# 284: T is for Treasure

An attic crawl, a forgotten treasure, and our next Live Video session for paid subscribers on December 29.

I Know It’s There…Somewhere

I head up to the attic recently to find some important papers saying I know it’s here somewhere and its variation It’s in a clever spot. All the logical clever spots I think it might be give me a score of zero. The spot is soooo clever I’m not sure I’ll ever remember where it is but I do find some other things during my deep dive.

• A photo of my son with a friend he has known since he was five weeks old brings a smile to my face. They are still friends, by the way, too.

• A photo of me in 1972 when I went to music school in NYC.

• The memories of all the hours spent with my mom playing two piano/four hand music on her grand pianos when I see all the cartons of music tucked away up there. She truly was the best two-piano partner I ever had.

• The Swiss cotton lace valance at the bottom of a box of cotton batting for quilting. I thought I must have given away and now it’s up in my window.

All treasures.

The valance above that I thought lost.

And, then I found these. Two letters from American novelist, short story writer and essayist Henry Miller to Angelo Pellegrini, professor of English Literature at the University of Washington.

The letters and my 2005 copy of The Unprejudiced Palate.

The originals, of course, are with the Pellegrini family whom I used to spend some time with when I lived in Seattle. How these copies showed up in my papers is still a mystery to me but I have a vague recollection that it was around the time of a 2005 dinner honoring Pellegrini.

In the letters, Miller absolutely gushes over Pellegrini’s book The Unprejudiced Palate (1948). I used to have a first edition copy of it and The Food Lover’s Garden (1970) but they are in clever places, too. (Note to self: Don’t loan out things you can’t replace or don’t want to have to replace because you may never be able to replace them.) Like Miller, I love Pellegrini’s writing and if you are into serious food literature you may, too.

I wonder if Miller was sitting at his desk in his Big Sur cabin when he wrote the letters to Pellegrini.

Henry Miller in cabin Big Sur 1955 (photo via Improvised Life)

Angelo Pellegrini (1904 – 1991)

December’s Paid Subscriber Video Session

December 29 2PM Pacific/5PM Eastern

Join me and Jessica Leigh Clark-Bojin the author of Pies are Awesome and learn how she makes one of her amazing pie tops!

• This special one-hour session will be held on Zoom on Sunday December 29 2PM Pacific/5PM Eastern and is a part of a paid subscription.

• An hour before the session I will send all paid subscribers the Zoom link.

• ALL paid subscribers will receive a video replay recording after the session.

See you soon

P.S. Thanks to all of you for all your likes and comments about Bosco. We’re settling in well and loving our daily walkies. The area in front of the couch is now Bosco’s playpen. Here he is showing me the important culinary skill of how to unstuff a bird.

Link to Full List of Recipes

Something that you can do for me and Bosco is to heart ❤️ this post. It not only lets us know that you are stopping by but this really helps our ratings on Substack, too. Thank you!

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I made this with a canning jar lid and markers.

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