Angelo Pellegrini

Angelo Pellegrini (1904 – 1991) was the author of books about the pleasures of growing and making your own food and wine, and about the Italian immigrant experience. He was also a professor of English Literature at the University of Washington.

Pellegrini's family immigrated in 1913 from Tuscany to McCleary, Washington, where his father worked for a sawmill. His first book was titled Argumentation and Public Discussion, written in 1936 with Brents Stirling. In 1948, he wrote The Unprejudiced Palate, an important work in the history of food literature[1] that remains in print.

In 1946, Sunset published Pellegrini's recipe for pesto, likely the first major publication of a pesto recipe in the United States. Two years earlier The New York Times had first mentioned the sauce, referring to an imported canned pesto paste. The sauce was not immediately embraced by the American public and did not rise in popularity until the 1980s and 1990s.[2]