"Where Foodies Come Together!"

On the Food Trail Again…

Les Aaron


Okay, it’s that crazy guy again about to attack another Ethnic group.
No, of course not. Only that I realize that in all my correspondence I have failed to mention or do justice to God’s favorite people, Italians. And although I am not one of the clan, to my Italian friends, I apologize.

I always felt that Italians were God’s choice; why else give them such a great cuisine all up and down the country…. That would be cruel and unusual punishment.
That belief system developed a long time ago. And I was reminded of that by the author of scary children’s stories who grew up in a mixed community of Jewish, Italian and Russian immigrants and always remembered that it was the folks across the hall who always had the best time and ate the best food. In a community of immigrants,. The Italians stood out as truly knowing how to enjoy life.

I can attest to that experience myself having spent my fair share at an Italian table on Christmas Eve when the table looked like low tide at Coney Island and the chairs seem to flow into the next time zone as in some modernist painting by Salvador Dali. . You would eat and then eat some more until you couldn’t eat anymore. That was the Italian way.
And that’s how I was formed after learning that one plate dinners did not a cuisine make.

As a single guy living on his own, it was the Italians who literally saved my culinary life by sending me Care packages to see me through. Those Care packages always contained a little pasta, a sausage, a meatball, sauce and lot’s of love. It was the Care packages and pockets full of peanuts that I picked up in my local bar that enabled me to get from one payday to the next.
Here’s an observation I will share with you. One thing I had learned, you do not go to an Italian’s home when invited to dinner without fasting for at least two days…otherwise, you will automatically insult your host. Please take this advice seriously; you do not want to offend your hostess especially if she is from the south of Italy…
If you can overcome that obstacle, then you will probably have the best culinary experience you could ever imagine.

All of those great Italian dinners you thought you had “outside” will be revealed for what they really are and you will be redeemed in the neighborhood. I used to live on an ethnic block peopled with all Southern Italians. It was the most challenging living assignment in my lifetime. I had to negotiate an entire block without stopping more than a dozen times and having espresso more than six times…

It was as you might imagine impossible to circumnavigate this block in less than an hour’s time. That was because it was only polite to stop at every stoop to inquire of the health of the family and to pick up the local gossip. It was wonderful, nurturing and fattening in a glorious way. Kids of every size and description would fill the block. They would be playing stickball, kickball, Ringo-Leavio, Johnny Ride the Pony, Chinese handball, Hide and Seek, marbles, hit the penny! And a million other street games; most of them required only a pink Spaldeen that cost about fifteen cents new. There was music coming from a dozen different places, from the LP’s to the portable radios that jutted out here and there. The block was our collective kingdom and we only wandered off to do things like shop. Nobody on the block had a last name; it was always Vito the plumber, Joseph the Carpenter, Johnny the mechanic in emulation of what it must have been like in Medieval Europe during the craft guilds.
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The great thing was that everyone was safe. Parents left their kids outside and never worried! There was always a host of surrogate mothers just waiting to share the burden, change a diaper, feed the tykes and, overall, there was the neighborhood “Yenta” sticking her nose out of the window and ready to tell you everything that was happening on the block. That was the Brooklyn that I remember and it was wonderful. Why do I tell you that? As an introduction to my little story about the pursuit of the best pizza.

Now, you can imagine. Ask any Italian about where you can get the best pizza and they will give you a million answers that they will defend with mind and body. I have never met an Italian who does not have a ready answer to that question. Nor have I ever met one who would say, “I don’t know.” I don’t know does not exist in the Italian lexicon. You either know or for some reason, you don’t want to say. That’s a little trickier. For example, if you are asking a question like who just got made, you might hear a lot of disclaimers and receive a lot of head shakes and hand motions and a good chance that you might be standing alone in twenty seven seconds after asking the question. But when it comes to pizza, well, that’s a different story.

First rule of thumb: Don’t ever expect to see voted number one any pizza that is either a commercial brand or brought in from somewhere else. That is against the law of pizza propriety practiced in the land where pizza is a natural and ubiquitous as good bread. Such an offense might likely to lead to a repeat of the famous Pizza Rebellion of 1948 in which pizza contenders battered each other for supremacy with large rolls of dough fashioned into baseball bats. The winners were found to have incorporated iron ingots into the fabrication thereby rendering all competition dumb and senseless.

I recognize this is ancillary to our original goal of pursuing the timeless pizza, the sophisticated mélange of sauce, cheese, dough into a holistic mass of mouth watering indulgence known as the pizza…

True pizza sophisticates from Naples claim that there are certain rules that define the margins of what may qualify as a pizza in the first place. At the very risk of alienating these gormandizing judges of the gustatory, we have chosen to toss their warnings to the winds so as to not be encumbered by self-serving regulations that favor the City of record for pizza excellence; instead, we acknowledge that it is possible that pizza may have exceeded its limits, burned its bridges and broke out of the confines set for it to amaze us with new boldness of taste and a plethora of new ingredients.

Now, before you say what I am suggesting is violating unwritten canon, be advised that I am not a total clod! For example, I cannot and will not ever accept pineapple on flattened dough as any rendering of pizza anyway you can pronounce it. That is the limit; the distance to which I could never go beyond. The point of no return that no true gustatory master of Italian fabrications that embrace rolled, flattened and embellished dough enhanced with other tastes and heated in uniform coal ovens to a certain degree for a certain period of time to form the ubiquitous savory pies could ever agree to no matter how flexible, inventive or willing to bend the rules. That is my limit! The gauntlet is extended~~

In lieu of that, where do we begin and end?

I gave you a clue before: It is the Savory Pie. The savory pie is the broadest category that includes pizza as merely one subdivision. How do I know? Well, to make a long story short, Anna Teresa Callen wrote the book and Rose, my spouse was her assistant and I had the most important job of all. I was the resident taster getting to eat both the mistakes and the successes.
Anna, who also was the president of the James Beard Foundation that some of you erstwhile cooks certainly heard of and a TV chef and party host, introduced us to her art and invited us out with a bevy of food critics and chefs to visit with Lidia Bastianich , the original host of
Felidia’s and now one of the most successful, and for me, the best Italian chef on TV today. (I do like Mario B; but Lidia does simple and great things using simple ingredients and, therefore, qualifies for my Italian chef of the year even though she isn’t Italian. (Only a few of us know this of course but I have friends who are related to her and they are from the Northern Adriatic and stay with her on vacation..) Of course, the circle has closed with Mario now a partner of Lidia’s son in a new food venture in New York to supplement Babo…

Okay, let’s get back to what Anna calls savory pies.
Most of the best savory pies in the category of pizzas are prepared simply and in less than ten minutes in a coal or wood burning stove. The ingredients are simple but fresh and pure—no acidy tomato sauce out of a can, no pre=cut packaged cheeses purveyed by broken-nosed folks who make you an offer you can’t refuse. No, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t make them a profit and produce a great pizza…so make your mind up now!

One must realize that attempting to bring a new pizza interpretation to Brooklyn must be something like shipping coals to Newcastle; it just ain’t done….

Once you have the fresh ingredients down, there are thousands of permutations that can result in an edifying experience that you will not forget.

Let me quote simply one experience. When I was a loyal Brooklynite, we used to wend our way to the piers and stop at “Patsy’s” one of many restaurants claimed to have garnered supremacy in the arcane craft of fashioning the best pizza known to man.

Well, to tell the truth, they did a pretty good job. Coal stove. Thin crust of quality pizza dough, slightly charred on the outside. Fresh tomatoes; fresh mozzarella and a sprinkling of cheese for flavor—everything subtle; nothing overdone! Ah, almost perfection. So good, in fact, that Sinatra was rumored to have sent his private plane there for sixty pizzas at a time…
We don’t know whether that’s really true but I did know from personal experience some of Sinatra’s favorite hang-outs among them were some of mine. The “other” Patsy’s in New York where the head chef used to cook for Sinatra after they’d close the restaurant, and he would bring the left-overs home for my daughter. The M place over by the docks with the best oven-basted prawns you could find anywhere layered over pasta with breadcrumbs, garlic and an espresso in a glass with sugared-rim that you could die for and I guess some did. Anyway, M’s gave itself away as a hang-out with the profusion of Bentley’s, Ferraris, Rolls Royce, and Daimlers in its parking lot next to nothing but bombed out industrial buildings. No credit cards accepted please!

Of course, to understand the pursuit of great pizza in Brooklyn, you have to understand that Brooklyn is a mélange of communities that are complex as any European country…To give you a little perspective, Brooklyn by itself would probably qualify as the third or fourth largest city in the US; it has 90 ethnic groups and every language and nationality you can imagine. It has more South Indian newspapers than there are in South India. It has a Chinatown that is now larger than New York’s China-town. It’s middle eastern area extends for mile after mile and embraces every country you can think of and then some. Its population alone is about five times the size of the entire state of Delaware all compressed inside of a Borough that one can go across in under two hours from one end to the other….but it would take virtually infinite time to try to fathom. . Brooklyn is really like a microcosm of Europe but instead of countries, what you have are communities, and each community, no matter how complex or diverse, stands tall on one thing the quality of its pizza.

With all of the choices ranging from thick crust Sicilian to wafer thin Patsy’s best, my favorite pizza violated all of my own rules which simply goes to show that taste decides all.
In the bowels of Brooklyn operating from a hole-in-the-wall that nobody would ever find were it not for the fact that borders two landmarks, General Washington’s temporary headquarters during the Battle of Brooklyn down from the slopes from where the Hessians came and the nearby Fifth Avenue bocce ball courts where old Mafia wannabes’ played their hearts out and argued strenuously about whose ball was closer sat this pizza emporium run by two guys who just got off the boat and barely got by slaughtering the King’s English.

Two unknown men in an unknown place on an unknown street made the best pizza in the world. And instead of making the traditional thin pizza with fresh mozzarella and fresh tomatoes, this was thick and Sicilian and heavy with plump tomatoes and good quality Olive Oil and cheeses shipped from Italy. No cardboard crust that winds up tasting soggy and limp. No acidy tomato paste! No cheese that tastes like congealed rubber cement! It was the real thing. Finding this spot in the middle of nowhere was like finding the Rosetta stone. I bought pies by the dozen, froze them and wrapped them individually slice by slice for safe-keeping. It was almost as if I knew that this was an illusion and it would not last. And I wanted to save it as long as I could.

And I was right! For the best pizza in the world, what did they get? They got fire! The mob didn’t want a couple of refugees making better pizza and not doing business with them. So one night, they got burned out and were no more.
Sometimes it goes like that.

I managed to find them one day and get their address and we all hugged and said good-bye. I even managed to go to their new location in South Jersey and found that they no longer make pizza but all of the conventional fare but, instead, served only razor thin veal cutlets and decent ziti and the like.

We stayed there for dinner one night and left never to return.
You can’t reduplicate Oz!....

Sicilian pizza is an acquired taste; but aside from what my Italian friends had conjured up during their short stay in my neighborhood, there was always the authentic Sicilian pizza that makes me drool to think of it… This is a pizza with very little sauce; no cheese and non of the toppings that you might tend to think of when you think of pizza with one exception: Anchovies. The real old-fashioned Sicilian pizza that the old timers used to serve in Italy was simply a hand-rolled crust filled with onions sautéed in oil, a little olive oil, a profusion of bread crumbs, flavored or unflavored to taste, and anchovies that have been melted and deposited all over the hand-shaped crust and baked at 375 for about ten minutes (oven preheated!)….You could not find this pizza outside of a couple of Sicilian Focceterias and a small pizza joint on 5th Avenue and 72nd Street in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn where they would make it for you if you ordered a full pie in advance.

It was also a pie we used to bake at home on Friday nights when we both decided to hang out relax and watch old movies on TMC or AMC… especially when Edward G. Robinson or George Raft were playing….We all knew a lot of stories about George and sitting down, telling stories and enjoying one of the greatest pizzas ever was just proof that America had to be the best place in the world and the Italian people the luckiest! What more could you want.

As you can imagine, I am only starting to wind up now but we will have to leave the stories of Some Like it Hot for another day and not bore you any longer with my pursuit of the best pizza in the world. Thanks for coming along for the ride. I hope you enjoyed the little diversion. Stay tuned!

Les Aaron