And a Side Order of Sayonara
When I was a kid growing up in the suburbs of New York City there were really only two kinds of ethnic restaurants, Chinese and Italian. The choices of entrees were pretty limited. After chow mein, spaghetti with meat balls, and pizza there wasn't much else. The popular notion was that chow mein and pizza weren't even invented in China and Italy respectively, but rather were Americanizations. I can't speak for chow mein, but I can tell you that pizza is very Italian, dating back to ancient times when Neopolitan bakers on their noon break would grab a chunk of bread dough, flatten it out, and bake their lunch in seconds. What is American is the slice. The closest thing to it in Italy is the pizza that you get as a quick snack in the coffee bars and rosticcerie, baked in large metal baking pans and cut into small rectangles. In restaurants, each diner is served their own plate-sized pizza, in Rome much thinner and crisper than American pizza. My favorite is pizza with "everything," only there each topping is assigned its own segment of the circle like a pie chart, with, among other things, mushrooms in one segment, onions in another, tuna fish in another -- yes, tuna fish -- and then a whole egg cracked onto it and baked along with it. The other Americanization of the Italian dish is truly an abomination, pineapple.
posted by John M Crowther @ 7:33 AM
6 Comments:
Great cartoon John! roger
>My favorite is pizza with "everything," only there each topping is assigned its own segment of the circle like a pie chart,”<<
Having lived for many years a few blocks away from “Da Baffetto,” one of the few authentic Neapolitan pizzerias in Old Rome where pizza was only served in the evening when the wood-burning ovens were extremely hot, may I attest to John’s taste in pizza. I believe the one he describes was called “Pizza Capriccioso,” or capricious pizza, and very capricious it was.
My favorite is the pizza found around Florence. Thin crisp crust with onions, garlic, olives, peppers and real tomatoes. I never had pizza with a tomato sauce spread on it until I came to the states. I stared at it with the same horror that I had felt in Munich, when a Mexican resturant, with much fanfare, was opened in the city, only to find that they were serving their 'tacos' stuffed not with cheese, meat and lettuce but cheese, meat and sauerkraut. You have not lived until you have experienced a German-Mexican taco.
Wished that I could have lived in Rome for even one year, says she with a big sigh. Envy the two of you!
This cartoon tonight is wonderful. I immediately felt sympathy for the poor woman as I have the same problem.
Great commentary as usual, John C
As a WV mountain gal that grew up during the depression and WW2, I did not even know about pizza. I thought all spagetti came in a can until after the war ended and I went off to college.
I never have cared for any pizza, even tried to make my own, but it is not my thing.
Give me old time country cooking.
Katherine,
In defense of pizza. If you have ever tasted “pizza croccante” (crunchy) as it was baked in the original Neapolitan wood burning ovens you would have had a taste sensation entirely different from the average mountain of goo a top a hot sponge that non-Italians think of as pizza.
As the original Pizza alla Napolitana was made from the left over dough of the baker’s day that dough was spread very thin with a brush of tomato sauce and maybe a few pieces of ham or mushroom, then baked quickly in an enormously hot end of the day oven.
Pizza was poor people’s food, and in my day (the early eighteen century!) an entire pie (It. pizza) could be had for 25 cents (US) or less. The slice, as John Crowther, points out is an American invention as is chop suey.
I wholeheartedly second il prof's evaluations and comments about the pizza, which is heaven on earth when done right. Just the smell of one of those ovens in a real Roman or Neopolitan pizzeria is ecstasy. The one correction I'd make is with the translation of pizza. The notion that it means "pie" is another American invention. All my research leads to the conclusion that pizza, in fact, means nothing more than pizza, though as il prof knows well, the word has been preempted to mean "reel," as in film reel, presumably because of its resemblance to the dish. Actually, the "pie" as we know it doesn't exist in Italy, hence there's no word for it.
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