Entries tagged with 'pizza history'
Posted by Adam Kuban, June 20, 2008 at 11:00 AM
Clicking into the Slice mailbag, we've got this nice note, with a great link, from M. W. —The Mgmt.
I’ve been enjoying (and commenting upon) the recent Sam’s post, and thought you might in turn like to see this video. It profiles a few Carroll Gardens establishments, talking with the proprietors, etc. There’s a lot of time devoted to Sam’s, mostly an interview with Louie Migliaccio [the waiter/server/busser/bartender there], but a bit with his father, Mario, who talks about making pizza. There’s also the owner of D'Amico's Coffee. It’s not all pizza- or food-related, but I think the majority is.
--------------------
Dear M. W.,
Thanks for the link! This is a great video. Beautifully produced, with great stories. Really gives you a sense of what the neighborhood used to be like. Again, I'll say it: I'm so glad that Sam's is still kickin' as a reminder of times gone by.
Hasta la pizza,
Adam
Posted by Emily Koh, June 11, 2008 at 6:45 PM
Pizza Margherita will now be recognized as a "regional specialty" in Naples by the European Union under its official name, the Pizza Napoletana. This means anyone claiming to sell a Pizza Napoletana must now adhere to the rules of what constitutes a Pizza Napoletana, as conceived by the Associazione Vera Pizza Napoletana (the True Neapolitan Pizza Association):
- The diameter must be no more than 35 cm (14 inches) in diameter and no thicker than 1/3 of a centimeter at its center
- The tomato base must be made from the San Marzano variety of tomatoes
- The olive oil used must be extra virgin
- The cheese topping is buffalo mozzarella
- All ingredients must be from the Campania region
- The oven must be wood-fired, and the pizza must cook in less than two minutes
Legend has it that the Margherita was created in 1889 at Pizzeria Brandi, in honor of the queen of Italy, Margherita of Savoy. Since its inception, it's gone through a myriad of changes and creative twists by pizzerias all around the world, like a tomato-less bianca version. However, the Associazione has threatened to sue restaurants in Europe if they advertise the Pizza Napoletana but aren't complying to the rules: "We are protecting one of the most ancient and most important gastronomic traditions," VPN director Antonio Pace said. "We don't want the others not to make pizza, but we want them to make it as we make it—as it should be done."
Posted by Adam Kuban, May 30, 2008 at 11:30 AM
The original Pizza Hut, in Wichita, Kansas. Photograph from Spynotebook on Flickr
Fifty years under the regime of Pizza the Hut. It's too much. What they've done to the reputation of pizza worldwide is a disgrace. We need regime change.
Posted by Adam Kuban, November 27, 2007 at 6:00 PM
Hope you're thoroughly glutted on leftover turkey sandwiches at the moment.
Quick question, I was thinking of finally hitting Patsy's this weekend and was wondering if it's worth the trip to the original up in Harlem? I thought all the Patsy's were owned by the same people but I noticed the original isn't listed on their website. So really who else can I turn to with such a pizza conundrum?
—Bret S.
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Posted by Adam Kuban, September 25, 2007 at 2:00 AM
Last week, the New York Times did away with its Times Select pricing scheme and at the same time opened up its archives from 1987 to present, bringing them out from behind its "paywall."
That means that several seminal moments of pizza journalism are once again available to all you homeslices. Although they deal primarily with New York–based pizzerias, anyone who loves pizza will pick up some historical context in which to place one of America's favorite foods. These bits of required pizza reading follow after the jump.
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Posted by Adam Kuban, July 24, 2006 at 6:18 PM
1st Pizza Hut, blogged to Slice from the Flickr photostream of spynotebook
We normally don't rhapsodize about the Hut here on Slice, but this is kinda cool. It's the first Pizza Hut. In Wichita, Kansas.
Yes, Kansas.
What's the matter with Kansas, indeed.
Before I get any angry emails from Kansans, lemme disclose that I was raised there. Therefore I can poke fun at the Sunflower State. —Ed.
Posted by Adam Kuban, June 29, 2006 at 1:47 AM
AMERICAN EATS
The History Channel
10 p.m. Eastern/Pacific, 9 p.m. Central
Order a pizza in and get ready to watch. Or set the TiVo and go out for a pie. From the "New York Times":
The migration of pizza westward — from southern Italy to New York, Chicago, Los Angeles — is the story of mutation, innovation, perversion. And in spite of the documentary's wonderfully nonjudgmental narration, viewers will find it hard not to take sides.
Midwestern deep-dish types tend to see coastal pies as too wan or too fancy. Californians like their Spago-era artworks all fusioned and deluxe; I imagine they silently believe that other kinds of pizza are only for fat people. New Yorkers, who are fundamentally right on this subject, know they have the real thing.
Or almost. One thing this documentary does well is show how importation is always transformation: even when Gennaro Lombardi, the founding father of American pizza, opened his shop on Spring Street in SoHo a century ago, he was tampering with tradition. He had to use local tomatoes, explains the voice-over, "instead of San Marzano tomatoes grown in the volcanic soil of Mount Vesuvius." And atop the local tomato sauce he melted ordinary cow cheese, instead of the distinctive Italian mozzarella made from water-buffalo milk.
'American Eats' Offers the True American (Pizza) Pie [New York Times]
Posted by Adam Kuban, May 10, 2006 at 9:00 AM
"Taylor Street, the late 1890s. The neighborhood of Italian immigrants, largely from Naples, is packed with handcarts and makeshift stands selling fruit, vegetables, olive oil and bread. Speaking mostly in Italian, they buy, sell, argue and barter, when suddenly a man walks onto the street pushing a cart holding two copper washtubs. Their bottoms are packed with charcoal, keeping round pies of bread, tomato, spices and cheese hot. Walking near Taylor and Racine, he sells these pies for two cents each, and the people seem to like them. Little does he know that he is America's first pizza vendor, and in a hundred years those few cents would turn into a multi-billion dollar industry." A Pizza History: Charting the rise of Chicago's pie [NewCity Chicago]
"Michael Altenberg, chef and owner of Lincoln Square's Bistro Campagne, will open Chicago's first all-organic flatbread pizza restaurant, called Flat Earth, in Wicker Park in mid-September. The menu is '100-percent organic' and includes 'flatbread pizzas, salads and sandwiches,' according to managing partner Greg Christian." The Local Pizza Place [NewCity Chicago]
New Zealand pie chain Hell Pizza has box that turns into coffin for your slices' "remains" (pictured). [Boing Boing]
Totino's makes lean Pizza Rolls. Because people who eat Pizza Rolls are really big on dieting. [Fort Worth Star-Telegram]
Satire: "Domino’s Pizza (DPZ) announced that it is teaming up with Federal Express (FDX) to provide nationwide pizza delivery. In a move expected to revolutionize the food distribution business, the pies will be assembled on-site in FedEx’s Memphis distribution facility, and loaded directly on airplanes for next day delivery." [TheSpoof.com]
Posted by Adam Kuban, April 7, 2006 at 10:32 AM
Forbes's history magazine, American Heritage, offers readers a cover story on the history of this website's raison d'être.
It's a great piece, too, unearthing amusing tidbits from the newspapers and magazines of long ago, like this:
But pizza wasn’t always so popular. Food writers in the 1940s who were worldly enough to take note of the traditional Italian treat struggled to explain the dish to their readers, who persisted in imagining oversized apple-pie crusts stuffed with tomatoes and coated with cheese. “The pizza could be as popular a snack as the hamburger if Americans only knew about it,” The New York Times lamented in 1947, illustrating its plaint with a photograph of a pie subdivided into dozens of canapé-sized slices.
And this:
The urge to tell other people about pizza was apparently a universal impulse that seized knowing literati like Ora Dodd —who in 1949 penned a two-page paean for the Atlantic Monthly: “It is piping hot; the brown crust holds a bubbling cheese-and-tomato filling. There is a wonderful savor of fresh bread, melted cheese and herbs. This is a pizza”
My own urge to tell other people about pizza has led me to read a lot of books, articles, essays, and recipes on the subject, but this American Heritage digs up anecdotes and facts that I hadn't yet read. So click on over and take a gander for yourself.
There's even a top-ten list:
Lombardi’s
32 Spring Street, New York NY; 212-941-7994
John’s Pizzeria
278 Bleecker Street, New York NY; 212-243-1680
Mario’s
2342 Arthur Avenue, Bronx NY; 718-584-1188
Naples 45
200 Park Avenue, New York NY; 212-972-7001
Totonno’s Pizzeria Napolitano
1524 Neptune Avenue, Brooklyn NY; 718-372-8606
Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana
157 Wooster Street, New Haven CT; 203-865-5762
Sally’s Apizza
237 Wooster Street, New Haven CT; 203-624-5271
Al Forno
577 Main Street, Providence RI; 401-273-9767
Spago
176 North Canon Drive, Beverly Hills CA; 310-385-0880
Pizzeria Bianco
623 East Adams Street, Phoenix AZ; 602-258-8300
Chez Panisse Cafe
1517 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley CA; 510-548-5049
American Pie: How a Neapolitan street food became the most successful immigrant of all [American Heritage]
Posted by Ed Levine, February 16, 2006 at 8:43 AM
Here's the American Pizzeria Timeline, which includes only two non–Pizza Belt entries, Tommaso's and Uno's:
1905: Lombardi's, on Spring Street in New York City, is granted the nation's first license to sell pizza.
1910: Joe's Tomato Pies opens in the Trenton, New Jersey, Chambersburg neighborhood.
1912: Papa's Tomato Pies in Trenton opened by Papa, who learned his trade at Joe's.
1924: Anthony (Totonno) Pero leaves Lombardi's and opens Totonno's in Coney Island, New York.
1925: Frank Pepe opens on Wooster Street in New Haven, Connecticut.
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Posted by Ed Levine, February 13, 2006 at 4:13 PM
Once upon a time, around the turn of the last century, pizza in America was an inexpensive peasant food, made casalinga (home-style) by southern Italian immigrant women in their kitchens. Adverse economic conditions had forced four million southern Italians to come to America by 1900. Descendents of all the seminal American pizza makers indicated their ancestors learned to make pizza by watching relatives make it at home.
In 1905, Gennaro Lombardi applied to the New York City government for the first license to make and sell pizza in this country, at his grocery store on Spring Street in what was then a thriving Italian-American neighborhood. In 1912, Joe's Tomato Pies opened in Trenton, New Jersey. Twelve years later, Anthony (Totonno) Pero left Lombardi's to open Totonno's in Coney Island. A year later, in 1925, Frank Pepe opened his eponymous pizzeria in New Haven, Connecticut. In 1929, John Sasso left Lombardi's to open John's Pizza in Greenwich Village. The thirties saw pizza spread to Boston (Santarpio's in 1933) and San Francisco with the opening of Tommaso's (1934), followed shortly thereafter with additional openings in New Jersey (Sciortino's in Perth Amboy in 1934 and the Reservoir Tavern in Boonton in 1936). In 1943, Chicago pizza was born when Ike Sewell opened Uno's. What did New York, New Haven, Boston, and Trenton have in common? Factory work available to poorly educated southern Italian immigrants. Pizza at this point was very much an ethnic, poor person's food eaten by Italians in the urban enclaves in which they had settled.
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Posted by Ed Levine, February 13, 2006 at 10:59 AM
"The frequenter of the pizzajuolo is a careless youth who has no other occupation or who is occupied simply by sitting from eleven to three, provided with a strong stomach and a little money." —Emmanuelle Rocca, in The Customs of Naples
How far back does pizza go? A long way, more than a thousand years. According to Ed Behr in his
Art of Eating newsletter, "The written record of the word
pizza, in the sense of focaccia, goes back to the Codex Cajetanus of the year 997." Evelyne Slomon in
The Pizza Book says even before that Plato gave an account of pizza in his
Republic: "They will provide meal from their barley and flour from their wheat and kneading and cook these ... they [the cakes] will also have relishes—salt ... and of olives and cheese; and onions and greens." It's a bit of a stretch, but the idea of Plato waxing philosophical about pizza is a delicious notion. Behr goes on to say that "pizza is an alternation of the Greek word
pitta, which was introduced to southern Italy during the Byzantine conquest of the sixth century." Slomon says, "The name [pizza] comes from a southern Italian corruption of the Latin adjective
picea (peechia), which described the black tarlike coating underneath the placenta, a pie made of the finest flours, a topping of cheese mixed with honey, and a seasoning of bay leaves and oil." The first pizzas, as we would recognize them today, were white pies, made with lard.
In the 1700s, King Ferdinand IV built a pizza oven for his wife, Maria Carolina, sister of Marie Antoinette. According to Behr, in the 1850s Emmanuelle Rocca wrote in a book called The Customs of Naples, "The frequenter of the pizzajuolo is a careless youth who has no other occupation or who is occupied simply by sitting from eleven to three, provided with a strong stomach and a little money." That pretty much fits the description of my friends and me in high school.
Rocca goes on to say, "The most ordinary pizzas, called coll'aglio e l'oglio, have for condiments oil, a scattering of salt, oregano, and finely cut up cloves of garlic. Others are covered with grated cheese and seasoned with lard and then some leaves of basil. To the first, tiny fish are often added; to the second, thin slices of mozzarella. Sometimes slices of ham are used or else tomato, mussels, etc." The tomato, called a golden apple, or pomodoro in Italian, was brought back from the new world in the mid–sixteenth century. Sloman says that Neapolitans were initially scared of the supposedly poisonous tomato, but by the eighteenth century they were putting it on pizza and pasta.
Maybe the most prescient pizza observer was nineteenth-century French author Alexandre Dumas. In a travel essay, he wrote that "the pizza is a kind of schiacciata which is made in St. Denis; it is round in shape and made with bread dough. At first glance it looks like a simple food, but examined more closely, it seems complicated."
Ed Levine is a regular contributor to the New York Times Dining section and is author of New York Eats and New York Eats More. He also maintains a blog: Ed Levine Eats. This entry is an excerpt from his book Pizza: A Slice of Heaven
, published on Slice through special arrangement.
Posted by Adam Kuban, October 27, 2005 at 3:00 PM
With a cover reminiscent of a retro pizza box and contents almost as tasty as the real thing, Everybody Loves Pizza, by Penny Pollack and Jeff Ruby, has earned a place on the Slice Bookshelf.
Full disclosure: I know one of the authors. Mr. Ruby and I were in the same journalism program at university. Still, that didn't stop me from turning a critical eye on this book. In fact, my initial reaction when hearing about it was, "Oy! Another pizza book!? What more can be said?"
Fortunately, Penny and Jeff find plenty new to say, particularly with some interesting history and facts that, surprisingly, I haven't read elsewhere. Concerning one of Slice's favorite pizzaioli, Dom DeMarco, for example, the authors tell us that he ends each pizza-filled day by drinking a "$100 bottle of Amarone Valpolicella—he buys 1 bottle a day and 2 on Saturday because the liquor store is closed on Sunday." Who knew!? (More important, how does Dom get himself into work by 7 a.m. after drinking a bottle of fine wine post midnight?)
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Posted by Adam Kuban, October 20, 2005 at 8:42 AM
The New York Post comes through with a story on the Lombardi's centennial, giving a rundown on the place's 100-year (give or take) history. Lombardi's is, as many of our longtime readers know, the first licensed pizzeria in the United States—it got its pizza creds in 1905 when Gennaro Lombardi opened it up the street from its current location. To find out why it moved and read more about the history, click through to the story [A Pizza Party]. I'm out the door for work and don't have time to digest it for you.
What I want you to take from this entry, however, is this: November 10. 5¢ pies. To mimic the cost of a pizza in 1905. Not even Wal-Mart rolls prices back that far.
A Pizza Party, New York Post; photograph by Lockhart Steele
Posted by Adam Kuban, April 30, 2004 at 10:05 AM
Thanks to reader Greg, we're able to present to you the pizza-family-tree graphic that originally ran with Eric Asimov's June 10, 1998, New York Times story "New York Pizza, the Real Thing, Makes a Comeback."
Greg graciously volunteered to snap a picture of this illustration, which hangs on the wall of Totonno's, at the most recent meeting of the Slice Pizza Club.
It's a little blurry—it's difficult to get a good photo in low light and when you're trying to get newsprint into focus—but we think you'll be able to read it.
Posted by Adam Kuban, October 22, 2003 at 7:14 PM
Lombardi's gets a quick mention in the October 23–30, 2003 issue of Time Out New York. In that magazine's "It Happened Here!" sectionette, cleverly subhedded "The Life of Pie," Katherine Pushkar writes:
For many New Yorkers, "eating in" actually means take-out Chinese or a large pie. Finding the first lo mein merchant is like eating soup with chopsticks, but pinpointing the first pizza purveyor's spot is a cinch. Genarro Lombardi opened his grocery at 53½ Spring Street in 1897, and by 1905 he'd gotten a restaurant license, giving the city and the nation its first pizza parlor. At some point, the original site lost its fraction and became 53 Spring Street. After Lombardi's moved down the street to No. 32, where Genarro's descendants continue to dole out slices of heaven, it ultimately became a bar, Gatsby's, which serves up paradise of a different sort.
Nice rundown on the city's—and the country's—first pizza parlor, but really: "slices of heaven"? The Slice editorial board doesn't think Lombardi's lives up to its hype. And isn't Time Out the same magazine that pronounced Lombardi's overrated earlier this year?
