lysana, posts by tag: new england - LiveJournal

This article discusses the varieties of pizza available in the United States. As a scion of Massachusetts, the usual pizza discussions tend to leave me out. I had a hard time grasping what was so different about MA pizza compared to NY style when I moved out here that I almost had myself convinced that's what I used to eat. Then this discussion came to view. You want to talk pizza? This is what I absolutely, 100% *cannot* find in the SF Bay Area, and is dubbed New England Greek style:

# Thin crust with a firm, but not crackerlike, bottom, which is often oily enough to saturate the pizza box
# Tomato sauce heavily spiced with oregano
# Thin layer of cheese, sometimes a blend of mozz and cheddar
# Cooked long enough for the cheese to become molten, slippery, and sometimes separate, coating the entire top of the pie with orange oil

And sure enough, one of the best pizza places I knew of growing up was run by a Greek man. The fact he had a thing for hiring teenaged girls who tended to quit on him after two or three months was something nobody could do a thing about unless one of them filed charges for what he'd try to do in the freezer area, but that's what you call "local color" 25 years after the fact (no, I never worked there).

Of course, I'm now such a Californian that one of my favorite pizzas is a variant on Hawaiian style that also comes with mandarin oranges. But the oily crust and top are such a part of my pizza mentality that to this day, part of me wonders why the bottom of the pizza box doesn't have a dark spot the size of the pie.

I know a lot of my local friends will not easily believe this, but this is the honest truth, so help me.

I am not that fast a talker compared to what I was like when I moved out to CA from Massachusetts. I have mental governors on more often than not. Ask blackfyr. He has heard me when I've been surrounded by my own kind. Machine gun is about right. And the passionate nature of some of the discussions is just part of the process. It doesn't always mean I'm actually annoyed; I just care enough to show that I do. We resolve or agree to disagree, I get past the adrenalin, and all is good if both sides demonstrate it's good.

Maybe it'd be more obvious if I'd maintained the habit I used to have of talking with my hands. You have to remember I grew up as a child of French-Canadian stock with an Irish grandmother who was really more Quebecois herself, just to make things interesting. I was far from the only hand-talker in class, too, and oh, yeah, the in-class discussions could get a bit fierce if the teachers weren't tough on us about it. And it was Massachusetts, home of John "Obnoxious and Disliked" Adams. I suspect one of the only problems with his depiction in the movie version of 1776 is he speaks at about the same speed as Benjamin Franklin.

My heart is in San Francisco. My speech patterns are a hybrid.