white pizza; clam hash

[Frank Abate]

Larry H said, re white pizza:

>>
Weird.  I've always thought of authentic New Haven apizza [aBI:TS] as
necessarily THIN-crusted, including Sally's excellent white clam
pizza.   I also recall white pizzas (not with clams) from my year in
Ann Arbor in 1969-70, in Greek-run pizza emporia.  Basically, any
pizza with cheese and no tomato sauce was called "white".  It would
certainly predate 1980, as would Sally's white clam pizza.  Frank?
Fred?
<<

I agree that New Haven-style "apizza" is thin-crusted, as far as I know, as
"classically" served at Pepe's, the place that claims (we now know wrongly)
to have served the first pizzas in America.  Pepe's started in 1944, as I
recall, and Barry P has antedated that by some years, in NYC I think.
Anyway, it is a thin-crust pizza, and it is cooked in a wood-fired brick
oven at Pepe's, and left in until the crust just starts to blacken in a few
spots.  Similar is John's Pizza in NYC, the one that Woody Allen featured in
one of his movies (title?), in a scene with one of the young Hemingway
females (which?).

I myself first encountered white pizza in CT, in the early 1980s, but when I
did it was clearly an established favorite in the area, as it occurred in a
phrase like "Luigi's famous white clam pizza".  I had never heard of or seen
a "white pizza" before, with clams or otherwise.  I should add that my
family ties to Italian/Sicilian cooking include an Uncle Ciccio who ran a
pizza parlor in Detroit, Ciccio's, on Eight Mile Road.  He made
Sicilian-style crust, which is very thick.  The thickness of the crust is
like that of the "pan pizza" that was popularized, I believe, by Pizzeria
Uno out of Chicago, but is now all over, as a chain restaurant.  But
Ciccio's thick-crust pizza was not made in or served in a pan; it was done
the "conventional" way, as a dough laid flat on a board, toppings added,
picked up by a peel and put in the oven.

But again, I never heard of a "white pizza" till the "famous" one with clams
and no tomato sauce served (to this day) at Luigi's in Old Saybrook, CT.  Of
course, fresh clams would have been a very odd and VERY expensive topping in
Michigan, but familiar and relatively easy to come by in CT, though still
the most expensive one on the menu.

Related clammy item, and lexical, too, is from Pat's Kountry Kitchen (sic)
in Old Saybrook, where they serve clam hash, and have since at least 1982,
when I first went there.  It is made like roast beef hash, except with clam
"meat" in lieu of beef.  The story Pat tells on her menu is that one day her
kids threw out the clam juice she had put aside to make clam chowder, and
left her with the clam meat only.  So she made a hash with that, tried it,
and had others try it -- instant hit.  They claim it to be "world famous",
which may be a stretch, but it is excellent, and unusual if not unique.  I
expect somebody has copied it, and who knows if Pat didn't get the idea from
elsewhere.

Barry, if you come up to CT, we can do a "clam and apizza tour", maybe with
Fred Shapiro and Larry Horn, and we can even expense it as lexical research!

Frank Abate