Georgia Pellegrini - Modern Pioneering: More Than 150 Recipes, Projects, and Skills for a Self-Sufficient Life

Copyright 2014 by Georgia Pellegrini

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
www.clarksonpotter.com

Clarkson Potter is a trademark and Potter with colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pellegrini, Georgia.
Modern pioneering : more than 150 recipes, projects, and skills for a self-sufficient life / Georgia Pellegrini; illustrations by T. Kristian Russell.1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Vegetable gardening. 2. Gardening. 3. Cooking (Vegetables) 4. Self-reliant living. I. Title.
SB321.P46 2014
635dc23 2013025178

ISBN 978-0-385-34564-4
eISBN 978-0-385-34565-1

All photographs copyright 2014 by Georgia Pellegrini except on by T. Kristian Russell.

BOOK DESIGN BY DANIELLE DESCHENES

ILLUSTRATIONS BY T. KRISTIAN RUSSELL

COVER DESIGN BY DANIELLE DESCHENES

COVER PHOTOGRAPHS BY GEORGIA PELLEGRINI

v3.1

For my grandmother Frances Pellegrini and my great-aunt Ann Gray, the most fearless girls I know.

BECAUSE OF GREAT-AUNT GRAY, I HAVE ALWAYS LIKED TO GET DIRT UNDER MY FINGERNAILS. BECAUSE OF GRANDMA PELLEGRINI, THOSE FINGERNAILS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN WELL-MANICURED. THEY ARE THE TWO WOMEN WHO OPENED MY EYES TO WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A FEARLESS GIRL, THE LAST OF A GENERATION THAT KNEW HOW TO KILL A CHICKEN IN THE BACKYARD FOR DINNER, THAT WASTED NOTHING, THAT MADE THE BEST OF WHAT THEY HAD AND NEVER POINTED OUT WHAT THEY DIDNT. THANKS TO THEM, I LEARNED TO COOK WITH ECONOMY, WITH RESPECT FOR SIMPLE INGREDIENTS.

For them it wasnt about survival, it was a way of life. I can still picture Great-Aunt Gray standing in her gardens, hunched over with shovel and trowel, her white hair puffing out from below the brim of her baseball hat, her floral skirt falling just above her oversize muddy sneakers. We were both raised in Sparkill, a tiny hamlet in New Yorks Hudson Valley, on the same land that my great-grandfather bought and cultivated in the early twentieth century and affectionately named Tulipwood. She and I would take long walks through the gardens and woods, and she would point out every tree and shrub that her father, my great-grandfather, had planted. Years after she passed, the metallic labels she used to identify her plants still twinkle in the sun as a reminder of her determination to preserve old varieties.

that I studded with dandelions and rose hips. I made jams and pickled green tomatoes and climbed apple trees to get the very finest fruit. I learned the names of plants with Great-Aunt Gray as my guideand helped her protect her budding flowers from an overabundance of marauding midnight deer.

For much of my childhood, Great-Aunt Grays sister, my grandma Pellegrini, lived with her in the house they grew up in. She preferred to grow plants, particularly herbs, as close to the kitchen as possible, even in the kitchen, so they were within arms reach to use in her cooking. Grandma Pellegrini taught me about unusual herbs and all of their healing attributes. As I picked white eggplants in the hot August afternoons, I learned to stop and smell the rosemary and to look for purslane, a weed that she taught me has an extraordinary amount of while doing it.

Grandma Pellegrini was famous for her rustic cornbread, and Great-Aunt Gray for her homemade ice cream, which they prepared with the bare minimum of sugar in order to accentuate the other flavors. They probably would have eliminated sugar from their recipes altogether if they could have gotten away with it, such was their disdain for added sweetener. There was comfort and strength to be found in Grandma Pellegrinis pans of steaming meatloaf and the fluffiness of her , all made with an artists temperament; reassurance to be found in the deliberate churn of Great-Aunt Grays ice cream maker, which set the days tempo.

In the years since then, I have spent countless hours exploring the outdoors and I have lived in small urban spaces without the luxury of lush land around me. No matter where I am, I always have the desire to feel the dirt slip between my fingers, to stir ruby-colored jam in a pot and watch it grow thick. And I have come to realize that Grandma Pellegrini and Great-Aunt Grays generation got more than a few things right. Now, more than ever, there is a collective yearning that courses through cities and suburbs across the country, a need to be disconnected from the virtual and reconnected to the rhythms of nature. Many of us are seeking to experience things more viscerally, the way our grandmothers did, either at the stove or outdoors, often hunched over, cooking, curing, weeding, burning, or digging, even parking chicken coops in our driveways instead of cars. In an age of the information highway, social networks, entertainment junkies, and the blurry line between reality and virtual realityall sedentary pastimeswe are looking for ways to access what is real and lasting and tangible, to access the DIY values and can-do, improvisational spirit of our grandparents generation, to extinguish the manic flicker of the computer screen and learn how to use our hands again.

City dwellers are suddenly foraging with gusto, and food is no longer just a vehicle to satisfy our stomachs, or even our sense of morality; where it comes from is not enough anymore. It now also has to ignite our imagination, take us to another place that is more grounded, where we can feel, for example, what it is like to scatter a fistful of rose petals onto a aging on our shelf. For many of us, a palmful of handpicked raspberries now brings more delight than designer food at designer restaurants.

Modern Pioneering savors this moment in time, a period of rediscovery, when we are looking at food and the farm through fresh eyes, making the do-it-yourself mentality work for a very modern age. This book shows you that no matter where you live, you can learn how to step off the grid in your own way, one that is bright, colorful, stylish, edgy, and alluring.

This is your guide for how to do more with less, to delight in your little patch of garden behind your home, to enjoy life in the process. Since I left Great-Aunt Grays gardens at Tulipwood, Ive added labels to my own plants, Ive foraged and hunted food for my own meals, Ive raised chickens and honeybees. But recently after moving to an urban city, I discovered, in the back of my new home, a loquat treefull of luscious fruit that was entirely unfamiliar. This humble discovery was every bit as transforming as those other experiences, and a reminder that the lost world we seek can be within arms reach.