[Sca-cooks] White Pizza- OOP

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Jan 27, 2008, at 12:01 PM, Nick Sasso wrote:

> The average consuming public is
> rather unsophisitcated in the ways of classic foods in so many  
> ways.  Ceasar
> and Alfredo are the very beginnings of it all.

They are, as the old saying goes, the thin end of the wedge. And it's  
not so terrible that stuff like this occurs sometimes; rather, it's  
that people don't recognize, or don't represent, the trend for what it  
is: that there's no difference between peddling some dubious animal  
feed and the work of an artist or a loving mother or grandmother. Or  
father ;-).

>  We have a guy on the pizza
> boards spending great time and expense to get the 'raw tomato'  
> flavor out of
> his suace??

Has he figured out how to remove the volatile but subtle perfume of  
fresh basil, too? I've been annoyed by that one for years. Maybe some  
sort of genetic engineering is indicated?

>  We spend huge time and expense most days trying to preserve
> that gentile and delicate essence that we can.  He is now going to the
> warehouse club store to buy #10 cans of Ragu pizza sauce.

Oy weh ist mir. This is clearly a man in the fast food trade: he would  
rather embrace the mediocrity that is the result of endlessly pursuing  
limits to trouble and problems, rather than simply pursuing excellence.

>  I do wish him the
> best, but it is the sort of socialized taste fade and expectation we  
> are
> talking about.

Yes. Either he, or we, simply don't get it. Probably both, in a way.

> Condamento is a foreign concept in America.  Spaghetti is a sauce  
> delivery
> system for most people I know.

I'm trying to think whether there's an American food we inherently  
respect and simply don't %$&* with, in the way that so many Europeans  
respect handmade pasta, bread, cheeses and wine. I got nothing.

I think it's not that there's nothing, but maybe there's nothing  
that's part of our national identity in that sense. Maybe America's  
too big for that. You do see flashes of regional foods people wouldn't  
dream of molesting the way we do pasta, sometimes. And we aren't the  
only ones that do it, but we do it a lot, it seems.

Adamantius