As bad and uninformed as most of what is offered by the Tri-State
pizzamakers. Even after so many years, eating their sugary, often
overcrunchy or soggy dough isn't that easy. Where they are hopeless is
in the garnishing. The chemical taste of tomato paste is unavoidable
(wouldn't know why, as wholesale prices for peeled tomatoes aren't
really higher). The hair-raising cacogueusy of popular NY combinations
rarely allow to keep the top juicy. Forget about judicious use of
herbs. A good margherita is almost impossible to get. The good
pizzerias in NY and upstate are few; almost all are run by either a
native Neapolitan or a Brazilian. There are also a good number of
excellent (non-NY and non-Chicago) pizza parlors in SF and the Bay.
Several, again, are Brazilian.

mb wrote [about pizzas]:

"Cacogueusy"?

I looked in several dictionaries. No luck. What does it mean? The
variety of toppings?

Enquiring minds and all that.

Maria

On 19 Jan 2003, mb wrote:

"Combinations"?!  Oy!

I've never said that *most* pizza places in the Tri-State Area are
good.  I've said here many times that most of them are mediocre to
horribly bad, and it's been that way ever since I was old enough to eat
pizza (I dunno, sometime in 1970 or 1971?).  And the bad ones back then
were all bona fide New York pizzerias.  But the best pizza places are
far better than anything in the rest of the country, even if the worst
of them are as bad as anything in the rest of the country, and they
are.  And the situation has only gotten worse over the years,
especially since the late 1980s.  Nevertheless.

Your comments about "combinations", as I noted above, indicate that you
don't understand what pizza is all about (NTTAWWT).  I don't know from
combinations.  Combinations are for the goyim.  I detect some special
fondness in your remarks for the San Francisco Bay Area.  Perhaps this
is where you grew up or migrated to.  Look, San Francisco is visually
(from a distance, at least, unless they've solved the litter problem
in the past few years) and climatically the greatest city in the US, if
not the world, though it has a rather high crime rate.  As for the rest
of the 'Bay Area', it's mostly a bunch of boring suburbs or
economically troubled communities like most of the US, but that's
okay.

But if there's one thing that makes California different from the
Tri-State Area, it's that no part of it, none of it, has the proper
conditions for thriving pizza culture.  You need the following things
for a thriving pizza culture:
1.  Good water
2.  A heritage of pizza-making rooted in thriving and
culturally working-class communities of persons with strong cultural
links to particular places in southern Italy where pizza of some sort
was a feature of local culinary traditions.

Well, I don't think we need spend much time on 1.  I mean, if this
alone is why you can't find good pizza in Boston, you can see why
things aren't going to be so great in most of California.  I think 2.
is the real problem, and 2. is also one of the reasons why the quality
of pizza in the Tri-State Area, even in those places which
traditionally could be relied upon to sometimes provide good pizza, has
been declining over the years.

But it's easy to see why 2. isn't present in California.  I'll just
take the San Francisco Bay Area, since you seemed to single it out as
an especially wonderful place for pizza.  Sure, there was a
significant amount of (indirect) immigration from southern Italy to
parts of coastal northern California during the early part of the 20th
century.  But what makes that part of California unique is that *prior*
to the great wave of turn-of-the-century immigration from southern and
eastern Europe there was a significant amount of immigration from
*Northern* Italy, of relatively bourgeois persons, from places where,
needless to say, pizza did not exist as a feature of local traditional
popular cuisine.  Moreover, the subsequent immigration from southern
Italy was never as large as the immigration from southern Italy to the
Northeastern United States.

The North Beach district of San Francisco is commonly thought of as a
historically Italian immigrant-based community.  Well, it sort of was,
but remember that initially this was a community of bourgeois Northern
Italians, who were hostile to the cultural traditions of the poor
people of southern Italy, whom they regarded as culturally and
racially inferior.  'Nuff said; you aren't going to get a thriving
urban working-class pizzeria culture under conditions like that.  I've
been to the North Beach area.  It's a lovely place.  Where are the
pizzerias?  There are none.  There are some bad tourist-oriented
Italian restaurants around there, but that's it.  Where do you go to
get a slice?  'Nuff said.

There's still another reason, and it goes to a basic cultural
difference between California and the Coastal Northeast.  California is
culturally assimilationist in a much stronger way than the Coastal
Northeast is.  It's hostile, I would say, to the maintenance of
distinct ethnic traditions rooted in the cultures of the poor peoples
who may have immigrated there, beyond a few generations.  I'm not
condemning this completely, and there are probably some positive
social aspects to this strong form of assimilationism (which,
incidentally, is why English-speaking people [at least if they're of
primarily European ancestry] are called "Anglos" in California but not
in the Coastal Northeast), but there's a price to be paid.  Forget
pizza.  Where are you more likely to get a good bagel -- in San
Francisco or in Brooklyn?  'Nuff said.  All this is why California
makes great wine (because of the maintenance of the wine-making
traditions of those bourgeois or gentry Northern Italian immigrants to
Northern California) but not great pizza.

Your sentence "A good margherita is hard to get" is telling.  I think
that to you pizza is like Starbuck's coffee or jelly-bellies.  It's
properly a gourmet item, properly obtained in some sort of premium
food-serving environment, and not a humble, working-class food properly
served in an inexpensive and unpretentious place.  The sort of place
where if you go up to the counter and say "I'd like a margherita" the
guy behind the counter will tell you apologetically that they don't
have a liquor license.  Pizza is not food for the bourgeoisie. It's
food for the peasantry, for the workers.  As someone (maybe me) once
said, food is always political.  'Nuff said.

As for Upstate New York (which of course isn't in the Tri-State Area
or the Coastal Northeast), it's known not for pizza but for "coneys".

R Fontana <rf...@sparky.cs.nyu.edu> wrote
an excellent essay
...

Absolutely agreed, and that's also where we start looking at it from
different angles. Before my first trip to the US, pizza was a pie with
a) a smudge of peeled or squeezed tomato (the one and only until 1872)
or b) a margherita (created in 1872 to represent the tricolor of the
new kingdom and honor the queen, Margherita of Savoy): a leaf of
basil, tomato and mozzarella. Made not by local guys but Neapolitans.
Dozens of different combinations, some delicious, were eaten only in
fancy company. So the first contact with NY pizza was a shock.

No such culture, just several places that make excellent pizza as
judged by an immigrant.

...

Good dough, flat yet divinely fluffy, is made with Cal water too. Good
here, again seen from a non-NY angle, means first and foremost no
sugar!

No culture, but Neapolitans (or quasi) and Brazilians (who continue to
make dough as in the old country after 2 or more generations, with
Mediterranean-tasting innovations).

...

Agreed on that, including the part about North Beach. As for calling
the Polentoni bourgeois, certainly not! The good ones aren't in North
Beach (with a single exception) but in neighborhoods, Berkeley,
Oakland etc.
...

Yes, deplorable. But the ex-new Eldorado is very liberal with its new
immigrants. So, instead of an established ethnic tradition that has
modified its food and habits almost as much as its language (we'll
avoid a painful excursus on the noodles), you get a lot of direct
imports who cook and bake come in casa, or boil their bagels just as
in old-country Brooklyn.

Gentry my eye and foot. We're talking mainly about Piedmontese
chimneysweeps, Ticinese stonemasons, Genoan stevedores and the like,
pariahs who sometimes made good thanks to their winemaking skills.
Polenta, of course, never was a recipe for success in the restaurant
business.

It should be clear by now that the request for a margherita is a
thoroughly proletarian request -the simplest, cheapest and
best-tasting item of yore, a request made in the wrong environment due
to nostalgy for food, also political. Proletarian for proletarian, the
genetic connection between Neapolitan and authentic NY pizza starts
looking almost like that of Romanian to Portuguese.

...and the superb Italobrasileiros (Tarrytown, but also Troy, Buffalo,
Rochester, as of 1998).

"Maria Conlon" <mconlo...@sprynet.com> wrote

Me and my big mint (output rate depends on alcohol input). Sorry.
Started writing cacophony, braked on a dime to avoid the mixed
metaphor, then -hold it, I see I mistyped it too. Correct as
cacogeusy. From geusis, taste,  as in the medical term dysgeusia,
troubles of the taste organs.