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.”
That was 1943. The restaurant, without enchiladas, became Pizzaria Uno. It was the 1950’s before pizzas really became an American staple. James Dean liked it; around 1957, his fans began to seek it. So go the teenagers who are now senior citizens — probably still eating pizzas.
Ms. Miller ends her excellent history of pizza with a list of the top 11 pizza restaurants including Spago's in Beverly Hills (176 North Canon Drive, Beverly Hills, Calif., 310-385-0880):
Swankier than this restaurants do not get — Wolfgang Puck’s wildly successful glamour palace in Beverly Hills. But the original Spago (now closed) was set up as a pizzeria and grill, and the young Puck pioneered great pizza in California, even as he came up with marvelous new ideas for them, like a “Jewish pizza” topped with smoked salmon, sour cream, and caviar. Avoid his frozen pizza line in the supermarkets but go for the original Puck pizza at Spago.
It is the current immigration debate framed in dough and cheese. Can a foreigner gain acceptance in America? Should we allow these tastes from foreign shores into our American stomachs?
I might begin thinking whether the taco is another danger and how we Americans attached it to a bell. Will ma po tofu become another staple? How about hot and sour soup? Do you eat your borscht with or without sour cream? Can an exotic, Japanese concoction of seaweed stuffed with sticky rice and raw creatures ever find a market in our nation? It hardly seems possible unless you think of the once exotic pizza.
Article comments
1 - Heloise
Illegal Avenue--coming soon to a theatre near you.
I wrote about how illegals are creating an obesity crisis here with their low wages and more junk food available in this country. In fact school districts are replacing black women, single with children, with illegals in the cafeteria who speak NO English. They are impacting the food thing here.
But not so fast with Heloise because she knows how fattening their foods are plus she's a vegetarian so I am not tempted by much of their fare. I do not eat Mexican food or texmessmex food because it is just not my culture.
I am part Italian and most of my food choices reflect that. Look at their kids, they're fat. The grocery stores in my area, mostly Mexican, are crammed with women and two shopping carts full of FOOD paid with by food stamp cards.
The kids are as fat as black kids and there is no end in sight.
Heloise
2 - Bliffle
Ethnic food, like everything else ethnic, is detestable and noone should eat it.
Instead of just slavishly eating the same food your mother made, one should investigate what foods one needs, and the side effect of foods and then design onesown diet. As I do (more people should be like me!)
Most ethnic foods are nothing more than cheap food-components which are combined into fatty globs which is easily packaged and easily sold to masses of ignorant people.
3 - Howard Dratch
Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report showing that recent immigrants reported significantly better physical and mental health (such as lower rates of obesity and high blood pressure) than their U.S.-born counterparts, despite having limited access to health care and little or no health insurance. The study found that people from other countries (African-American, Asian and Hispanic) who move to the United States become progressively less healthy the longer they stay in the country. Those who were U.S. residents for five years or more were 54 percent more likely to have high blood pressure and 25 percent more likely to have cardiovascular diseases, for example, than those who lived here less than five years.I must disagree with these comments. "Illegals" may or may not be fat. America is suffering its own obesity epidemic which comes as much or more from fast foods, junk foods and convenience foods than from foreign foods. Unless the chains of McDonalds, Pizza Huts, Kentucky Fried and the rest are really owned by "illegals".
Bliffle wrote, "Ethnic food, like everything else ethnic, is detestable and noone should eat it." Which ethnic foods: slabs of roast beef (English), watercress soup (Chinese), Tandoori chicken (India), stuffed grape leaves (Greece), vichyssoise (French), Fish in Veracruzana sauce (Mexican), Miso soup (Japan)?
Obviously different ethnic groups have "... cheap food-components which are combined into fatty globs..." There are hot dogs covered with bacon, Quarter-pounders with cheese, deep-fried ham and cheese sandwiches, brie baked in a pastry shell, Cuban sandwiches with everything on them... I have made myself hungry with the first group and would be dead if I ate from group B.
In Newsweek on line today Dr. Dean Ornish wrote on "Globalizing Health",