Who's Angelo Pellegrini?
This year marks the third time that the Weekly has presented an Angelo Pellegrini Award honoring someone for a lifetime's worth of service to food in the Puget Sound. But many newcomers may not know who Angelo Pellegrini was. In short, he was a UW English professor, a first-generation immigrant from Italy, who began writing about gardening, cooking, breadbaking, mushroom-hunting, winemaking, and the "good life" in the 1940s. His teaching and writing has not only affected the lives of thousands of people in the Seattle area, but millions of people around the nation — including Alice Waters, Ruth Reichl, and Mario Batali. As the locavore movement grows, and as the return of interest in gardening, foraging, and home cooking rises, Pellegrini looks even more of a visionary than he did when he was alive.
Here are a collection of links in case you'd like to read more about him:
Roger Downey's 2005 article about Pellegrini, written on the rerelease of the author's most famous book, The Unprejudiced Palate.
Pellegrini also wrote a column for the Weekly in the early 1980s, and our intern, Kassi Rodgers, combed back issues to select a few of them (all PDF files):
On Living Appropriately
A Little of Italy in Mt. Shasta
The Perfect Dinner
Previous Award Winners
2008: Armandino Batali
2006: Jon Rowley
Each year, the award winners join Pellegrini Foundation head Roger Downey and the board of judges, Chris Curtis and Bruce Naftaly, in selecting the next year's winner. I'd also like to thank Pellegrini's children, Angela (Owens) and Brent, for being so generous with their time and their memories. Every year, I've learned a little more about the man whose writing I find so inspiring.
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