When
it comes to foodstuff, two staples from the Mediterranean hold
the record for providing stimulus and sustenance to generations
of hipsters...When
it comes to foodstuff, two staples from the Mediterranean hold
the record for providing stimulus and sustenance to generations
of hipsters...
Look, I'll grant you, Pizza Hut's not cool; Domino's is definitely
not cool, but pizza itself, at a 
mom-and-pop
pizzeria that usually doesn't have much else on the menu (a couple
of appetizers, a salad that must come with fluorescent yellow-green
semi-hot pickled pepper, probably lasagne, spaghetti and meatballs,
and, at the shore, spaghetti and clams), a place where they still
use chopped garlic soaked in olive oil instead of garlic powder,
and homemade sausage from the neighborhood butcher, and where
there is invariably a painting of Lake Como on the wall--in America,
it doesn't get much better than that.
Pizza is the story of Italian immigrants taking a common snack food from the old country and turning it into a fortune. Whenever possible, the first Italians here would never buy bread, they'd build a little wood-fired bakehouse in the back yard and make it there. Add some olive oil to the bread-dough, squeeze some tomatoes on top, throw some oregano and garlic and cheese onto it and presto! Something for the kids. In the cities, there was no room for a bakehouse, so commercial bakers made pizza and its cousin focaccia, a non-topped hearth-bread. The first pizzeria per se opened in Brooklyn (hi, Spike!) just after the turn of the century, and the Thirties saw Lupo's open in San Francisco, introducing the pie there. Tommasso's, which is the successor business in the same premises (1042 Kearny, just below Broadway), continues to make what might be the best pizza in the U.S.
But for my money, the hoppin'-est pizza place in the country
is the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania. There, in 1926, Philip
Senape, a Hazleton baker, was asked to contribute something to
his church fair, so he rolled out some dough in an 18 x 24-inch
pan, squeezed some tomatoes on it, and sold the results as "Pitza."
Now, 65 years later, there are no fewer than 14 different styles
of pizza for sale between Hazleton and Scranton, including the
indigestible Sizzle-Pi (fried pizza), sauce-on-top-of-cheese style,
cheese-on-top-of-sauce style, "Brooklyn" style (round),
and white pizza, unique to this region of the country. In its
classic form, epitomized by the pie at Arcaro & Genell's in
Old Forge, white pizza is like this: a layer of dough on one of
Senape's 18 x 24 pans, followed by the secret five-cheese mixture
(provolone, brick, mozzarella, mozzarella scamuzz', and the mystery
cheese), and then, if you've ordered the white pizza with broccoli
like you should, a layer of finely-chopped broccoli that's been
sauteed in heavily garlic-scented olive oil goes on, then another
layer of dough, which is brushed with olive oil and sprinkled
with a
fine dust of herbs, including rosemary, oregano, and marjoram.
A couple of "cuts" (don't call them slices) of that,
and you'll realize that it's worth the trip to Scranton.
Chicago's stuffed pies are another American glory, cheese and mushrooms and spinach inside, tomato and herbs on top, and I'd love to go to New Haven solely for the famous white clam pizza at Pepe's. Someday, though, I shall go to Naples, where it all started. Ah, pizza in Naples! A dream.
(white pie pic courtesy Petaluma Pete)
These days, among the people I
know, it's the drug of choice. It's got the jolt of cocaine, but
it doesn't tear up your nose or have that annoying come-down.
It lacks amphetamine's rough edges, although it's somewhat addictive.
There are times when I sit and wonder what it means, that so many
people I know have gone from pot to coke to alcohol to... cappuccino.
I've always loved the story of the discovery of coffee, the Ethiopian goatherd who noticed that his goats got friskier when they ate red berries off of a certain bush. Right, so then, I suppose, he picked some, roasted them, ground them, and poured boiling water through them. Well, whatever he did, good for him, because he jump-started the whole human race with those red berries.
The trouble is, though, that we drink really horrible coffee in the U.S. We seem to have developed a bean that is bitter, thin-tasting, but packed with caffeine. Like the terrible beer we brew, it seems to be means to an end, evil-tasting medicine to be swallowed for the effect. The world's coffee-drinking cultures, the Arabs, the Turks, the French, and especially the Italians, disdain us for it, and usually when Americans of taste visit one of those cultures, they see the light.
No wonder that, for years, America's Bohemia has been drawn to European-style, usually Italian, coffee-shops. They feel one with the tradition that stretches back to the joints where Sam Johnson held forth, where the French Revolution was plotted, where the artistic youth who were their spiritual forebears gathered in Vienna, Budapest, Berlin, Milan, Paris, and Rome to foment the artistic and intellectual advances that brought us into the modern era.
And no wonder these artistic and intellectual achievements sprang forth over cups of the goatherd's brew, whether in one of those bathtub-sized cups of cafe au lait they serve in Berlin or one of those antiseptic-white Italian cups with three ounces of evil black liquid with dark-brown froth around its edges. Because coffee makes you want to talk, and that's where ideas come from. And maybe that's good news about my friends: pot gave them ideas that weren't as good as they seemed at the time, and which they forgot in the morning; coke gave them ideas that were too grandiose to realize, and made them too busy to even start; and alcohol was about forgetting that you had ideas in the first place.
Even so, we've got so much to learn. I was initiated into the
after-dinner espresso by a Sicilian-American gentleman who got
his demitasse with a fingernail-sized piece of lemon rind in the
saucer. Pressing down hard, he would work this around the lip
of the cup, and then, twisting it, drop it into the coffee. (I
know, it sounds weird, but it's really delicious.) Years later,
I found myself in San Francisco, yearning to be cool, and so I
went to one of the Italian coffee-shops in North Beach. The espresso
I
ordered, though, came without the lemon, so I called the waiter
back over and asked for it. "Oh," he boomed, for the
benefit of the hipper types at neighboring tables, "you should
have ordered caffe Romano!" He then walked the entire length
of the cafe, slowly, and came back, bearing my tiny lemon sliver
on a clean white plate. "Caffe Romano!" he intoned.
And a friend who's just back from Italy tells me she counted 19
kinds of coffee in one place. "The names for the different
preparations change from town to town, too," she said. Her
favorite? "Caffe perfecto," she said. "That's with
a big slug of grappa." Mmmm! Signore!
Signore!
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