How Pizza Came to Queens

Khalsa, Dayal Kaur

ISBN 10: 0606085505 ISBN 13: 9780606085502

Publisher: Demco Media, 1995

Synopsis

A pizza-less Queens is forever changed when Mrs. Pelligrino arrives from Italy for a visit, bringing a rolling pin and her culinary expertise

About this title

From School Library Journal:

Kindergarten-Grade 2-- Can you imagine the world B. P. (before pizza)? When Mrs. Pelligrino visits relatives in a quiet Queens (New York) neighborhood c. 1950, local knowledge of Italian language and cuisine is limited to spaghetti, macaroni, and lasagna. Their glum visitor speaks little English, so the children try without much success both to cheer her up and to understand her reiterated complaint: "No pizza!" Finally the girls do a bit of research, and then buy the necessary ingredients. Mrs. Pelligrino is ecstatic and unwraps the rolling pin that she has been cradling. The children are skeptical--their reaction to the recipe had been "Yuk"--but the finished product thrills everyone. Khalsa's paintings are also satisfying: a wide range of flat, bright colors in her naive style conveys the cheerful simplicity of a lost Eden. The jacket illustration, a smiling Mrs. P. and her four young friends whirling dough aloft, and the pizza-in-the-sky endpapers are particularly successful. Culinary historians may question this version of pizza's advent (and the text might have been shorter), but, like its subject, this product should appeal to popular tastes. --Patricia Dooley, University of Washington, Seattle
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Publishers Weekly:

May, of My Family Vacation , is staying with her good friends Linda, Judy and Peggy Penny while her parents are away. The Penny family is visited by a distant cousin, elderly Mrs. Pelligrini, who walks through the kitchen door, sniffs the air and immediately declares, "Is no good." The girls notice that the only time the elderly visitor is really happy is when she is cooking, and they all wonder about the mysterious "pizza" that Mrs. Pelligrini misses so much. "Maybe it's her daughter . . . " says one of the girls. "Or her dog," ventures another. When the girls learn, at the library, the meaning of the word pizza, they copy the list of ingredients and then go shopping. Mrs. Pelligrini, seeing the items the girls have assembled, flies into action, and soon the house is filled with the aroma of the bubbling, baking pie. This amusing story is embellished with Khalsa's intensely colored paintings in her vigorous primitive style, each one brimming with details of family life a few decades ago. The delicious-looking endpapers depict pizza pies falling from a beautiful blue sky. Ages 6-9.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Demco Media
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0606085505
• ISBN 13: 9780606085502
• Binding: Library Binding
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 30