Credit
Gentl and Hyers for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Rebecca Bartoshesky.
Some winter nights when my heart is tight, I take the F train from work to stand on the sidewalk in front of the plate-glass window at Lucali, the famed, candlelit pizzeria on Henry Street in Brooklyn, and watch Mark Iacono make pizza. His movements are slow, deliberative. They resemble a jungle cat, grooming. The dough moves back and forth in his hands, slowly growing in circumference. Iacono barely looks at it. He looks at the people in the dining room, though his gaze is middle-distance unfocused. His pizza-making is a meditation. Pizza-making should be a meditation. I go home and make pizza.
On other suffering evenings, I walk down the echoing corridors and ramps of Grand Central Terminal and make my way to a stool in the Oyster Bar for a pan roast. I like the cherrystone version better than the oyster one and, especially, the rich interplay of the clam juice and the cream, the way it soaks into the toast points floating in the center of the bowl. I do not make pan roasts at home. Pan roasts should be made only in the steam kettles of the Grand Central Oyster Bar. But I do make clam chowder, and I float toast points on top of it, and that is what John Cheever called a triumph over chaos, every time.
Lately I’ve been doing both, at once: clam-chowder pizza, a balm against the pain of the world. It was probably Frank Pepe who invented the clam pizza, in New Haven, scattering freshly shucked littlenecks onto a round of dough, then pecorino cheese, garlic, oregano, black pepper and a torrent of olive oil. That was in the 1940s, according to his family, which still operates Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana on Wooster Street there.
Clam pizza moved south in the decades that followed, to New York City. Lombardi’s put one on the menu. Franny’s made one, makes it still. Otto. Motorino. Moto. Most recently, Pasquale Jones. Some are built on the Frank Pepe model. Franny’s omits cheese altogether. Moto adds potatoes. Motorino’s is dressed with fior di latte mozzarella in addition to the clams.
They are all the best pizza. Clams are on them. Quibble all you like, but a clam pizza is the very best pizza in the world. My recipe honors no one particular preparation of the pie. It honors all of them, and the teachings of Iacono and the Oyster Bar as well. It uses as sauce the building blocks of a classic clam chowder — alliums slowly fried with bacon, then infused with clam juice and wine, reduced to a glaze and thickened with cream — and tops it with chopped clams, lemon zest and a spray of hot pepper flakes.
I spread these elixirs across homemade pizza dough, a recipe I learned from another pizza guru, Anthony Falco, until recently the pizza czar at Roberta’s in Bushwick. But you could use them on store-bought dough and still have a good pizza. Or on slices of sourdough bread, or an old running shoe. Just work slowly as you make it, being present in the moment of creation. Cooking is a practice, a kind of devotion, a form of mindfulness. Practice.
Recipe: Clam-Chowder Pizza
