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American Pie (How a Neapolitan street food became the most successful immigrant of all)
American Heritage.com ^ | April/May 2006 | Hanna Miller

Posted on 05/12/2006 7:58:53 PM PDT by SamAdams76

Almost every American food—from egg foo yung to empanadas—is covered in the phone book under the generic heading “Restaurants.” Only pizza stands alone. Pizza, a Johnny-come-lately compared with such long-standing national favorites as the hamburger and hot dog, has secured a special place on the American table. Everybody likes pizza. Even those who claim to be immune to its charms must deign to have the occasional slice; a staggering 93 percent of Americans eat pizza at least once a month. According to one study, each man, woman, and child consumes an average of 23 pounds of pie every year.

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.

That writer’s wistful tone was supplanted in a very few years by a weary one, as culinary chroniclers became jaded by the nation’s voracious appetite for pizza and the pie’s never-ending parade of variations. “The highly seasoned pizza with its tough crust and tomato topping is such a gastronomical craze that the open pie threatens the pre-eminence of the hot dog and hamburger,” the Times reported in a 1953 story about “what is perhaps inevitable—a packaged pizza mix.”

Pizza had wedged its way into the nation’s hearts and stomachs almost overnight, a phenomenon befitting a food that became synonymous with quick and easy. Americans seeking fun in the years after World War II found a good measure of it in pizza, a food that when eaten correctly (a matter of some debate among 1950s advice columnists) forced the diner’s lips into a broad smile. Pizza, like teenagedom and rock ’n’ roll, is a lasting relic of America’s mid-century embrace of good times.

Modern pizza originated in Italy, although the style favored by Americans is more a friend than a relative of the traditional Neapolitan pie. Residents of Naples took the idea of using bread as a blank slate for relishes from the Greeks, whose bakers had been dressing their wares with oils, herbs, and cheese since the time of Plato. The Romans refined the recipe, developing a delicacy known as placenta, a sheet of fine flour topped with cheese and honey and flavored with bay leaves. Neapolitans earned the right to claim pizza as their own by inserting a tomato into the equation. Europeans had long shied away from the New World fruit, fearing it was plump with poison. But the intrepid citizens of Naples discovered the tomato was not only harmless but delicious, particularly when paired with pizza.

Cheese, the crowning ingredient, was not added until 1889, when the Royal Palace commissioned the Neapolitan pizzaiolo Raffaele Esposito to create a pizza in honor of the visiting Queen Margherita. Of the three contenders he created, the Queen strongly preferred a pie swathed in the colors of the Italian flag: red (tomato), green (basil), and white (mozzarella).

Thus ends the story of pizza, according to most histories of the pie. It’s not a bad story, but it’s only the beginning; Esposito’s adventures in patriotic baking have little to do with why American pizza makers are taxed to exhaustion every Super Bowl Sunday. By the late fifties it was storming the American kitchen. By the late fifties it was storming the American kitchen. (GETTY IMAGES)

Pizza crossed the Atlantic with the four million Italians who by the 1920s had sought a better life on American shores. Most Italians weren’t familiar with the many regional variations their fragmented homeland had produced, but a longing for pan-Italian unity inspired a widespread embrace of a simplified pizza as their “national” dish. Fraternal “pizza and sausage” clubs, formed to foster Italian pride, sprouted in cities across the Northeast. Women got in on it too, participating in communal pizza exchanges in which entrants competed with unique pies, some molded into unusual shapes, some with the family name baked into the dough.

Although non-Italians could partake of pizza as early as 1905, when the venerable Lombardi’s—the nation’s first licensed pizzeria—opened its doors in Lower Manhattan, most middle-class Americans stuck to boiled fish and toast. The pungent combination of garlic and oregano signaled pizza as “foreign food,” sure to upset native digestions. If pizza hoped to gain an American following beyond New York City and New Haven, it would have to become less like pizza. By the 1940s a few entrepreneurs had initiated the transformation, starting a craze that forever changed the American culinary landscape.

The modern pizza industry was born in the Midwest, not coincidentally a place of sparse Italian settlement. Although pizza had pushed into the suburbs as second-generation Italians relocated, most of the heartland was pizza-free. Its inhabitants had neither allegiance nor aversion to the traditional pie. The region also boasted an enviable supply of cheese.

Despite such advantages, Ike Sewell still wasn’t thinking pies when he partnered with Ric Riccardo to open a Chicago restaurant. Sewell, a native of Texas, planned on offering a menu of Mexican specialties. Riccardo willingly agreed, having never tried Mexican food. His first meal changed his mind so completely that, he liked to say later, he fled to Italy to recover from it. While there, he sampled classic Neapolitan pizza and found it much better than Sewell’s Mexican offerings. Sewell eventually agreed to forgo enchiladas for pizza, but not until he’d inflated the thin-crusted Neapolitan recipe to make it more palatable to Americans. “Ike tasted it and said nobody would eat it, it’s not enough,” Evelyne Slomon, author of The Pizza Book, said. “So he put gobs and gobs of stuff on it.”

Sewell’s lightly seasoned deep-dish pie, introduced in 1943, the signature item at Pizzeria Uno, was the first true American pizza. The pie was a uniquely Chicago institution, like a perennially losing major-league baseball team, that other cities showed no interest in adopting. Until Uno’s opened its first location outside Chicago in 1979, people had to go to East Ohio Street to sample anything like Sewell’s idea of a pie. But its success liberated pizzeria owners nationwide to tinker with their product, ultimately paving the way for the megafranchises.

Sewell was followed in the next two decades by scores of independent operators who deleted the traditional herbs and went easy on the garlic in hopes of gaining a bigger clientele. Pizza was no longer the province of firstand second-generation Italians. Americans of every ancestry wanted a slice of this pie. “I make any kinda pizza you want,” the New York pizzeria owner Patsy D’Amore told The Saturday Evening Post in 1957. “One day a man order a lox pizza with cream cheese. It turn my stomach, but I make it for him.” Professional pizza chefs like the unnamed Japanese-American woman who stumped the panel of the TV show “What’s My Line?” in 1956, and the Mexican-Americans who helped make pizza the second-best seller at the 1952 Texas State Fair (edged out only by the irresistible corn dog), and fledgling franchises like Pizza Hut, gradually shed all Italian imagery from their advertising campaigns.

But despite the best entrepreneurial efforts, most Americans remained unfamiliar with pizza well into the 1940s. “We had to give it away at first,” Eugenia DiCarlo told a McNeese State University interviewer of her husband’s attempt to establish a pizzeria in Lake Charles, Louisiana, in 1947. “They had never, never heard of it down here. And, boy, every time they’d take a piece of it, they liked it. And more and more liked it, told other people, and then got to the place where that was the biggest part of our business.” Miss Rheingold enjoys a match made in heaven in the early 1960s. Miss Rheingold enjoys a match made in heaven in the early 1960s.

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”—and World War II servicemen returning from Italy. Veterans ranging from the lowliest private to Dwight D. Eisenhower talked up pizza.

Led by the servicemen’s newfound cravings, Americans timidly sampled their first pies. Most weren’t crisp, bathed in olive oil, or sprinkled with mozzarella; if cooks followed the advice offered by Good Housekeeping in 1951, their pizzas were biscuit rounds or English muffins topped with processed Cheddar cheese, chili sauce, salt, pepper, and salad oil. Cooks could also opt to add deviled ham, stuffed olives, or canned tuna to the “cheese treatment.”

Americans who ate at any one of the country’s rapidly proliferating pizzerias (the number of parlors in the United States skyrocketed from 500 in 1934 to 20,000 in 1956) enjoyed a pie that cut a neat compromise between the traditional Italian pizza and Good Housekeeping’s “Yankee” variety. Pizzas at the Pennsylvania parlor where Andy Zangrilli got his first job were massive rectangles speckled with slithery pepperoni disks. “It was a hit,” said Zangrilli, who today owns a chain of pizzerias. “If you didn’t like the pepperoni, you’d take it off. It was the Model T of food.”

Unlike other ethnically derived foods that enjoyed faddish popularity in modern America, pizza never masqueraded as exotic. Its consumers didn’t aspire to be cosmopolitan or courageous. They were simply drawn in by the bewitching interplay of tomatoes, bread, and cheese—drawn in so strongly that by 1958 the novelty singer Lou Monte could issue an album called Songs for Pizza Lovers. A serving plate from the early 1960s. A serving plate from the early 1960s.

But it wasn’t just the taste that Americans liked. The social aspect of the pie appealed to a nation riding the postwar boom economy. It seemed uniquely suited to the fun that defined the 1950s, easy for “the gang” to share and informal enough to figure in slumber parties and sock hops. While the early New York pizzerias had been forced to sell by the slice to draw lunchtime business, most pies outside the five boroughs were sold whole, making it nearly impossible to eat pizza alone (although Jackie Gleason attributed his girth to having accomplished the feat many times, sometimes within the span of a single meal).

“I call it happy food,” Slomon said. “It’s a communal thing. You can have two people enjoying a pizza or you can have a group.” Sophia Loren in 1959 told the Los Angeles Times that having been raised in Italy to consider pizza the food of poverty, she pitied Americans when she saw how many pizza joints they had. “So I think America not so rich after all. Then I find eating pizza here is like eating hot dog—for fun.”

Eliminating cutlery made pizza eating seem raffish to more staid diners. Although Dear Abby urged her readers to respect the pizza as a pie and reach for a fork, the etiquette authority Amy Vanderbilt condoned eating slices “out of hand,” adding that “pizza tastes best as a finger food.” Look magazine in 1954 published an illustrated step-by-step guide, instructing readers to hold pizza from “the arc edge,” rather than the measly tip, and “roll it in a log.” Bob Hope still had reservations when his buddy Jerry Colonna prepared a pie. “It’s a tough baby to cut,” Hope complained. “I never cut it,” Colonna responded. “It’s hand food. Chew it down and have fun.”

Pizzeria owners accelerated the fun by hiring dough-tossing showmen to divert patrons by spinning pies skyward, sometimes sending the dough 12 feet into the air (and creating an overly dry pizza in the process). Tossers such as Aldo Formica, who demonstrated his talent on Tennessee Ernie Ford’s television show, became second-rung celebrities. “Then it started coming out that maybe the guy with the hairy arms in the dough wasn’t turning people on, and maybe he was turning people off,” the pizza consultant John Correll said of the tosser’s ultimate disappearance from the scene. “But pizza has stayed locked in to the image of fun and frolic.”

The image was polished in 1953 when Dean Martin swung his way through “That’s Amore!,” an Italian-flavored love song that famously compared the moon to “a big pizza pie” (a phrase that irritated exacting food writers, who insisted it was redundant).

By the mid-1950s pizza was everywhere. Although it would be another decade before baseball stadiums and zoos offered the snack, political parties, fundraising groups, and synagogue sisterhoods were plying their members with pizza. Fun and flavor aside, the price was right: Zangrilli sold two slices at his Pennsylvania State College parlor for a quarter. “Pizza fit students’ needs perfectly,” Zangrilli said. Sometimes too perfectly, as a 1950s Atlanta restaurateur discovered when he added pizza to his menu and immediately attracted hordes of Georgia Tech students who would congregate around a single pie and linger for hours. He dropped the pies.

An anonymous pizza baker in 1957 blamed James Dean for inducting teens into the pizza fraternity. “Jimmy loved pizza,” he complained to The Saturday Evening Post. “His fans knew that, so they loved it too.” Pizza was pitched as the ideal snack for hard-to-please high schoolers by companies such as General Mills, whose Betty Crocker character appeared in a 1960 comic strip to solve the “Problem of the Puzzled Parent,” who is perplexed by what to serve her daughters’ friends after a roller-skating outing. What do “most teenagers” like? she wonders. Refrigerated pizza dough, Betty Crocker assures her. Betty is proved right, as always. “Gee, Mrs. Steward, you sure know what’s good,” one handsome teen raves (although he disconcertingly appears to be eyeing her twin daughters rather than her pie). By 1963 pizza was a staple of the school lunch menu. The American School Foodservice Association that year announced it was bested only by hamburgers and hot dogs in the cafeteria popularity contest.

Adults weren’t ready to cede pizza to children, though. People of every age and income bracket went for it, as Lucille Ball, who met her second husband, Gary Morton, on a blind date in a pizza parlor, could attest. George Liberace was so enamored with pizza that in 1959 he contemplated abandoning the brothers Liberace to open a parlor, reconsidering only when brother Lee, the pianist of the duo, teased him ruthlessly.

Pizza’s mid-century journey from unknown to unparalleled was captured in a raucous 1956 skit aired on “Caesar’s Hour,” the show’s second gag that year grounded in pizza adoration. Pizza was to Sid Caesar’s writing team what domestic tranquillity was to the creative staff over at “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet”: a source of endless inspiration. In “The Commuters,” three couples are absorbed in a competitive Scrabble game. The word pizza is played, but nobody’s too sure how to spell the name of their new favorite food (the word routinely shows up on first-grade spelling lists today). So the couples consult a dictionary, taking care not to drool on the definition. The men, now rapturous at the thought of a pie, flee for the nearest pizzeria, promising to return with pizza for everyone. This being comedy, they hit a snag on the way home: Their car breaks down, and the pizzas are in danger of getting wet. One of the men decides to shield the pizzas beneath the hood, a bit of chivalry that manages to jump-start the engine. Powered by pizza, the men arrive home to find their wives asleep, to be awoken only by having fragrant slices of pizza dragged beneath their noses. Pizza was a dream come true.

The premise of Caesar’s skit quickly became dated as Tom Monaghan institutionalized the innovation that transformed America’s infatuation with pizza into a lasting relationship: home delivery. In 1960 Monaghan and his brother James bought an Ypsilanti, Michigan, pizza joint called Dominick’s (James traded his share to Tom one year later in exchange for a Volkswagen Beetle). According to Correll, Monaghan was forced to rechristen the store as Domino’s when Dominick complained he was “besmirching his name” with a lousy product. But Monaghan wasn’t fixated on quality: He decided to best the competition by offering free delivery, a service that every major chain later added to its repertoire. Pizza purveyors tested lots of new concepts in the 1970s and ’80s: There were restaurants that explicitly wedded pizza to entertainment, such as Chuck E. Cheese’s, where a life-sized rat boogied through the arcade, and restaurants that emphasized fresh and novel ingredients, such as California Pizza Kitchen, home to the caramelized pear and gorgonzola pie. Nothing, however, has yet supplanted the large pepperoni pie delivered hot within the hour as the quintessential American pizza experience.

Pizza’s firm hold on the American appetite is unlikely to slip anytime soon. With very little nudging from pizza marketers, Americans have made pizza the traditional food of the emerging national holiday Super Bowl Sunday; almost 70 percent of viewers eat pizza while watching the game. Both spontaneous and economical, ordering pizza remains a signifier of carefree camaraderie; pizza seems to automatically make any event a little more fun. “We will have pizza(!),” the Carleton College history department announced last year in a memo meant to lure students to a meeting. It’s hard to imagine fried chicken or tofu having the same drawing power. “Pizza is more popular than ever,” Slomon said. Not bad for a food that most Americans had to have explained to them just 50 years ago.


TOPICS:
KEYWORDS: cosmopolitancuisine; ethnicfood; food; pizza
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I eat pizza once in a while. I wonder if any Freepers ever tried pizza. It's pretty good.
1 posted on 05/12/2006 7:58:59 PM PDT by SamAdams76
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To: SamAdams76
Pizza is in a category by itself in the phone book because of the dollar volume of the business derived solely from phone sales and delivery. No other kind of food service can compare.
2 posted on 05/12/2006 8:15:14 PM PDT by WorkingClassFilth (Di'ver'si'ty (adj.): A compound word derived from the root words: division; perversion; adversity.)
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To: SamAdams76

A Roman delicacy known as "placenta"...That loses a LOT in translation!!!


3 posted on 05/12/2006 8:32:54 PM PDT by Frank_2001
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To: SamAdams76
I eat pizza once in a while. I wonder if any Freepers ever tried pizza. It's pretty good

I think I've heard of this "pizza".  Something about a tower leaning ... ?

4 posted on 05/12/2006 8:42:01 PM PDT by softwarecreator (Facts are to liberals as holy water is to vampires.)
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To: SamAdams76

http://www.sliceny.com/archives/2006/04/a_slice_of_heaven_pizza_and_organized_crime.php

From above link:

It was once say by someone I can't rightly remember who, but he said
"Never eat anything bigger than your head.
He must of said this before he ate pizza.

Pizza and organized crime share a long and storied history. In the 1930s AI Capone decided he wanted his piece of the burgeoning pizza-industry pie. He forced neighborhood pizza parlors to purchase only his mozzarella cheese, which was made in a mob-controlled plant in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.

More than fifty years later Rudy Giuliani made a name for himself as a federal prosecutor with the famed Pizza Connection case. Giuliani prosecuted organized-crime figure Salvatore Catalano and 22 other defendants of Sicilian descent, who from 1979 through 1984 imported 1.6 billion dollars worth of heroin into the United States and then laundered the proceeds through pizza parlors throughout the country. In the course of an 18-month trial one defendant died, and another was murdered. After six days of deliberation all but one of the defendants were convicted. Who was Giuliani's star witness? None other than Joe Pistone, otherwise known as Donnie Brasco.


5 posted on 05/12/2006 8:44:12 PM PDT by ThomasThomas
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To: SamAdams76
According to this article, I don't exist. I don't like pizza, having always found it (even as a kid) too greasy and hard on the system.

Wait, I take that back. I did eat pizza once in some famous restaurant near the campus of Yale. It was white clam and garlic, or something--and that was pretty amazing.

But even the charms of NYC and Boston pizza leave me cold.

6 posted on 05/12/2006 8:59:38 PM PDT by RepoGirl ("That boy just ain't right..." Hank Hill)
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To: RepoGirl
I did eat pizza once in some famous restaurant near the campus of Yale. It was white clam and garlic,

That was most likely Pepe's. Been around since the twenties. Clam pie is their specialty, although not my thing. Frank Pepe's nephew was working for him way back and they got into a fight so Salvatore Consiglio (the nephew) opened up a pizza place next door and named it Sally's. IMHO Sallies is the best apizza anywhere (how the real apizza joints spell it in the Northeast).

Anything you get further West or South of North Jersey isn't real pizza.

7 posted on 05/12/2006 9:15:30 PM PDT by L_Von_Mises
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To: SamAdams76

We had "hamburger pie" in my small-town Midwest grade school cafeteria in 1959 - it was that Bisquick type recipe with a thick biscuit crust on the bottom, then browned ground beef with some Italian spices and something tomatoey in it, then cheddar cheese on top.

The bread on the bottom soaked up all the red grease from the meat and cheese both. I absolutely loved "hamburger pie"! I've tried to duplicate it as an adult, but have never achieved the same level of greasiness that made that "pie" so good.

Eventually, they started calling it "pizza." My parents told me they already knew about "pizza" from living in California when Daddy was in grad school in the mid-1940s and it was nothing like that burger pie. Putting all this together, I just naturally assumed pizza started in the US in CA. I knew that Chicago's Uno claimed to be first, but didn't know that was true until this article.

Our small town had a Pizza Hut by that time and teens congregated there. I honestly don't recall if they had home delivery or not--I know we never had it at home.

It was really in college that I ate the most pizza -- and a couple of my more workaholic jobs where we ordered in a lot while working - for everyone. We used to get heart-shaped pizzas from our sweethearts - or sent to them.

I still don't order it at home much, but do make my own very often and will never pass up a stray piece offered. I love it cold for breakfast, too. I even like anchovies on mine, but prefer it without them.

The worst pizza to me is one with pineapple on it, even with Canadian bacon or ham or something else. I like my own "white" ham artisan pizzas with Dijon mustard and horseradish sauce instead of tomato sauce, and Swiss instead of mozzarella - but only occasionally.

Other than that, the moon hits my eye like a big-a pizza pie and I love it.


8 posted on 05/12/2006 9:24:26 PM PDT by Rte66
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To: L_Von_Mises

>>Anything you get further West or South of North Jersey isn't real pizza.

So true. I'm from Jersey, now in central PA where they can't even pronounce it right.


9 posted on 05/12/2006 9:27:25 PM PDT by Graymatter
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To: SamAdams76

I've been working in pizza places or other places that make pizza for the last 20 something years. Still love it! People get the weirdest combinations but hey, if they like it, so be it! I'm a big fan of taco pizza and ones with everything on them except the anchovies. Hate anchovies and shrimp too. They stink to high heaven when put in the oven!


10 posted on 05/12/2006 10:06:58 PM PDT by swmobuffalo (The only good terrorist is a dead terrorist.)
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To: SamAdams76
Give me a good old hamburger from the 1950's Hamburger Inn in Ardmore, Oklahoma and I could and probably would die a happy man.
11 posted on 05/12/2006 10:10:20 PM PDT by OKIEDOC (There's nothing like hearing someone say thank you for your help.)
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To: Graymatter
You mean.....wipe away the tears...boo hoo..hoo... that Pizza Hut and God Fathers isn't real Pizza, blah blah blah.......
12 posted on 05/12/2006 10:13:13 PM PDT by OKIEDOC (There's nothing like hearing someone say thank you for your help.)
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To: OKIEDOC

"Good ole 50's hamburgers"....
Ain't that the truth. Also, never eat a hamburger north of Oklahaoma or west of Texas!


13 posted on 05/12/2006 10:50:14 PM PDT by BnBlFlag (Deo Vindice/Semper Fidelis)
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To: BnBlFlag

I about gagged the first time I ate a hamburger in Canada, They brought the thing out loaded down with Ketchup.

Of course now I love ketchup.


14 posted on 05/12/2006 10:52:43 PM PDT by OKIEDOC (There's nothing like hearing someone say thank you for your help.)
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To: SamAdams76
I'm old enough to remember this 'Chef Boyardee' pizza mix in a box that came with a little tin can of tomato paste and a packet of dry Parmesan cheese to pour over it.

God, that pizza was lousy as hell. My parents loved it.

I remember sitting in front of our black and white TV eating awful square thin pizza slices watching the Patty Hearst drama unfold.

15 posted on 05/12/2006 10:56:14 PM PDT by The KG9 Kid (Semper Fi!)
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To: The KG9 Kid
"old enough"?

Patty Hearst was kidnapped in the 70's.

My mom was making that Boyardee boxed belly buster in the 50's.

I found it amusing when I learned that the Boiardi family from Cleveland had owned the food company and a company that made specialty mortars. I wonder which came first, tile grout or their canned spaghetti?

16 posted on 05/13/2006 12:52:23 AM PDT by leadhead (It’s a duty and a responsibility to defeat them. But it's also a pleasure)
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To: TR Jeffersonian

ping


17 posted on 05/13/2006 12:55:41 AM PDT by kalee
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To: SamAdams76
Until Uno’s opened its first location outside Chicago in 1979, people had to go to East Ohio Street to sample anything like Sewell’s idea...

The author left out a few other places in Chicago, which weren't located on East Ohio Street:

Uno's

Due's

Gino's

Gino's East

Dino's Grotto

Lou Malanati

So she dropped in a short history of Chicago deep-dish pizza. Maybe for her next article she can do an in-depth study the Italian Beef. That might take her two paragraphs, based on this.

18 posted on 05/13/2006 1:10:23 AM PDT by Bernard (God helps those who helps themselves - The US Government takes in the rest.)
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To: SamAdams76
Americans like ethnic food. None of it seems foreign - whether its Chinese, German, Yiddish, Italian or Middle Eastern - it just seems well - American.

(Denny Crane: "Every one should carry a gun strapped to their waist. We need more - not less guns.")

19 posted on 05/13/2006 1:13:30 AM PDT by goldstategop (In Memory Of A Dearly Beloved Friend Who Lives On In My Heart Forever)
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To: The KG9 Kid
Would you believe that you can still find that awful "Chef Boyardee" pizza mix in your supermarket?

I remember having that stuff as a kid growing up in the early 1970s too. It was passed off by my mother as "real pizza" but I already knew better. There was a genuine pizza place down the street that made great pizza but I only got to eat it two or three times a year. This was back in the days before casual dining when "going out to eat" was only for special occasions and you had to dress up to go there. 99% of all meals back then were made and consumed at home.

I also remember my mother making this godawful toaster-oven pizza which was essentially tomato paste and shredded cheese on top of English muffins.

We ate it just like we ate everything she put on the table (or my father gave us the belt). Wednesdays was always spaghetti-and-meatball night and Friday night was for fish sticks. Not that my family was Catholic but all our neighbors were and my parents didn't want to insult them by having meat.

I still live in New England and having been around the country, we definitely have the best pizza here. Also the best subs. Forget major chains like Subway and D'Angelos. When you come to the Boston area, seek out the local mom and pop pizza & sub shops. They are everywhere. That's where you get real pizza and real subs.

20 posted on 05/13/2006 4:03:17 AM PDT by SamAdams76 (I think Randy Travis must be paying his bills on home computer by now)
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