son, Brent, a man in his 30s who had been commercially fishing in Alaska.

Afterward, in the living room over brandy, there was more good talk, more laughter. Pelle read a funny poem in Italian, translating for his monolingual guests.

Looking back. now that I know the Pellegrinis much better and we are friends, I see that evening as encompassing much that is most important about the Pellegrinis, much that is most important to them.

Virginia’s kindliness and gaiety were evident at the door. Pelle’s utter indifference to superficialities—in this case, clothing fashion—was on display in the kitchen. The greens were from their garden. The tomato conserve for the sauce, dried and concentrated in the autumn sun, was of their making. The mushrooms had been picked in the woods by their hands. The wine had been made in their cellar.

Like the food and drink, the hospitality, the sentiments expressed in the toasts, the talk, the laughter were basic, honest, straightforward. Nothing was forced or mannered. There was no pretentiousness. The values manifest in the Pellegrini household, where nothing is more important than family and friends, were certain and humane. It was an evening profoundly cultured, deeply civilized.

After 48 years of marriage, Virginia and Pelle are one, a complete human unit. Angelo, or “Pelle,” as nearly everyone who knows him well calls him, is the more public personality, however. Forty years a teacher of English at the University of Washington, author, public speaker, authority on food, wine, gardening, and the Italian immigrants’ experience in America, Pelle is widely known in Washington State and elsewhere. This story, then, will be principally about him.

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http://pellegrinifoundation.org/the-passionate-peasant/

The passionate peasant
I like to think of Angelo Pellegrini, in my journalist’s fashion, as The Passionate Peasant. A peasant he was born, in the village of Casabianca, in the Arno River Valley, in Tuscany, in Northern Italy. It was a hard life he knew there, a constant struggle for food. Pelle remembers it, his writings make clear, without bitterness or self-pity. Though he is thoroughly educated, in the fullest sense of that word, though he lives a life of plenty and comfort far beyond the imaginings of a Tuscan peasant in the early part of this century, though he has not lived in Casabianca for nearly 70 years, Pelle is still a peasant. He is the first to understand that. In fact, there is a certain pride in his understanding. for Pelle is still guided by the ancient peasant virtues.

Foremost among these is the commitment to family and community, to sharing. There are also these: hard work; frugality; a reverence for the soil and what grows there.

Pelle’s passion for life—for what he calls “the good life”—did not necessarily come also from Casabianca. Peasants call be dumb, numb, narrow-minded, intolerant. Pelle is none of these. At 78, his mind is alert to new ideas; his zest for music, jokes, people, books, food, and drink is undiminished. The passion, perhaps, came from his parents, who must have been remarkable.

They were set apart from their neighbors in Casabianca, if only by their ambition, their courage in seeking to provide better for the family. Pelle’s father found work in Europe and Africa. His mother spent time with his father in Algiers, where she was a wet nurse in a grand family. Finally, his father set off to the edge of the world, to America. When he was established as a railroad hand for the Henry McCleary Timber Co., in the company town of McCleary, Washington, near Olympia, he sent for his family. Mother Pellegrini, speaking no English, and with no idea where McCleary was or even how broad was the American continent, set off with five children to join her husband. Pelle has written dramatically of their fearful journey and of the courage and determination his mother exhibited in seeing them through to their new home.

In a powerful essay for a small magazine that was picked up by The Reader’s Digest and later became one of the sketches in his book about Italian immigrants, Americans by Choice (Macmillan, 1956), Pelle wrote this about his mother:

“Her Italian friends, with an uncanny talent for summarizing a character in a single word, called her Bimbina, which is a slight Tuscan perversion of Bimbilla—little girl. The name described perfectly her infectious humor and her willingness to participate in any community mood that brought hearts closer together. . . .

“They were small hands, but thick, with bulging knuckles and cracked skin—hands that had never known the dubious luxury of idle hours. They had woven and spun and carded flax; they had tilled the soil, wielded sickle and scythe, and held the spade and hoe in their firm grip. They had cut the grape, pruned the vine, and stripped leaves from the mulberry tree to feed the silkworm. They had washed clothes, made tons of bread, scrubbed floors, and prepared innumerable meals. . . . ‘Noi altri che non abbiamo educazione bisogna avere giudizio nelle mani’ (We who have no education must have good sense in our hands.)”

His father, if only by example, allowed Pelle later in life to feel comfortable in the kitchen, for it was unusual for a peasant man to cook. Pelle wrote of this aspect of his heritage in his autobiographical Immigrant’s Return (Macmillan, 1953):

“[H]e had a taste for good food and good wine. Like so many men who are genuinely interested in food and discriminating in their tastes, he had learned to cook, and he enjoyed cooking whenever he had the opportunity. The cultivated peasant, with the instincts of a gentleman, could be seen regularly at the kitchen range on Sunday: smoothshaven, black hair parted on the side, the sleeves of the white shirt rolled above the elbows, Mother’s embroidered apron tied around his waist, whistling merrily among his pots and pans, in the hot glow of the stove, preparing for his family and his friends the chicken or the rabbit he had dressed the day before.”

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http://pellegrinifoundation.org/wider-horizons/

Wider horizons


Where Pellegrini parted from his parents was in the matter of education. With the aid of good teachers, he went through high school, although his parents would have been just as pleased to see him quit after the elementary grades. And then he had the idea that he wanted to study law at a university. They did not understand. As Pelle has written, “the decision to go to America [was a] search for bread, and not of such fancy realities as freedom, opportunity, education. We found these, to be sure, as well as bread; but we first had to learn their meaning. For when we came to America we were creatures of a peasant world in which such attributes of human dignity were not values which the peasant could clearly conceive, or which he might some day aspire to possess. They existed only vaguely as the wonderful privileges in that other world, the world of the citizens, to which the peasant had never been admitted. Since his mind could not conceive of freedom, opportunity, education as realities in his world, he therefore had no real desire to possess them.”

Despite his parents’ skepticism, Pelle entered the University of Washington in 1922. The qualities that his peasant upbringing in Italy had given him, the characteristics that his remarkable parents had passed on to him, the example of courage they had set by coming to America and thriving through industriousness in the small town of McCleary, these were joined in Pelle by an education at an American land-grant university. At the university he became the man who has earned a measure of worldly distinction and the admiration of so many people like me.

His intention was to be a lawyer, and he invested two and a half years of post-graduate work toward that goal. But then he was offered a job as an instructor in English and debate coach at Whitman College. That experience convinced him that his career lay in teaching so he returned to the UW, and taught here from 1930 until his retirement in 1973 at the age of 70.

Pelle’s reputation was that of a teacher, not a scholar. “I had a passion for teaching,” he told me when we discussed this. “Some of my best friends are my former students.” He disdained scholarly writing. “I haven’t written a word on Shakespeare,” he said, though Shakespeare was his principal teaching subject. “In fact, I’ve only published a half a dozen articles in learned journals that nobody ever reads.”

Some of the younger teachers who arrived at the UW’s English Department long after Pelle and other teachers like him had been well established were appalled, I have been told, at the older men’s lack of scholarly interest and intention. Only recently have the younger professors become aware, now that teachers such as Pelle are gone, of how valuable the older men were.

Pelle’s attitude toward this is, characteristically, well thought out and firm. “The superior teacher should receive the distinction he deserves.” he wrote in an essay on education that was part of Immigrant’s Return. “Between a fine scholar and a fine teacher there should be no disparity in rewards. In terms of service to the university. to the student, to the state, to posterity, there is no valid reason for supposing that one is superior to the other. Until the university recognizes this as a fact and takes it into account in recruiting personnel and in formulating its promotion policy, it will fail not only to encourage great teaching but also to fulfill its obligation to the mass of students it invites to participate in the higher learning.”

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http://pellegrinifoundation.org/an-unusual-cookbook/

An unusual cookbook
In 1936, Pelle and a colleague wrote a textbook on “public discussion and argumentation.” But Pelle found his niche as a writer elsewhere. In 1948, he published The Unprejudiced Palate (Macmillan) to critical acclaim. Palate was a cookbook. But it was an unusual cookbook for that time or any time because it contained few recipes and those it did were set down discursively rather than formulaically. What Pelle did, in instructing his readers about cooking, was to set forth—gracefully, humorously. earthily, persuasively—his own attitude toward life, including the cooking and eating of food. As a guide to the good life as well as to cooking, Palate is as valuable now as it was then. Pelle’s convictions about “grow your own, cook your own, brew your own,” his abhorrence of excess and waste, his devotion to natural simplicity. anticipated by 20 years the popular rise of these themes in American life,

Here, for example, is what he wrote about eating:

“The hearty, discriminating eater is seldom a sour puss. He does not live to eat; rather, he eats well and drinks judiciously, that he may pursue his interests in life with greater enthusiasm. His sense of proportion is admirable. He considers a restful bed as important as a good dinner, and a comfortable chair and adequate lamp to read by as necessary as after-dinner coffee and brandy. He knows. too, that simplicity and variety, both in ingredients and in their preparation, are the abiding principles on which the distinguished diet is based. A cup of broth, fine, crisp bread. good cheese, celery and chicory hearts, a bottle of wine—never mind the French names and ancient vintages—topped with coffee and brandy, make a pleasant and satisfying dinner.”

And about drinking:

“The way to temperance is unambiguous and sanctioned incontrovertibly by the experience of old and continuous civilizations. First of all, drinking must be accepted as part of, and more or less rigidly limited to, the dinner hour, primarily in the home, with the unrestricted participation of the entire family. No beverage should be consumed if it must be disguised with sugary corruptions to make it palatable.”

And about the garden, the wine cellar. and the table:

“If I were asked which I enjoy most, drinking wine or making it, growing and cooking food or eating it, I must confess that I would be on the horns of a dilemma. Such a disjunctive proposition would leave me speechless.”

And about waste:

“[Waste] is a sin; or. if one prefers . . . frugality is a virtue. . . . The good things of the earth are intended for our use; when we waste them we sink below the level of the dog who buries a bone for the morrow when his belly is full.”



Photo © Bob Peterson
Photo © Bob Peterson

Pelle’s attitude toward waste was formed in Casabianca, where he knew only scarcity. In America, he found abundance that was staggering. When Mother Pellegrini and her brood arrived in New York, their first meal was what Pelle calls The Great American Breakfast. He still remembers it with awe, as he wrote in Immigrant’s Return:

“And this is what we were served: sliced oranges, ham, eggs. fried potatoes. buttered toast, coffee, cream, sugar. And then more buttered toast, more coffee, more cream, more sugar. And would we have more toast? Just ask for it. Would we have more coffee, more cream? Just ask for them. As much as we could eat of anything, all for one price. Just ask for it! So that was America! Just ask for it! Or, just reach for it! For there were the cream and sugar on the table. We had hoped for much from the New World. But we had not hoped for all that.”

In America, where they had come for bread, the Pellegrinis found it in abundance. And they found much, much more. But they retained their peasant values. Near their house in McCleary was a continuous fire, fed by a conveyor carrying discarded lumber and wood from the timber mill. The Pellegrinis, though they were surrounded by forests containing all the wood they could ever imagine that was theirs for the taking, kept watch near the fire and pulled the wood and lumber they needed from the pile before it was consumed. Remembering how scarce wood was in Tuscany, how, when a peasant got rid of an old apple tree he would carefully dig up its roots so as not to waste a single fiber, they could not abide the notion that wood could be burned uselessly.

Pelle returns to his basic themes again and again in his writing and speeches. He is now writing a book, to be published by Seattle’s Madrona Publishers, in which, frugality will be hailed not only as a moral virtue but as an esthetic and practical one, too. Pelle describes the book as “a guide to the good life in the lean years ahead.” He will begin with an extended essay on scarcity and waste as a global problem and then devote chapters to the garden, kitchen, and wine cellar—grow your own. cook your own, brew your own. [Editor’s note: the book was published in 1983, under the title Lean Years, Happy Years.]

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http://pellegrinifoundation.org/a-memorable-bottle/

A memorable bottle
The Unprejudiced Palate launched Pelle as a writer. Five books and hundreds of magazine articles were to follow. Immigrant’s Return, researched with the aid of a Guggenheim Fellowship that financed his return to Italy and Casabianca, was next. Americans by Choice followed five years later.

Then, during a trip to Seattle, Alfred Knopf, the publisher, gourmet, and wine fancier, sought out Pelle for a talk. The next day, Pelle sent a bottle of his own wine to Knopf at the Olympic Hotel. Knopf was barred, by Sunday blue laws, from drinking it at dinner there with Charles Odegaard, then the U.W.’s president. But on his way back to New York, Knopf drank the wine in company with the superintendent of Glacier National Park. Knopf was so impressed he wrote Pelle and asked him to write a book on winemaking.

Some time later, Pelle sent Knopf another bottle, which Knopf served at a dinner he put on for two European gourmets. As Knopf wrote Pelle, he told his guests, who were highly skeptical of American winemaking. that he was going to treat them to an American red. The wine, of course, was unlabeled. After their first sniffs and tastes, the gourmets thought Knopf had thrown them a ringer from France. But Knopf assured them the wine was American. And furthermore, he said, it had been made in Washington State by a schoolteacher in his basement.

The wine book was called Wine and the Good Life (Knopf, 1965). Then, as part of a series on the United States, Pelle, published Washington: Profile of a State (CowardMcCann, 1967). He followed with The Food Lover’s Garden (Knopf, 1970).

Though he is officially retired, Pelle has taught three courses, in collaboration with others, at Evergreen College in recent years, and found among the students there rapt listeners. (He was invited to teach a course again this fall but had to decline because it would have coincided with the winemaking season.)

In 1978, though they had at first decided not to have a commencement speaker, Evergreen’s seniors, some of whom had heard Pelle deliver a lecture on “The American Heritage,” invited him to talk at their commencement. With a true teacher’s enthusiasm for the young, Pelle delivered a wonderfully joyful speech. “I gave one helluva unorthodox commencement address,” he said. “The whole thing was in blank verse and I had a bottle of wine and a loaf of bread on the podium with me. The wind was blowing the papers around and I had a little boy running around picking them up.”

Though he has emeritus status at the U.W. and could coast through his retirement, Pelle still puts in a full day at the office—even going there when the heat is turned off on weekends and holidays and no one else is around. There is the new book to complete, and other writings, and students to advise, and speeches to prepare for the campus speakers’ bureau. Also. convinced that “a day without some kind of physical exertion is a day wasted,” he plays racquetball every day, having given up handball a few years ago in the only concession to age that I am aware he’s made.

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http://pellegrinifoundation.org/italian-american/

Italian. American.
Although he savors the ltalian language and culture and has been sought out as often for his knowledge of the Italian immigrants’ experience in America as he has for his knowledge of food, wine, and gardening, Pelle is not a professional Italian. His affection and admiration for an America of abundance, democracy, opportunity, and work is unabashed. It was not until he reached manhood and returned to Italy to research lmmigrant’s Return, however, that he became aware of how thoroughly American he is. On the way back to Seattle, he wrote, “I perceived a truth, clear and compelling as if it had been a revelation: I am not an Italian; I am an American. I issued from my mother’s womb in Italy; but I was born in America.”

He has been courted by the Italian-American Foundation, but he refuses to become associated with it. “What is an ‘Italian-American’ anyway?” he said one night as we were talking over brandy. “You’re either an Italian or you’re an American. You can’t be both.”

On another occasion, he explained his shunning of the foundation this way: “The foundation’s purpose, they say, is to see that Italians get a square deal. That’s absolutely preposterous. Nobody has gotten a squarer deal than Italian immigrants. They’ve become beautifully assimilated into American life, some of our great jurists are of Italian backgrounds. Now if they were to fund studies at the university level of the Italian civilization in America then I would be for that.”

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http://pellegrinifoundation.org/virginia/

Virginia
Angelo and Virginia Thompson Pellegrini met at the U .W. 50 years ago, when she, daughter of a Salt Lake City shoe merchant, was a senior and he was a young instructor. Her heritage is mixed, but she has accomodated herself to Pelle’s powerful Italian influences and speaks the language with pleasure.

Pelle and Virginia photo © Bob Peterson
Pelle and Virginia photo © Bob Peterson

At 71, she, too, is as active as ever. Once when we were dancing-—the Pellegrinis love to dance, relish any form of fun and gaiety—she offered to kick her toe above her head to demonstrate that she could still do it. In a group, her laughter comes through clearly.

Her friends cherish her, for among other things she is one of the world’s great listeners—attentive and retentive. I once overheard a young woman whom Virginia had met several months previously begin to prattle on about some details of her life. “Yes,” Virginia said, “I remember your telling me that.””How on earth could you remember?” the young woman asked incredulously. “I listen,” Virginia answered, firmly.

Until a few years ago, when she quit because her work was not as good as she wanted it to be, Virginia was an excellent painter. Friends and acquaintances who are lucky enough to have her paintings prize them. She reads and studies avidly. Her face shows kindliness and gentleness. Her straight backbone shows strength and conviction. She is not afraid to deliver an opinion as firm as any of Pelle’s.

Virginia is also a superb cook. It could not have been easy for her—trained in the domestic arts as she was—to adjust to living with a cook with the reputation of Pelle’s. An indication of the adjustment it took is contained in a humorous but honest article she has written on the subject that is not yet published. I remember particularly a sentence recounting her thought after a dinner party in which Pelle’s culinary virtues had been extolled and one of the female guests had gushed to Virginia how lucky she was to live with a man who could cook so well—a cliche Virginia has had to live with all her married life. Virginia thought to herself, she wrote, something like this: “What I wanted to say to [the female guest] was that I had received several marriage proposals on the strength of my cooking alone.”

No one knows better Virginia’s ability in the kitchen than Pelle. The dedication in The Unprejudiced Palate reads: “To Virginia, who graciously stepped aside that a myth might be perpetuated.” “Gin,” Pelle told me, as he has told many people, “is just as good a cook as I am—in some ways better, because she can do more things.” Early in their marriage, while Virginia was nursing Angela, the first of their three children, a pattern was established that has more or less endured: Virginia tended the children and Pelle did the shopping and cooked the evening meal. When they’re entertaining, Pelle often does the main course and Virginia makes the antipasti and desserts.

Pelle also bakes the bread, often using the wood-fired, beehive brick oven he constructed on their back patio.”There is no such thing as rivalry,” Pelle said. “lf I can’t do it, she takes over the kitchen. When I experiment, I watch her reaction, and if she praises something I take note.”

Pelle is grateful for Virginia. Some idea of why can be found in this passage from Wine and the Good Life: “I felt the expression on her face without seeing it, and I knew her mood. It was gay, amiable, affirmative. Such was her nature, and her mood was but an intensification of it. Youthful and affirming and adventurous, prone to the humane response.”

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http://pellegrinifoundation.org/garden-cellar-kitchen/

Garden, cellar, kitchen
Pelle’s wine cellar brings him equal joy. It is a modest place, in a modest house. The cellar takes up only part of the basement, commodious enough to hold what Pelle wants to put there and equipped only as necessary.

There are two 60-gallon barrels. one 30-gallon barrel. and five six-gallon glass jars, all filled with aging wine. (The fermenting is done in 80-gallon whiskey barrels that Pelle has been using for 45 years.) There is a good corking machine that someone gave to Pelle. And there are racks containing hundreds of bottles of wine, most of it red and most of it Pelle’s own. The cellar, Pelle said, is prepared to hold about a thousand new bottles yearly and “a couple of thousand others.”

Pelle has been making wine on his own since 1934. For years he used any grapes he could obtain. Then, through research for Americans by Choice and later through wine-judging and writing, he became acquainted with the great pioneer winemakers of California. “Friends down in the Napa Valley,” as he describes them, now send him about a ton of fine grapes annually.

He makes only cabemet sauvignon wines now. They are unfiltered because, Pelle says, “filtering is a commercial expedient. Filtering guts wine, stripping it of the organisms that bring it to its full potential.” Unfiltered, Pelle’s wines are richly colored, deeply aromatic, and full-bodied, almost chewy. A magnum of ’73 that he brought to a dinner party recently was as good as any wine I have ever tasted—the essence of grape, with a velvety texture.

I won’t say anything further about that wine. Though he is proud of his wines and immensely pleased when others enjoy them, Pelle winces when someone gushes about wine—or food. What Pelle preaches is “the good life-the arts of living.” Food and wine have a place in the good life, but they are not by themselves the good life—nor are they to be valued more highly than people.

Making good wine, he says, is not difficult. Making wine, he says, “is just the fermenting of the grape properly. That is as true today as it was 2,000 years ago.” As a check to people who go overboard in praising him for his wine—and perhaps as a check to his own pride—Pelle will quote Louis Martini, who once, when he and Pelle were enjoying an exceptional wine, pointed to the vineyard near the kitchen and said, “The wine is made out there.”

The Pellegrinis’ kitchen astonishes visitors who come expecting vast counter space, huge chopping blocks, an array of utensils and appliances and racks of gleaming copper pots. The kitchen is modest. As everywhere in their life, it reflects their avoidance of anything fancy, pretentious, or unnecessary. The pots and pans are quite ordinary; they could be from a college senior’s bachelor apartment. Pelle’s great knife is 50 years old. The cutting board is perhaps as old and of modest size.

What makes the kitchen distinctive, other than what comes out of it, are the mottoes Virginia has painted in script.

Above the stove: “Buon appetito! L’appetito vien mangiando,” (Good appetite! The appetite comes with eating.)

Above the sink: “In vino laetitia. In pane vita.” (In wine, gaiety. In bread, life.)

Their garden is the foundation of the Pellegrinis’ kitchen. Pelle’s approach to cooking is simple, and his first commandment is that one should use fresh fruits, vegetables, and herbs. By “fresh,” he means not just recently arrived from the garden but at the absolute peak of development.

He also believes that Americans unnecessarily restrict their selection of foods. As he wrote in Palate “When is the American going to learn that there are vegetable salads other than sliced tomatoes and quartered head lettuce? Endive, escarole, dandelion and chicory shoots, with a dressing of olive oil, wine vinegar, and whatever else suits one’s taste, yield superb salads as counterpoints to roasted, broiled, and fried meat.”

And he argues that American’s abhorrence of animal innards is wasteful and a deprivation. Sweetbreads, tripe, even chicken guts (in an omelet) are found on the Pellegrinis’ table-and consumed with gusto by guests.

Pelle teaches cooking as he taught literature: Understanding is the key, not rote learning. The idea of recipes is somewhat repugnant to Pelle. One must acquire a knowledge’ of herbs and other ingredients, what their characters are and how they fit together, and then combine them to enhance the whole. Inventiveness is essential—Pelle is constantly experimenting—but this is possible only when basic knowledge—easily acquired—has been absorbed.

The proof of good cooking, Pelle believes, is in the eating. No dish can be redeemed by a fancy name or a pretentious display. The joy and purpose of cooking, according to Dr. Angelo M. Pellegrini, my admired friend, is to prepare such a meal that one may sit down—with friends and family—and begin by repeating with passion the Italian peasant toast:

o Pancia mia! Fatti capanna!

(Oh belly of mine! Make of yourself a warehouse!)

End of Article

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