Modern Apizza

Going to New Haven last Friday meant the chance to eat apizza. "Apizza" is local Italian American dialect for Neapolitan style pizza. Pepe's on Wooster Street (established in 1925) is the original and, in my opinion, the best, but I wasn't sure if it was open for lunch, so I suggested Modern on State Street, a place I've been meaning to go to for years. It's just hard to be in New Haven and not go to Pepe's.

New Haven apizza is baked in coal-fired ovens at 700+ degrees till the crust is slightly charred. It's topped with tomato sauce and maybe a little parmesan. NO Mozzarella! unless you order it that way. That's the original Pepe's tomato pie, anyway. Rival Sally's (est. 1938), also on Wooster Street, and Modern (est. 1934) a couple of miles away are similar.

We arrived before noon and got a booth with no trouble. I've never had that experience at either Sally's or Pepe's. An hour wait on the sidewalk is almost inevitable and deters no one, even in the worst weather.

Modern's menu featured, in addition to apizza, salads and calzones and grinders and even a few dinners. Pepe's has nothing but pizza. (It doesn't even have menus. Just a board on the wall.)

We got a pie with peppers on it. It was chewy and pretty good, but not as burned as I like it. Better than what you get here in town, but my loyalty to Pepe's remains unshaken.

I've eaten pizza in Boston, New York, Rome, even in Tehran (where it routinely comes with coins of bubble-gum-pink hot dogs). No less a food critic than Frank Stern has come to the same conclusion as I and about a million other people. Pepe's on Wooster Street in New Haven (where FS would choose to have his last meal, if it came to that) makes the best pizza in the entire world.

But if you're in New Haven and Pepe's is closed, Modern will do nicely.

Blogging on Bugling

This morning, friend Maggie and I took a ride to New Haven to visit the Foundry Music Company. Maggie's a musician who can drop hundreds of dollars in a place like that and call it business expenses. I'm just a person who can be talked into going on a random ride on a beautiful day. Especially if the destination lands us within a few blocks of the world's best pizza.

We had an hour on the meter, and Maggie had no trouble using it up at Foundry Music. I'm not very musical, but I had no trouble amusing myself. I found an interesting book, "Bugle Signals, Calls & Marches for Army, Navy, Marine Corps Revenue Cutter Service & National Guard," by Captain Daniel J. Canty, U.S. Army, Retired. From this little book, the size of a postcard and 34 leaves thick, I learned more in twenty minutes than I've accumulated in the last six decades about bugling.

I learned that to be a bugler, it is not necessary to read music (although of course it's very helpful). It's possible to learn "by air." The real requisites for a good bugler are 1) an ear for music 2) knowledge of proper breathing 3) medium sized lips and 4) good front teeth.

This little book contains many familiar and not-so-familiar marches: "You're in the Army Now," "Marching Through Georgia," "The Blue and the Gray," "The Drunken Soldier," "Chicken on the Fence." Also sound-offs: parade calls originally supposed to heighten the troops' spirits before marching off to battle.

Most interesting to me, however, were the signals and calls. Although bugle calls are mostly ceremonial in nature now, historically they were a method of issuing commands over distances greater than that over which a human voice could be heard. That is to say, they are a musical language.

Drill signals tell the military unit how to move: to the right, to the rear, trot double time, double section left oblique. Reveille tells the unit to get up; mess call, to eat; tattoo, to stop drinking and get ready for bed. The navy has the most interesting calls: clean bright-work, knock off bright-work, point guns abeam, man overboard.

Man overboard?? I wonder about that one. When a man falls off the boat, first somebody has to go round up the bugler, and then the bugler has to signal everyone, and then people rush over and help? If you fall off a navy ship while the bugler's in bed, pray there are no sharks.