Text 9626, 119 rader
Skriven 2008-06-27 03:52:00 av MICHAEL LOO (1:123/140)
     Kommentar till en text av BURTON FORD
Ärende: intolerance 521
=======================
 sas-> Nice save.  When you smelled the ozone, did you get
 sas-> the tingly sensation on your scalp, too?
 BF> If you did, Man that was close!   The ozone is bad enough, but 
 BF> when you get the tingles it's time to squat so only toes touch
 BF> the ground.  

I had few fears, as I was with Erik (the husband of the
Carol in the picture), and he's the tallest tree in the
forest, being 6'8" or so. Of course, he was also my ride
home, so I had a vested interest in keeping him alive.

 BF> That stuff scares me foolish, especially when I'm being a golfist
 BF> and I am associated with a near-by bag of lightening rods.
 BF> Two distant rumbles and Burt is on the way to the club house.
 BF> [One rumble and I just turn ash white and say "What was that?"]

Better than just turning to ash!

A report on Frank's tomato pie.

As you may know if you read the Times, train service was
disrupted this week because of bridge demolition and
replacement on the shore route (they optimistically said
4 days) between New London and Groton, so all trains were
routed to the inland route at New Haven. Anyhow, I was in
Pelham, so I could take the commuter train there and have
a couple hours for lunch before switching to the Amtrak,
starting off around the same time and spending $10 less,
which could go to pizza (apizza, in New Havenese). So I
got the commuter train, which stopped at Stamford, so one
had to switch trains, but that's easy, as the connection
comes in on the same platform, and I got to New Haven in
plenty of time to walk to Wooster Street for lunch.

It's a 10-minute walk from the station and much less daunting
than when I used to go there in the '70s and '80s. For one
thing, Wooster Street was a slum back then distinguished only
by three pizza parlors (apizza restaurants), and not only was
it dangerous to get there, nobody knew where it was. Now, the
streets, though graffiti-ridden and trashy, look less daunting,
there are actually signs for about a mile that have arrows
pointing there. It is the writing of the much maligned Sterns
over the last 25 years or so that has effected this change,
putting a warm spotlight on the pizzerias, The Spot, Frank
Pepe's, and Sally's Apizza. When I started going there, 37 or
so years ago, The Spot (whose ovens date from the 1880s, before
the putative invention of pizza) was considered the ne plus
ultra, with Pepe's and Sally's (run by cousins or uncle and
nephews or something) running neck and neck with Modern
downtown for king's court positions. We used to go to The Spot,
where the pies were thicker-crusted and cheesier, with an
occasional foray to the others for variety. Remember, my sister
was at Yale, and then when she left there, she stayed at the
Connecticut Ballet, and then when she left there, my friend
Diana did a doctorate there, so New Haven was not a closed
book to me.

It had been many years since I'd been up Wooster Street. The
street itself is way picked up, though the neighborhood is
otherwise still kind of dodgy. My choice was easy this time,
as Pepe's is the only one open before 5 pm.

I got there at 3 something, and the place was hopping, most of
the booths occupied. There was an eight-top by the window,
though, and they put me there; presumably if other stragglers
showed up I might have had to share it, but as the hour went
by, more people left than came, though there was a party of
maybe 5 who looked oddly at me when they had to wait a couple
minutes for a booth that was smaller than mine to open up.

It had been my plan to grab a couple slices and a beer, but
there's no provision for that. The pies come in three sizes
only, no slices for sale. So I got a small pepperoni (clam
was I believe $3.85 more and came with grated cheese) and a
Long Trail Ale: this totalled $11 - back in my day, we could
feed four people with plenty of Budweiser to wash it all down
for that amount, but that was then and this is now.

The waitress was jolly and cutish in a townie way, attentive
enough but sensible enough to stay out of my way when I was
eating.

The pizza (apizza, tomato pie) took about 15 to show up -
everything's made to order, and I nursed my beer abstemiously.
At length it came, the small being eight decent-size slices,
quite thin, with a fair amount of standard sauce and a small
amount of standard mozzarella, cooked almost to the point of
burning, a healthy serving of irregularly-cut salty thickish
pepperoni, some smelly Romano, thankfully only a tiny amount,
though, and gobs of oil. The crust, well, the texture is
indefinable, and it's almost crisp and almost chewy, and I
can see how a journalist can call it crisp and chewy, even
though it's not quite either. It has a progressive crunch
as of the breaking of little bubbles, followed by a toughness
that might be called chewy when the sauce soaks into it (and
before the sauce makes it soggy). Hard to describe, and I
shouldn't perhaps have come down on the Times person for
describing it this way, because I can't do better. It's almost
as peculiar as the fluffy (?!) smoked scallops I described on
the echo a decade or more ago. The pie, cooked as it is in
a really hot oven, is thin, as the yeasts are killed off very
quickly, and there are burned bits all around and on the
bottom. On the whole, I found it almost indistinguishable from
New York pizza and quite similar to Boston North End pizza.
I found it in no way superior (though not inferior) to either,
and the fierce rivalries have as much substance and sense
attached to them as those of devotees of Harvard, Yale, and
Columbia or the Yankees, the Red Sox, and the White Sox. The
experience was also compatible with my memories. The Long
Trail Ale, $2.50 for a 10-oz draft, was a pleasant surprise.

Eight slices of pizza is a lot, and I used a huge number of
pills on this meal.

A somewhat slower, more laborious 15-minute walk back to the
train station.
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