<br><br> <div><span class="gmail_quote">On 9/10/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">joanna</b> <<a href="mailto:123hop@comcast.net">123hop@comcast.net</a>> wrote:</span> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">The first time I went to Italy, in the mid seventies, there was nothing<br>there that looked like or tasted like American pizza. That's why I said <br>that what an American thinks of as traditional pizza is not at all<br>traditional, but still delicious.<br><br>No big deal.<br><br>Joanna</blockquote> <div> </div> <div>Starting in the 1920s my family owned restaurants in New York (on Houston street where NYU built those awful apartment buildings) then later in Schenctady, Saratoga and Florida.  My great-grandmother's family hailed from a small town near Naples, Italy.  What they made in the old country was something that was akin to American Pizza but was closer to what we would today call Foccacia.  Occaisionally my one of my great grandmothers (I knew three of them) would make there version of pizza for me.  They called it pizza only because the name they would have called in Italy would have been lost to us children.  The variation of pizza that they made was like foccacia except it was very thin like what we call "Neapolitan" pizza today. When the dough was finished baking my great-grandmother would take it out of the oven and put it in a big - really huge - cast-iron skillet with olive oil and sautee it for about five minutes.  Then she would dress the top side of the "pizza" with what ever was handy -- this was not always tomato sauce and cheese but rather what ever meat, sauce, vegetables, left over in the ice box.  The she would stick the cast -iron skillet back in the oven to heat up the "fixings."  This was my great-"Mamoos" version of "pizza," circa 1964 made from memories of her grandmother's version of pizza in small town Italy, circa 1894.   They didn't call it "pizza" in her small town but does that matter? </div> <div> </div> <div>Jerry Monaco</div><br> </div>