Ian MacAllen
If you’re about to read this Q&A, odds are that you’re fond of pizza, lasagna, spaghetti and meatballs, and a wide array of Italian foods that are readily available all over the United States. But have you ever wondered, like author Ian MacAllen did, about where these foods came from and how they became so popular? The simple answer is that the foods came from Italy and they are popular because they are delicious.
But there is far more to the story of how ethnic Italian dishes morphed into being many Americans’ most beloved meals. In his new book Red Sauce, MacAllen explores this story and describes all of the people and innovations that made it possible.Mr. MacAllen was nice enough to answer a few questions for us and in doing so he served up a big bowl of information about NYC pizza, the importance of Ira Nevin, and what he’d serve his ideal dinner guests. Definitely check out Red Sauce, which is available from all major booksellers! www.redsauceamerica.com
A: I grew up in a small, northern New Jersey town, a bedroom suburb of New York City. We had seven or eight pizzerias. Italians were everywhere, and to me, growing up in the 1980s, it seemed like everyone from New Jersey was at least a little bit Italian.
One of the Italian restaurants we frequented started out as a hot dog stand. It was owned by this family that had come straight from Italy. They built an expansion next door with several dining rooms for weddings and a formal restaurant. They kept one side a casual pizzeria. My family ate there a lot. If my grandfather was with us, he'd speak to the owner in Italian and at the end of the night they would drink some grappa.
I grew up eating red sauce. My mother's mother's family was from Naples, and what my mother cooked was inspired by Neapolitan immigrant food from the early 20th century.
When I was eighteen, we traveled with my grandfather to Rome, where my cousins live, and we saw the house where my grandfather grew up in Bagnoli del Trigno. Bagnoli is this tiny hilltop town, a few hours south. We ate the most incredible food when we were there, but very little of it resembled the Italian food we ate when I was growing up.
Twenty years later I'm in a red sauce joint in Manhattan drinking a lot of wine with my wife thinking about why the food is so different. Not better or worse, but different. I started looking for answers on the internet and then the bookstore and the library and I didn't find anything that really was answering my questions, so I started writing a book.
A: Ira Nevin might be the most important person in the history of American pizza making, and he was an engineer, not a chef. Nevin came from a long line of oven builders–masons who built ovens out of brick. As a kid, he built brick ovens. After the Second World War, he returned to New York and invented a gas-fired pizza oven that became a standard in pizzerias across the country.
Until Nevin came along, American pizza was baked in large bread ovens with either wood or coal as fuel. The ovens really created New York pizza. Coal was hotter than the wood burned in Naples, but since coal was cheap in New York that was the primary fuel source and it made the pizza crispier. The bread ovens tended to be bigger than the purpose-built ovens in Naples, so the pizzas expanded, which is why New York pizza is bigger and has a crispy but flexible crust. The problem with baking pizza in a coal-fueled oven though is that it is actually hard to maintain. If they get cold overnight, it can take a day or more to come to full temperature, and moisture can accumulate causing damage.
Along comes Ira Nevin. He had experience building ovens, he had eaten pizza while stationed in Italy during the war, and he was an engineer. He combined all that knowledge into the first gas-fueled pizza oven. His company, Baker's Pride, started manufacturing ovens on a large scale. The idea proved so popular, knockoff companies started competing with him. One reason he had so much competition was he failed to patent the first version of the oven. Not to worry though, he went on to continue innovating, and filed patents on new versions, and made pizza ovens even cheaper and hotter. Without this technology, there would not be thousands of pizzerias around the country.
A: I think the important thing is that most New Yorkers aren't precious about the pizza slices they eat. Most plain slices – thats sauce with low-moisture mozzarella cheese – are about $3. That means a single slice can make a nice snack, two slices a good lunch, three slices dinner, and when you're drinking, all bets are off. Obviously, I have pizzerias I prefer over others. I might walk a few extra blocks to get a slice from a place I prefer, but also if the weather is bad, I can go to the place on the corner and it's going to be a good slice too.
When you get to toppings, I do think there are purists out there who get too wound up over what is allowed on pizza. The truth is, even Neapolitan pizza 150 years ago had all sorts of different toppings. I like to try new combinations if I can. One of my favorites is vodka sauce with fresh mozzarella. I love a good ziti pie in its various forms, but a lot of people think that is too many carbs. And I'm very much in favor of having a slice with chicken–buffalo chicken, barbecue chicken, bacon ranch chicken, grilled chicken caesar salad.
One of great things about New York City though is not only do we have this amazing selection of slice joints all over the place–they are basically a public utility–but we also have sit down restaurants dedicated to pizza. Some of the original places like Totonno's only serve whole pies, so you have to go with friends if you want to try a few different flavors. But there are also new Neapolitan-style places like Motorino and Roberta's and Ops. These pies are smaller, and typically are cooked in traditional Neapolitan ovens fueled with wood. Coal ovens are almost impossible to build.
The city also attracts people who make regional, specialty pizza. I can get styles from all over the world, whether it is Detroit, or St. Louis, or Argentina.
We're a city of immigrants who bring all their traditions to our city's food culture. Birria tacos, a beef taco originally from Tijuana, exploded in popularity across the city two years ago. Now there's a birria pizza. A pizzeria in Bed-Stuy, Cuts & Slices, is run by a Trinidadian immigrant and sells an oxtail pizza I've been meaning to try. I'm sure there are going to be people out there who say that isn't authentic, that it isn't New York pizza. But the reality is New York cuisine has always been a fusion of the many people who live here, and that translates to our pizzas too.
A: I've eaten a lot of pizza in Boston. A friend attended graduate school there for a while and we would visit and have some drinks and then eat pizza. Pinocchio's Pizza was the first choice. They bake big rectangular sheets. It's thick and thick and puffy, but also the crust was very crispy. That's different from a similar New York "Sicilian" slice which tends to be soft all the way through.
There was a place in San Francisco I can recall that had a distinctly sweet red sauce. I was wandering around the city as a tourist. In New York, I walk everywhere, so I was doing that in San Francisco, just wandering around. You might not know this about San Francisco, but they have a lot of hills. Walking around is a lot different there as a result. Locals don't do it as much. My brother and I were walking toward Telegraph Hill, which means we were walking uphill. We hadn't had lunch, and then all of a sudden I see a place advertising pizza by the slice. So obviously I wanted to try it.
The Trenton tomato pie is worth mentioning too. It's typically round like New York pies, but the cheese is hidden under the tomato sauce.
The slice I won't forget though is the giant D.C. slice. These are about twice the diameter of a New York slice, about 18 inches. They were invented by competing pizzerias in the late 1990s and served in the Adams Morgan neighborhood where there are a number of bars. Those slices are a great way to end the night if you have had a few beers, but probably not a slice I want as a midday snack.
A: The spread of Detroit-style pizza demonstrates how versatile pizza can be. A few shops have opened in New York that have replicated the rectangular and crusty dough. On one hand, you have a place like Lions & Tigers and Squares serving up a Detroit-style pizza with some very traditional toppings. But then there is Emmy Squared which took the format–crispy rectangle–and started doing some wild and delicious things with the toppings like Korean wing sauce with radishes, a deconstructed cheeseburger, jalapenos and honey. I'm not trying to suggest pizza must come to New York to be improved, only that pizza as a food is continually evolving. New York's grandma slice is a great example of this. For Gen Z, they grew up in a world where the grandma slice was available at basically any corner pizzeria in New York, but it's a relatively new form, only a few decades old.
Neapolitan style pizza has really exploded and is widely available in so many places now. I had an amazing pizza in Tokyo at this Japanese brewery with figs and ham, and in Copenhagen, one with smoked salmon and cucumber. Because pizza is such a versatile vessel for toppings, we're going to see a lot more regional specialties adapted into pizzas. Whether that is popular local ingredients or entire dishes converted into pizza, I think as a delivery method, it really lends itself to ingredients that are local and fresh. I want to see some Texas barbecued brisket on a pizza or head out to Colorado and get a pizza covered in prairie oysters. Pizza allows people to express their own identity which I think is increasingly important in an era when global corporations want to standardize things. You can get essentially the same Pizza Hut pizza in any of a 100 countries in the world. That's great for what it does. It's something familiar and comforting. But also I think individuals can take pizza as a device and make it their own. Maybe that means changing the shape of the pie. Maybe it's making the dough out of a different grain. Maybe it's just finding that local flavor that reminds you of childhood.
The most important technological advance though is going to be in electric pizza ovens. Coal makes a great pizza, but even a limited number are horrible for the environment, for climate change, for breathing clean air. Natural gas-fired ovens give off less particulates, but they are still a problem for climate change. Already we have states that are banning natural gas hookups. New York City has a ban on new natural gas hookups that will be phased in over the next few years. Right now, electric pizza ovens aren't really up to the task. They don't get as hot as a coal or wood oven. I think the technology will get there eventually, but that's going to be a challenge going forward.
A: I assume in this scenario I'm allowed to cook the food and serve them some nice cocktails? I'd cook some red sauce favorites: pork braciole and eggplant rollatini. You know, braciole wasn't something my mother made, so I never had it growing up and only learned to make it after writing Red Sauce. Also I'll admit for years I was scared of making eggplant rollatini because I had no idea how to get the eggplant to cook properly. The trick is to fry the eggplant in olive oil first with just a light flour coating. Once it is partly cooked, it will finish by braising in liquid from the sauce and cheese.
As for drinks, I'll also mix up some Paper Planes at this party. I've been on a big Paper Plane kick lately ever since Alexander Chee was on Twitter asking for recommendations for cocktails using Nonino Amaro. Technically it is a grappa. I had some in my liquor cabinet for a while and didn't know what to do with it. So I followed the advice from the internet, which is always a risky proposition. It mixes in equal parts with lemon juice, Aperol, and bourbon. The resulting cocktail has a slightly peachy colored hue and a beautiful balance of sweet and bitter.
But you asked about who I would invite, not about the menu. This is the problem. All I really want to do is throw nice dinner parties and have interesting people eat the food I cook.
I'm going to stick with dead people for this to avoid jinxing myself from ever eating with living people. So right off the top of my head I'm going to say Julia Child, who was a master of cooking, but also supposedly wildly entertaining. I think she would be a blast to have as a dinner guest. But if she's coming I'm also adding homemade pasta to the menu so I can impress her.
I'm tempted to add an invite for Pellegrino Artusi who wrote the seminal volume, Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well, the first cookbook from a politically united Italy. He was a book critic and nobody wanted to publish his manuscript, so he self-published the first edition and dedicated it to his cats. It continues to be a bestseller today.
And finally, Enrico Caruso, the opera singer. He loved to eat. He kept standing reservations at his favorite restaurants around New York City and was instrumental in popularizing Italian cuisine in America. With these three people reanimated, I think we'd have a pretty good party. I'm assuming you're coming too? I guess that puts us over three, but I'm Italian: I feed people.