There is something of a long-standing debate, if Top Chef informed me correctly, between Chicago and everywhere else as to what makes a good pizza. Should it be deep-dish? Is it something Californian with salad greens and prosciutto? Who knows, and frankly, who cares?
I’ve had two great pizzas in my life. One was at a wonderful cafe in the sun in Rome, and the other was at To The Herbs, an Italian restaurant we used to frequent in Japan. To The Herbs had numerous varieties, some traditional and some slightly more “Japanese” in taste, but the quality of the dough and the flavors were always extraordinary.
I’m sure we’ve all had our fair share of good pizzas, and even when abroad for a quick dose of “American” flavor I could always order Dominos or Papa John’s (bleh!). But the one type of pizza that is truly lacking abroad (and in places like California, my friends inform me) is the greasy, super cheesy, Italian-American pizza from New York. That is the pizza I grew up on, and it is difficult to eat, ridiculously bad for you, and leaves you feeling distinctly slimy.
That’s from Joey’s Place, our local slice of heaven/hell, depending on how you look at it. The funny thing is that it’s one of the biggest foods I look forward to eating whenever I come home from abroad. I guess you can take the boy from Jersey, but can’t take the Jersey out of the boy.
I’m amused that you look forward to this, because you always feel so sick afterward 😛
I know what you mean though. Local pizzeria pizza is distinctly different than anything you could get from Dominos or Papa Johns. It’s flimsy because the pieces are too big and the cheese invariably falls off. But there’s something kind of comforting about it.
I could go for some To The Herbs right now. Especially the one in La Chic. http://www.to-the-herbs.com/shop/oth_nagoya_rsk/
This will take two or three responses. First, on the matter of pizza in Rome. The fons et origo of pizza in Italy is Naples. (Not really, but we let them think so.) Pizza Napoletana requires a brick oven fired by wood or coal. The recipe for dough is set by law. The sauce is used sparingly, the cheese (mozzarella) is barely a presence. There is usually an anchovy in the middle, which flavors the whole pie. Once baked, the crust is rather cracker-like.
In Rome, there are at least three varieties of pizza available. There is the Neapolitan, which I always enjoyed at La Balduina in Largo Maccagni up on Monte Mario, a couple of blocks from where I was living. I liked pizze capriccios more than any other–slice of prosciutto, half an artichoke heart, and half a hard-boiled egg. There is the more or less characterless, with a thicker crust, available all over Rome. And there was pizza rustica, which was sold by the piece in a lot of carry-out shops and tavole calde. The crust was bready but good. You’d get it by squares, weighed to determine the price. It’s hard to beat a sunny piazza, no matter what you’re eating. It’s hard to beat any piazza, no matter what you’re eating.
Now for American pizza, first let us clear away any idea that it was brought back by GIs after WW2. There is a quarrel of sorts between Pepe’s in New Haven and DiLombardo’s in Trenton over priority, but one goes back to l913 and one to 1920. Both establishments call their pizzas tomato pies. They both seem to be Neapolitan in inspiration. Leave those aside for now.
My aunt Sophie was a cook at a road house on Rte 119 between Everson and Connellsville, PA. The house specialty was chicken in a basket, but she also made pizza and showed my mother how she did it, so my mom could be counted on for a snack in an emergency (and weren’t they all emergencies?) The sauce was pretty simple. Mom canned her own tomatoes, so a quart of canned tomatoes, some chopped garlic, some basil, rosemary, and oregano, simmered until the contents of the post started spittin on the stove. She would use provolone instead of mozzarealla. This was in the 1950s. And I was not all that fond of pizza.
When I was in college (1954-58) in Cincinnati, pizza was still not the universal snack, and I remember having it only once or twice, but I do remember it was the soft-crusted, fold-over kind. When I went to grad school at Princeton, I was more into hamburgers than pizza, and I couldn’t tell you what the preferred style was, even though I was in Jersey. When we went out at night, it was for burgers (pre-McDonald’s) The couple of years I taught in Massachusetts (Marion, near Cape Cod), the weekly pig-out was Chinese. And when I came back to Princeton to try to finish my doctorate, and I came to terms with pizza, the Friday-night destination was a road house–King’s Inn in Kingston, N.J.–where the beer was more important than food. I don’t think I had any pizza in NYC either.
But I came to Chicago in 1963 and was introduced to Chicago-style at that point. I would hardly claim authenticity qua pizza for it, but I like it in small doses. It was invented in 1943 by a guy named Ike Sewell. I was told once upon a time that it was based on Sicilian-style pizza, but I never had anything like it in Sicily. I used to love it, but as one gets older the mass of molten cheese gets harder on the digestion.
New York style (Jersey style?) is just not available around here, which is just as will, considering the need to blot the grease off the top before letting it anywhere near your mouth. Thin-crust here is nothing like the East-coast variety. It is thicker and baked until crisp.
As far as I’m concerned, the California varieties are pizza by courtesy only. The best I’ve had are the brick-oven, thin-crusted Neapolitan style I had in Rome, which can be had in Chicago now too.