white pizza; clam hash

[Jan Ivarsson TransEdit]

The Italian white pizza, the "pizza bianca", is usually simply the pure pizza, without any sauce or hash. See e.g.

http://website.lineone.net/~traditio/pizza.html
"le pizze più famose di Napoli sono tre e sono quelle che si mangiano sin dall'inizio del 1800: la pizza alla mastunicola (che poi corrisponde più o meno all'odierna pizza bianca)..."

This is made with only flour, onions, lard and salt, in a richer version with basilic and buffalo cheese.

http://www.donnanews.it/atavola/details.php?ID=2260
"Cronologicamente la pizza napoletana più antica è la mastunicola la cui nascita dovrebbe datare 1660, seguita dalla marinara, 1750 e dalla margherita, con la sua variante al basilico del 1871."

To a "pizza bianca" one can add white sauces but obviously no tomatoes.

Jan Ivarsson

----- Original Message -----
From: "Frank Abate" <abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET>
To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Sent: Sunday, February 09, 2003 10:55 AM
Subject: [ADS-L] white pizza; clam hash


> 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
>