Choey wrote: Time to feed my inner Logical Positivist.
JimInLoganSquare wrote: With that, Gary, I think I am not alone in anxiously imploring you to publish your findings and opinions on the matter.
G Wiv wrote:JimInLoganSquare wrote: With that, Gary, I think I am not alone in anxiously imploring you to publish your findings and opinions on the matter.
Jim,
Soon, soon, but, in the meantime, to further complicate matters, as if they were not confusing enough, here is a picture of Gene and Georgetti's very good Chicken V.
Enjoy,
Gary
Antonius wrote:Some notes in response to specific posts in the thread [written a couple of days ago, before a link to ReneG’s CH post was provided]:MikeG wrote:The interesting deduction I make from Antonius' claims is, if it was so well known in Jersey as well as in the Italian Navy, how did such a dish come to be uncommon enough in Chicago that someone could get away with naming it themselves and passing it off as a new dish?
Mike, you make an eminently reasonable point but I think a reasonable (if not detailed and specific) answer can be proffered in response to the question raised.
I wish I could find ReneG’s post on the name of the dish but I believe he had evidence that tied the name to a restaurant in the Loop and, not surprisingly, a Neapolitan run restaurant, if I remember well. In any event, it seems hardly difficult to imagine that a restaurateur might have given this dish a nice, poetic sort of a name for his menu and that the name stuck. Especially if the restaurant were in an area where lots of non-Italians would come across it (such as the Loop), the name could quite naturally have become productive and taken up by competitors of the original restaurant, as well as finding its way into the vocabulary of the original restaurant’s patrons and ultimately those of the restaurants who borrowed the name. Let’s face it, it’s a great name. And I don’t think the naming was a conscious attempt to pass off the dish as an new invention; it was probably just the owner or cook having a little poetic fun, though one must wonder if the heat element of red pepper in the original was not the impetus to give it a special name, as suggested by jbw above.
Antonius wrote:Leah:
This sort of comment that addresses an ethnic group as a whole but contains no content about food is a little troubling. Perhaps you should say explicitly what you mean to add to the discussion with this seemingly condescending remark, lest we misunderstand your intention – as it is, the only reasonable way to interpret it is that you think that with regard to inventiveness, Italians have nought to be proud of but something for which an Italian wrongly received credit. Or was the writing just sloppy?
On second thought though, perhaps you should save any further comment and simply refrain from such ethnically oriented remarks altogether. Surely, you have enough to say just sticking to the food-related issues.
By the way, yesterday was Leonardo Da Vinci’s birthday.
Antonius wrote:What is called “chicken Vesuvio” is a family of recipes for roasted chicken pieces with potatoes, often with peas as well, cooked with olive oil, garlic, wine and/or lemon juice and herbs. And who with any direct or deep knowledge of Italian cuisine would possibly want to claim that that is a distinctively Chicago invention?
sundevilpeg wrote:Here is an interesting take on Chicken Vesuvio, from Giada di Laurentiis,
<snip>
Chicken Vesuvio, Courtesy of Little Big Head and Food TV
Vital Information wrote:Antonius, I have respect both for your scholarship and for your passion, but as this debate brews, I find myself less swayed by your position.
I have next to me on my desk, a circa 1993 menu from Spring Deer, a quite famous Beijing style restaurant in Hong Kong. Number 83 on this menu is...chop suey in casserole. Conclusive proof, no, that chop suey is not an American dish. Really?
No. I think we have two things going on here. First, yes, Chicago chicken vesuvio is based on numerous dishes of its ilk from Southern Italy. As you demonstrated, the antecendants are clear... Chicken Vesuvio is an original dish, the proportions of things and the timing of things make it taste different. Different than plain ol' roast chicken and different from related dishes like chicken scarpiello.
Second, it has become nomenclature. Just as a Chinese restaurnt in China would use the words chop suey to now describe something, restaurants now use vesuivio to describe something. Something winey, oily, garlicy and served with potatoes. The problem (I think) is that a lot of (more?) places have glommed on to the vesuvio name than the "actual" recipe. But on the other hand, I doubt very much that much of the chop suey these days tastes like the original either.
Antonius wrote:Now, let me also state clearly what I am not claiming:
1) I am not claiming that “chicken Vesuvio” is not an established part of the culinary repertoire and cultural identity of Chicago.
2) I am not claiming the dish is bad.
3) I am not claiming Chicagoans are bad-cooks, dishonest people, or people incapable of developing new and tasty dishes (well, there are of course exceptions).
4) I am not claiming that it is not the case that there is a tendency for dishes bearing this name to conform to an increasingly fixed recipe and this likely especially in restaurant kitchens. In this manner the Vesuvio preparations are perhaps on the way to being established as a dish more or less distinct from its Southern Italian forebears (especially given the development of ‘Vesuvio’ style which no longer necessarily involves chicken – see below). But this secondary development in no way alters the indisputable fact that the dish is in all ways a direct outgrowth and in essence a continuation of the Southern Italian tradition of roasting chicken pieces.
Antonius wrote:It has been claimed that the various preparations served in Chicagoland which are known as “chicken Vesuvio” constitute a unique dish that was “invented” in Chicago and further that this manner of preparing chicken is not known in Italy. The short passage from Mr. Vettel’s review of the Grotto cited by Cathy2 expresses this view very succinctly: “People who dismiss chicken Vesuvio for its lack of Italian pedigree (the dish was invented in Chicago) forget how good it tastes when you do it right” [emphasis added].
ReneG wrote:When you order Chicken Vesuvio in Chicago you have a reasonable expectation of receiving pan roasted chicken, cut into serving pieces, prepared with lots of olive oil, plenty of garlic, usually white wine, and always roasted potatoes but never any other vegetable except the optional peas (I think this is a later addition).
Mike G wrote:Another thing about taking it that far back is that we do reach such an early point in the history of ethnic dining in America that something as simple as a stock Italian style of preparing chicken could seem like a genuine innovation or at least novelty. I think that is, at bottom, the explanation for the fact that Rene G, Vital Info etc. say, quite rightly, that Chicago has long had a firm sense of having invented something, while Antonius says, equally convincingly, that there was nothing to invent (and once "invented," it hardly stayed fixed).
Vital Information wrote:The failure to pinpoint the first vesuvio does not mean there was not a first vesuvio.
MikeG wrote:Roast chicken with a little garlic and oregano, and maybe some red wine vinegar or lemon, may seem as obvious as toast with jam, but in the context of WASP dining pre-WWII, it was as exotic and strongly-flavored as Thai food. Indeed, not merely exotic but decadent; I once ran across a quote from the Jacob Riis era of immigration that cited, as proof of the essential inferiority, indeed criminality, of the Italian immigrant the fact that he often clung to his own cuisine even once in America and finally able to abandon spaghetti and veal scallopini for scrapple and Yankee pot roast. (And now we've all sunk to that level!)
VI wrote:Which means, what ever Grandma A was making, it was NOT chicken vesuvio, no matter how much it was LIKE chicken vesuvio.
VI wrote:The failure to pinpoint the first vesuvio does not mean there was not a first vesuvio.
JohnnyP wrote:I orderd the roasted chicken with potatoes. I wanted something simple, uncomplicated... but hearty and satisfying at the same time. I ordered perfectly. The dish reminded me of roasted lamb w/ potatoes (spiced lightly with rosemary) from your basic trattoria in Rome.
JohnnyP wrote:Following is a quote from San Francisco's Italian Cultural Institute Website:
"PAZZIA - Massimo Ballerini and Marco Sassone were both born in Florence. Massimo’s family owns and runs the restaurant I Ghibellini, considered one of the finest restaurants in Florence specializing in Tuscan cuisine. Pazzia specializes in homemade breads, pizza, pasta, and deserts prepared daily."
Mike G wrote:Roast chicken with a little garlic and oregano, and maybe some red wine vinegar or lemon, may seem as obvious as toast with jam, but in the context of WASP dining pre-WWII, it was as exotic and strongly-flavored as Thai food. Indeed, not merely exotic but decadent; I once ran across a quote from the Jacob Riis era of immigration that cited, as proof of the essential inferiority, indeed criminality, of the Italian immigrant the fact that he often clung to his own cuisine even once in America and finally able to abandon spaghetti and veal scallopini for scrapple and Yankee pot roast. (And now we've all sunk to that level!)
Antonius wrote:I believe I remember you had an especially impressive recipe for the dish and I think your presence for a CVathon would be a considerable boon for the expedition as a whole.
Antonius wrote:It has been claimed that the various preparations served in Chicagoland which are known as “chicken Vesuvio” constitute a unique dish that was “invented” in Chicago and further that this manner of preparing chicken is not known in Italy. The short passage from Mr. Vettel’s review of the Grotto cited by Cathy2 expresses this view very succinctly: “People who dismiss chicken Vesuvio for its lack of Italian pedigree (the dish was invented in Chicago) forget how good it tastes when you do it right” [emphasis added].
Antonius wrote:A [...] relevant analogy seems to me to be an actual Chicago innovation, namely the Chicago stuffed pizza, which is obviously a crossing of the holiday pizze with a short dough and savoury filling of Southern Italy with the flat-bread pizza alla Napoletana. In effect, the Chicago stuffed pie uses the sort of stuff that is more appropriate (from the traditional Southern Italian standpoint) to putting on a flat pizza and putting it inside the package (pastry-like dough) in place of the more traditional sorts of fillings (there is some overlap here but the point should be clear).
Now, a stuffed pizza in Chicago is something for which different restaurants surely have somewhat differing recipes, but that which marks the thing as an innovation here in Chicago is shared by all, namely, dough-type, form of pie and basic ingredients for filling. There is no such distinctive feature of “Chicken Vesuvio” to which one can point. The potatoes are not unique, nor the flavouring with herbs and wine or lemon, nor the cooking method (stove top to oven or just oven). The innovation that sets Chicken Vesuvio apart historically from “roasted chicken with potatoes” is the name, tout court.
Antonius wrote:Finally, some people may well not care at all about historical issues such as the one at hand and that’s fine. But some people do and I think it an absolutely legitimate topic for discussion on the Non-Food Chat board. Indeed, I find it a more worthwhile endeavour than debating the undebatable, that is, matters that are purely questions of taste. Antonius
Mike G wrote:Except we've seen versions without chicken or potatoes, and you say the wine is often skimpier than it used to be, and I'm sure there's some place catering to the old folks that omits the garlic.
And so we come to the ultimate definition of Chicken Vesuvio: a dish consisting of chicken (optional), wine (optional), garlic (optional), and potatoes (optional), to which many substitutions are often made. Invented in Chicago.
Mike G wrote:And so we come to the ultimate definition of Chicken Vesuvio: a dish consisting of chicken (optional), wine (optional), garlic (optional), and potatoes (optional), to which many substitutions are often made. Invented in Chicago.
Vital Information wrote:But I think it is a grave error to equate what chicken vesuvio has become, to what chicken vesuvio was. Or put another way, what a dish tastes like today has no bearing on what the original dish was. Or put it another way, the seeming confusion of what the dish means today, does not mean that there has always been confusion over what the dish was.
It is only over time that the dish and name have morped, adapted to changing tastes and styles.