shewhomust | Entries tagged with pizza

I did not recognise the name Alison Prince, but the Guardian's obituary suggests I should. She wrote, among other things, the scripts for Trumpton, and I enjoyed the description of how that came about. This turned out to be drawing heavily on an earlier 'making of' article (and all you need to know about Trumpton - indeed, all I know about Trumpton - is that it's about life in a small town from the point of view of its Fire Brigade):
...So I was dispatched to a bitterly cold converted church in the East End of London, where Trumpton's creator Gordon Murray was filming a test sequence using stop-motion animation. It dawned on me how quaint the remit was. You can't depict flames using stop-motion, nor can you do smoke and water. So I realised I would have to write 13 stories about a fire brigade that never went anywhere near a fire.

I love stories about how a piece of art is shaped by the constraints of its material - but what made Gordon Murray, working in stop motion animation, choose this particular subject?

Myfanwy Tristram spent a half term holiday in Barcelona, and then she published her sketch diary online. Warning: her website is very ad-heavy; also (though this may just relect the sizr of my screen / state of my eyesight) I did quite a lot of clicking through to larger image / struggling to find my place on the large image. I was really glad that I had read the taster of this and other travel diaries in Two Birds, her collaboration with Zara Slattery. But it was worth persevering to read the full diary, and it made Barcelona look like a great place to visit.

radiantfracture asked about newsletters. One that I not only subscribe to, but actually (mostly) read is Warren Ellis's Orbital Operations. In the latest, he is dipping a toe into poetry, specifically Alice Oswald's Nobody. I was very taken with one three-line fragment that he quotes - the rest of it, not so much, but this, yes:
There is a harbour where an old sea-god sometimes surfaces
two cliffs keep out the wind you need no anchor
the water in fascinated horror holds your boat

Why yes, thar's 'Nobody' as in Odysseus, that talkative, bald-headed seaman: the book is a collaboration with painter William Tillyer (there's just a glimpse of the paintings on his website.).

There was a takeaway pizza menu on the doormat, in among the election literature (only the LibDems so far, which I find odd). Previously unsuspected pizza options are the Northern Delight (cheese, tomato, layers of kebab, onions and jalapenos) and the London pizza (cheese, tomato, chips). Or perhaps it's just a spoof? Can they really be selling a Seefood Delight ((cheese, tomato, garlic, prawns, muscles & tuna)?

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/700944.html

Our friendly neighbourhood Italophile showed me the book she was reading, Matthew Fort's Eating up Italy: Voyages on a Vespa ('Eating up', because he travels up from the south to the north: cute, eh?). I asked to borrow it because I have good recollections of Matthew Fort's writings for the Guardian. I also have slightly less good ones: I thought it was a pity they had moved him from restaurant reviews, at which he was excellent, to writing about cooking, which he did less well. Unless it was the other way about...

The book contains some of each, plus a certain amount of travel writing and some portraits of artisan food procucers, and having read it all, I still don't know which mode I preferred. As a book, it reads like a series of - well, not exactly newspaper articles, but magazine features. Published in 2004, it doesn't quite feel like a blog, and the monochrome photographs give it a retro feel (they are sometimes striking and atmospheric, sometimes too small for me to make out in less than optimum light (your eyesight may vary).

I didn't feel any desire to try any of the recipes, which are heavy on the 'this is how you use this local product' (and occasionally 'this is how you make this local product', particularly sausages). Occasionally the landscape descriptions made me want to see more of Italy. But the one passage I wanted to hang on to is purely factual:

The most basic pizza of all is pizza bianca, which may be lubricated with olive oil and flavoured with garlic. Slightly more sophisticated and no less ancient, is pizza marinara, so called because sailors - marinai - could take the ingredients with them to sea. The ingredients for the topping were just tomato puree, garlic, olive oil and oregano. Had pizzaioli stuck to such inspired simplicity, all might have been fine, but they didn't. In 1889 Queen Margherita of Savoy paid a visit to the city, and the pizza Margherita, which combines tomato, mozzarella and basil leaves in imitation of the colours of the Italian flag, was invented in her honour and that has become the archetypal pizza, and the standard by which pizzas may be judged - and that is the problem.

I had assumed that pizza marinara would involve fish, and I had not known the origin of the pizza Margherita. Margherita was queen of Italy by marriage to Umberto I, apparently...

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/663798.html

Last night was bitterly cold (it was -3°C, which is nothing by the standards of places with serious winters, but quite cold enough for me); today is milder, there's a constant sound of dripping and the occasional rush as snow falls off a roof. It may not be the start of a real thaw, and even if it is, it could take a long time. But I've finished sorting another batch of photographs from our summer holiday, which is an excuse to think about summer sun, and the day we spent in Vicenza.

Vicenza was the home (though not the birthplace) of Andrea Palladio; it is rich in Palladian architecture and the nearest city to the Villa Saraceno. If we were going to do any city sightseeing at all, Vicenza was the place to do it, in one day of intensive city-exploring, architecture-admiring, sun-defying tourism. It may have been a tactical error to begin with the best thing:

The Teatro Olimpico was designed by Palladio but not completed until after his death. The trompe l'oeuil scenery was constructed for the first performance in 1585:

durham_rambler and I kept repeating to each other "1585!" Before the Globe Theatre was built, with all its strange archaic features, Vicenza had this modern- (well, maybe Victorian-) looking theatre. Of course, they used it to stage classical drama, while the Globe was performing completely new plays which would change the theatre forever, but even so...

Our ticket for the Theatre included entry to the art gallery, but this was much less impressive. The picture of which they seemed proudest in the first gallery as you came in: you looked up and there on the ceiling above your head was a very revealing view of Phaeton losing control of his father's chariot, surrounded by the signs of the zodiac. We should have opted out there and then, but we persevered through the saints and the still lifes, and emerged ready for lunch, and a sit down somewhere shady while we ate it. It was pleasant simply to wander the streets, to admire the Palladian architecture and the medieval survivals, the shuttered windows and the brightly painted walls, to consider whether we wanted to eat at this wine bar or that pizzeria (pizza alla Vicentina, apparently, is topped with cod) but eventually we stumbled, almost at random, into a little café:

where we lunched in the back room behind the counter: I had vitello tonnato, which I had previously read about in the writing of Elizabeth David but never eaten.

This refreshed us enough to explore some more sunstruck squares and shady arcades, and we found the Tourist Office where I bought a book about wine tourism in the region which would have been very useful earlier in the week. We retrieved the car, planning to visit the Villa Rotunda (another Palladian villa), but by the time we had found our way out of the city (twice round a one way system, and then the long way round a circuit of the city walls - hey, it's a walled city and we never noticed!) and done some very awkward manoeuvres in a narrow lane, trying to park, we lost our tempers. When we did eventually find a parking place, we walked straight past the entrance to the Villa and up the hill, past the Villa Valmarana (known as 'ai Nani', the dwarfs, because of the figures which top its walls and up to the basilica at the top of the hill, where there is a spectacular view over Vicenza and to the mountains beyond, and a café which serves cold beer in tall glasses, which restored our tempers admirably, and left us feeling that we'd made the right decision.

All the pictures of Vicenza

I know there is a recurring theme in my holiday posts of the pizzas we have eaten in incongruous places (ie not Italy nor England*), but I don't seem to have tagged the relevant posts. Anyway, we didn't eat any pizza in Brittany this autumn; perhaps because in Brittany when you fancy a light meal consisting of dough with a tasty topping, you can eat crêpes, and that's what we did.

There was a pizzeria in Josselin, where we spent our first night. It was called - presumably in an appeal to Breton patriotism - 'Breizh Pizzas', and it was closed. We would still have gone to the crêperie next door, even if it had been open, and we enjoyed our meal there, though I admit I don't remember much about the crêpes. What I do remember is the floor show, which was provided by the young woman whose job it was to write the menu of the day on a blackboard. She was taking great care over it, with plenty of flourishes and curly capital letters: velouté de potiron aux châtaignes, échine de porc aux deux purées (poireaux, carottes) - when an elderly gentleman dining alone began to heckle her: No, that's wrong, it should be 'au' not 'aux'... There was a reason, which I don't now remember - possibly it was that the word following didn't begin with a vowel? - but she found it convincing, and began rubbing out the 'x's**. At which point the debate became more general.

We didn't eat pizza in Roscoff, either, despite the appeal of the Pizzeria Marie Stuart - why would you call a pizzeria after Mary Queen of Scots?

durham_rambler suggested it was the Rizzio connection.

A year earlier, we had failed to eat pizza in Bogny, on the Meuse. We found ourselves in a small town which was closed on Sunday evening, and our hosts at the B & B recommended an Italian restaurant in the next village. It was an odd-looking place (some sort of post-industrial, or post agro-industrial, conversion?) - we had a fine view of it on our walk the following day:

but inside it was a classic Italian restaurant of a certain era. One wall was decorated with a mural of an Italian scene, with the inevitable fucking gondolas, and the wall facing it with a mural showing the Ardennes: the forest, the boar, the river...

Instead of pizza I ate escalope milanese as they used to serve it at the self-service restaurant at the Porte Saint Denis in Paris forty years ago: well, I could have had pasta as an accompaniment, but I admit I chose chips instead (the chips were excellent). There were rum babas for desert, the kind shaped like an outsized cork which you buy in a jar of syrup; they were served with ice cream and spray-on whipped cream and that red sauce the local kids call "monkey blood". The wine was Sicilian, and very good.

*I accept that it wouldn't be particularly incongruous to eat pizza in the US, but I'm sure I haven't posted on the subject.

**He was wrong, of course. She had been right in the first place.

After two days in Iceland, I'm close to information overload: we have seen so many wonderful things that I need some time to process and sort before I begin to write about them. The short version is that we spent yesterday exploring the Reykjanes peninsula, pulling off the road to explore minor tourist attractions: black cliffs dotted with birds, a bridge spanning a sandy gully which happens to be the fault line between the Eurasian and American tectonic plates, the boiling mud of Seltún - stuff like that. Today we toured the Golden Circle route - the major tourist sites: the original Geysir and his livelier little brother Strokkur, Gullfoss waterfall, Þingvellir. I'm overwhelmed, and a little exhausted, too.

After all that, we went out for a pizza, so instead of any weightier cultural analysis, here are two of the pizzas available:

The Viking: Cheese, sauce, tabasco sauce, mushroom, pepperoni, fresh chili, pineapple, black pepper, cayenne pepper, fresh jalapeno.
Janis Joplin: Cheese, sauce, ham, banana, pineapple.

I have held forth elsewhere about the wrongness of ham and pineapple pizza; it never occurred to me to add that that goes double for bananas, Of course, we are in Hveragerði, where most of Iceland's banana crop is grown...

Even so, we had the 'Salmon Harbor' (prawns, mussels, smoked salmon).