Daily Camera
By Cindy Sutter Camera Staff Writer
Posted: 02/29/2012 01:00:00 AM MST
Peggy Markel, who leads culinary immersion trips to Italy, Morocco, and India, is marking her 20th year in business. ( CLIFF GRASSMICK )
The Vucciria market in Palermo, Sicily, one of the destinations of Peggy Markel’s program, “Sicily: A Different Italy,” in September. (Courtesy photo Peggy Markel)
It would be too simple to say that a passion for extra virgin olive oil guided Boulder’s Peggy Markel toward her career. Just as it wouldn’t be quite right to say that it was her upbringing in Alabama where the fruit she ate came from hundred-year-old trees. Nor would it would it be totally accurate to say that the time her father in spent in Italy during World War II defined her path.
However, all these things led to a little voice in her head telling her — for reasons she couldn’t understand — to learn Italian.
“At the end of the semester, I booked a trip to Italy,” she says.
That monthlong trip to Tuscany two decades ago led to an immersion in Florentine cooking.
“I wanted to follow the trail of ingredients that I know are the base of good food,” Markel says.
It’s an idea that’s now commonplace. Nowadays, even supermarket chains promote the origins of fruits and vegetables when they can. To chefs, the idea of using the finest ingredients and cooking seasonally is almost gospel, but it wasn’t always so. In the 1980s and 1990s, plates often sported various squiggles and supported towers and other architectural pomposities.
During Markel’s travels, through a friend of a friend, she ended up studying cooking in a villa in the Tuscan countryside. After spending a week there, she made the owner a proposal — that she bring small groups to do the same thing she had: to see how regional ingredients were melded into a unique food and culture. This year, she marks 20 years connecting people with food, her programs having expanded to other parts of Italy, Morocco and now India.
“Here’s the way people have been (eating) for hundreds of years. It speaks for itself,” Markel says. “That’s what people were able to come back with.”
Jeanie Manchester, a local yoga instructor met Markel at the old Alfalfa’s where she did cooking demonstrations. Manchester went on the very first trip to Tuscany when Markel started her business.
“I bought some really good olive oil the other day, and it reminded me (of the trip),” Manchester says.
Of Markel’s gift for bringing together food, learning and culture, she says: “She makes every meal such an event and such a ritual.”
About five years ago, Manchester went on a Markel trip to Morocco. The meal she considered most memorable took place at a seaside resort where the meal and the rooms were all lit by candlelight.
“It was a five-course fish dinner made by all women,” Manchester says. “It was like a poet’s dream, otherworldly.”
Markel starting planning the Moroccan trips on Sept. 11, 2001, right after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. She had been to Morocco the spring before and made the contacts who she knew would make for a memorable trip.
“If I had not already been there, I could have been dissuaded and distrustful,” Markel says. “Because I had already made connections, I saw how the Moroccan people handled the experience. They were so terrific and compassionate.”
She says that breaking bread and sharing culture can be an important part of understanding between cultures.
“It became important to me to create somewhat of a bridge, to bring people to see the true face of Islam in that particular culture. I can’t speak for every Islamic culture in the Middle East, (but) at the edge of Europe, it seemed like a wonderful doorway to create some understanding.”
Markel also was a pioneer in the Slow Food movement, having heard founder Carlo Petri speak in 1993. She started the first chapter in Boulder, seeking the help of Charlie Papazian, who had been so successful igniting an interest in craft beer.
“This was the first convivium in America,” she says.
Alison Litchfield, who went on Markel’s first trip to Tuscany, says it’s Markel’s warmth and sensibilities that make the trips come to life.
“It just comes through — the passion she has for the language, the food, the people. … We would walk about the land. She would pick a bay leaf off a bush and have us smell it. She was so into the senses that I think that kind of brought it alive.”
