PIZZA, as I KNEW IT
in the FORTIES
Chacun a son gout, naturellment, BUT I come from an authentic Italian family. My great-grandparents born c. 1840 and my grandparents, born c 1865-70, came over in The Great Migration c. 1880.
My grandmother was THE greatest cook who ever lived bar none –– I'm not kidding. Each of her eight children mastered PART of her culinary legacy, but no one had it all –– not by a long shot. I was very lucky to get in on the tail end of it. My mother, born in 1913, was the youngest of the eight.
At any rate when I was kid, pizza was not so easy to come by. You had to go special neighborhoods, and obscure little storefront restaurants where formica tabeltops and chairs with tubular chrome legs and red leatherette seats were bathed in fluorescnt lights suspended from embossed tin ceilings, Those were the places where REAL Italian grandma's from the Old Country still made the sauce from scratch every day, and gave strict supervision to the staff, etc.
The pizza then was very simple –– just tomato sauce, the best imported olive oil, thin slices of imported mozzarella and lots of fresh-grated Romano cheese also imported. The crust was always thin and crisp with edges brown and bubbly lightly blackened here and there where bubbles in the dough popped open from the intense 1,500º heat of the brick oven –– but BOY was it GOOD!
Often the pizza was followed by a large tray of mussels marinara –– a tray at least 24" in diameter with dozens of mussels closely-packed to fill all the space. This was accompanied by a crusty loaf of fresh-baked Italian bread we used to mop up the sauce. I remember we paid a couple of dollars for the pizza and EIGHTY-FIVE CENTS for the mussels with no extra charge for the bread!
I haven't been able to find pizza like that –– never mind the mussels –– for more than forty years. The great old grandmas have all died off, and the people running the pizzerias now have fallen prey to expediency and use canned sauce, prefabricated commercial dough, and the whole shebang is so crapped up with inferior process cheeses, poor, flavorless oil, and so many choices of toppings –– none of them authentic –– it's enough to make you want to run across the street and get some equally bad chow mein. ;-)
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| Heaven on a platter! |
My grandparents were nice honest unpretentious hardworkng people. Their kids did well. All my uncles earned collge degrees –– one with highest honors from Princeton, if you would believe, back when that was still a good thing. Even so, not ONE of those "kids" –– even my mother –– could hold a candle to my grandparents or my great aunts and uncles. for sheer force of character and determination.
Fulfilling the American Dream –– even back when that was still possible before the "Progressives" took over ––, had a blunting effect on peoples’ character. WWI and the Depression increased the degenerative effect. Things have gotten steadily worse since, though we didn't notice it till the SICK-sties devastated the culture with lightning speed.
I'm very proud of my family, but I sometimes feel a little despondent when I realize that, though I've done well, I've never been able to match the amplitude and vigor of their courage and amazing accomplishments. That's probably because I've always had it too easy –– THEIR fault –– they wanted it that way, bless their hearts!
REMINDER:
REMINDER:
A DAY
that will
LIVE IN INFAMY
that will
LIVE IN INFAMY
Thank you for sharing this memory! It is important to remember where we came from, and this is the time of year for fond childhood memories.
ReplyDeleteThank YOU for stopping by, Old Friend! Most people today have either forgotten –– or have never known –– what life was like before the SICK-sties. I have t say I feel very sorry for them.
DeleteI was brought up to think, act and feel like a WASP, but in truth I am only HALF-WASP. My father's people were, indeed, Celtic-English, and came over c. 1630 to help found what was to become the State of Maine.
My MOTHER'S people on the other hand were what I have described in this memoir, and frankly both my father and I loved the Italian side of our family BETTER than our Puritan English relatives.
The amalgam of seemingly disparate elements was a good part of what made America great, UNTIL the "Progressives" started minkeying around with the basic principles on which we were founded.
It may seem odd, but my ITALIAN relatives ere far more aware of the devastatng effects of Progressivism and the New Deal –– and far more INCENSED than my English relatives about what they KNEW would become the wreckage of most of what they'd come here for in the first place.
The English side was perfectly aware, of course, but they were too much like the late George H. W. Bush –– to polite, too dispassionate, too reserved, "too far above it all" to allow themselves ever to express INTENSE emotion about ANYTHING.
At any rate, mongrel that I be I can't begin to tell you how grateful I am to have so many rich and personally glorious memories to savor as I age and prepare to go into the Great Beyond.
MERRY CHRISTMAS!
John's... best pizza in NYC.
ReplyDeleteEver eat there, Franco? My MIL's partner grew up in a cold-water flat near Washington Square Park and recommended it to us. He spent his life working for AT&T in the city and eventually moved out onto Long Island. Nothing beats a brick oven pie, with a slightly charred crust...
DeleteRegina's or Santarpio's.
DeleteAlthough I remember the days when dad would decide we'd all go out to DiPietro's for pizza. Good times, just going out was fun.
The experiences I describe from way back in the forties were either in Brooklyn, or Washington Heights, if yiu would believe, FJ-AM.
DeleteI spent a lot of time in and around Washington Square when I worked on my Master's degree in Music Hitstory and Historical Performance Practice at NYU, but that was in the early '70's. The glory days of pizza outings in ouit-of-the-way "joints" with the family were already far bhind me then. Alas!
Ducky I'm sure pizza in Boston was probably equally good as it was in New York, but I neer had a chce to try it, even though my grandparents live in and arund Boston mch of their lives.
I suspet the farther we go away from The geat Migration, the more dilute and corrupt the pizza industry became. It died, s far as I'm cincerned when those miserable chains took over.
Over-Commercialization has a degenerative effect on the quality of nearly everything. Bg is bad. Small is Superior. ;-)
Thank you for this Franco. The pizza I love, the thin crust, special outstanding sauce, and the relative simplicity of TRUE exceptional pizza is very hard to come by anymore.
ReplyDeleteI'm fortunate in that the town I live in has a craft pizza house, Casa Pizzeria, that is so close to what you describe it brings your memories alive for me.
BTW, Casa Pizzeria was voted the best pizza in MA by the folks who live here. They were right!
For a few years here, when pizza places were few and far between, we had Tony's Pizza, homemade-style pizza as you describe it here in this blog post, Franco. Perhaps the toppings were not always "authentic," but the base of every pizza was something exquisite.
ReplyDeleteAlas! Tony left us when he was murdered one day when he went home for a few minutes. He apparently surprised a burglar.
Nothing like Tony's Pizza has every reappeared. Instead, we mostly have the pizza chains such as Domino's and Pizza Hut. **sigh**
Great Post France.
ReplyDelete" formica tabeltops and chairs with tubular chrome legs and red leatherette seats"
Describes our kitchen table to a T.
When I first got to the Phoenix area there was a Pizza place called My PI. Circa 1980. Sooooo Good I can't even try to describe it. Never saw anything like it before or since.
Worked a project in S Chicago around 1995. The company took us all out to a neighborhood Italian restaurante'. They had a tomato slice topped with cheese in an Italian type dressing appetizer that was out of this world. I still can't reproduce it. I could have had only that for dinner.
Franco, a nice change of pace from the daily dose of strident politics served up by the media today. I enjoyed your description of a "perfect pizza". I was never served pizza at home growing up in the 50's and 60's but had to wait until after I left the nest, so to speak.
ReplyDeleteFinding the perfect pizza today waouldn't be found in the traditional conglomerate shops like Pizza Hut or Dominos as they are almost sickening to eat. Up this way there are a couple of chains that I have preferred over the years, one is Pizza Pizza and a more recent one Pizza Nova which has sort of become my go to pizza shop.
Pizza Nova cater more to the take out sort of thing with only a few tables for the walk-in traffic to eat their purchase on site. But they do offer the option to order on line for either pick up or delivery which I think is a nice feature. They offer a few different choices for a variety of different crusts including something new which I like called the Carbone crust a black crust that includes granulated charcoal in the mixture. I lean more to their spicier varieties like Pizza Diavola which gives off a bit of spicy heat.
Even though the idiotic Liberals hsve now made it politically incorrect to perform the Christmas classic “Baby It’s Cold Outside” – including being banned by an Ohio radio station – the daughter of Dean Martin vows she will continue singing it anyway.
ReplyDeleteFine, Super Man, but what in the world could this possibly have to do with the appreciation of authentic, old stye PIZZA?
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