Pizza Perfume?

I Love the Smell of Pizza in the Morning – And Now I Can Have It


One of the best things about going to get bacon at Allan Benton's place in Madisonville, Tennessee is that after spending five minutes inside Benton's Smoky Mountain Country Hams, everything I'm wearing smells like hickory-smoked bacon. The scent follows me into my car and, with a few pounds of porky ambrosia sitting in a paper bag in the back seat, I can enjoy the heady aroma for hours and hours. The wonderful scent permeates the fabric of the car seats and I can still detect it the next day. I've always wished I could have the same experience with pizza, and now, thanks to modern chemistry, I can. The folks at Demeter Fragrance Library have come up with pizza perfume.

The company's website (http://www.demeterfragrance.com/773364/products/Pizza.html) describes the new creation, which they admit is a “departure” even for them, as “tomato sauce, creamy mozzarella, a touch of oregano – perfectly balanced for the adventurous.” You can buy it in various sizes of spray bottles. It also comes in a body lotion, a shower gel, a massage and body oil, and as a roll on perfume. I'll take one of each, please.

The jury's still out on whether or not this is a product that mankind really needs. Some testers call it “intoxicating” and some describe it as “off-putting.” Others say it smells exactly like the inside of a pizza box and that it makes you constantly think about pizza – not that I need any help in that department. The only time I'm not thinking about pizza is when I'm thinking about bacon.

As of this writing, the new fragrance is only available through Demeter's website and it's reasonably priced, with a half-ounce mini splash going for just $6 and a one-ounce spray selling for $10. If you really like it, you can buy four ounces for $39.50. But rumor has it that the product will soon be stocked at a Walgreens near you so you can have instant gratification without all that shipping and handling.

Demeter also features the scents of dandelions, grass, lilacs, clean skin, wet garden, and dirt, among many others. Oddly enough, one of the scents missing from their menu is bacon. Guess I'll have to rely on Benton's for that one. Hmmmm......I wonder if Allan could put it in a bottle.

Which Qualifies as “Crap,” Butter or Margarine?

I'm writing from a slightly pissed off perspective, so proceed with caution. I'm still shaking with anger over something that happened during the holidays. I was visiting out of town and, as is often the case, I was asked to cook. Specifically, to cook breakfast. Now, when it comes to breakfast, the Italian side of my heritage is completely subjugated by other aspects of my ancestry. No prima colazione of coffee and pastry for me. Breakfast is some combination of bacon, sausage, eggs, potatoes, pancakes, biscuits, and toast. Bring on the syrup, the jam, jelly, or preserves, and most of all, bring on the butter. Paula Deen ain't got a thing on me when it comes to butter at breakfast.

So that's why when one of the people I was serving made his way to the refrigerator and pulled out a tub of margarine, I was confused. “There's butter on the table,” I said. To which he replied, “Oh, I don't eat that butter crap.” 

I was rocked to the core of my Dairyland upbringing. Never in more than a half-century of life have I ever heard the words “butter” and “crap” used in relation to one another. Creamy, delicious, wholesome, all-natural butter has been a staple of mankind's diet since humans and cows first developed a relationship in neolithic times. And it remained a staple until some 19^th century French chemist developed oleomargarine as a cheap substitute to feed Napoleon III's army. The fact that Napoleon III was overthrown and sent into exile not long after should tell you something.

Right from the start, margarine faced a steep uphill climb on the acceptance front. It didn't look natural, it didn't feel natural, it didn't smell natural, and it certainly didn't taste natural. And, as you can imagine, dairy farmers were none too fond of it. I won't go into all the details of the legal battles between butter and margarine that took place over the next few decades. The subject would take pages to cover. But three things occurred mid-century that would enable margarine to gain prominence over butter. The first was WWII, the second was the post-war industrialization of our food supply, and the third was a fallacious war on fat.

In 1942, the US government implemented its wartime Food Rationing Program. In March 1943 the Office of Price Administration added butter, fats, and oils to the list of foods to be rationed. These were part of “Red Stamp” rationing that also included meats and most cheeses. People got sixty-four red stamps each month and when their stamps were used up, that was it until the next month's issue. Butter was a hefty sixteen stamps per pound. “Oleo” – as most people called it – was substantially less, resulting in an enormous boost for margarine on the home front. Oddly enough, many Americans were so unfamiliar with the product that they thought it was something Uncle Sam invented to help the war effort. Rationing of lard, shortening, and oils was phased out in early 1944, but butter and margarine remained rationed until late 1945. 

After the war, the industrialization of the country's food supply, which had been slowly building momentum in the preceding decades, took off like one of the rockets down at Cape Canaveral. And lucky ol' margarine was riding right there on the nose cone of that rocket. Buoyed by brisk wartime sales, margarine manufacturers organized and found some money and muscle. The 1950s saw dozens of federal and state laws restricting and regulating the manufacture and sale of margarine fall by the wayside, until only Wisconsin stood guard at the gate – at least until 1967. Once margarine manufacturers got their collective foot in the door, they milked their advantage (sorry) for all it was worth and by 1957 margarine was outselling butter for the first time. People's palates had been sufficiently dumbed down during the war and now folks didn't have to smuggle margarine like old-timey bootleggers anymore or add their own packets of yellow coloring to the milky white gunk. Besides, it was cheap! At an average of 19 cents per pound it was much cheaper than the 65 cents per pound price tag butter carried in the mid '50s. And you know how Americans like to save money – even if it kills them.

Which leads to margarine's last step up the slippery ladder of success. As “Space Age” science came roaring to the forefront of the American consciousness, the previously unheralded study of food science took on new importance. Suddenly our culture stopped eating food and started eating “nutrients.” In his book “In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto,” author Michael Pollan dubs this phenomenon “nutritionism.” No longer did we look at a pork chop as a pork chop. Under the aegis of nutritionism, a pork chop became a conglomeration of protein, fats (saturated, polyunsaturated, and monounsaturated), carbohydrates, dietary fiber, cholesterol, sodium, potassium, and a handful of vitamins and minerals. And it was as a result of nutritionism that margarine took the high ground in the war against butter.

Practitioners of nutritionism had launched an all out war on fat and cholesterol. Butter, a byproduct of animal fat, was just loaded with unhealthy saturated fat and cholesterol. Leading scientific studies of the time said that one tablespoon, with its seven grams of saturated fat and 31 mg of cholesterol, was going to close up your arteries, shut down your heart, and put you in an early grave. Chemically engineered margarine, on the other hand, was all fluffy and white and made from pure vegetable oil. With a miniscule 2.2 grams of saturated fat per tablespoon and no cholesterol, margarine was touted as the miracle health food of the age. It had much higher levels of healthy poly and monounsaturated fats than wicked old butter and with just a tiny touch of butterfat added in, why, it tasted just like butter! (A finer example of the dumbing down of the American palate cannot be found.)

The problem with food science and the cult of nutritionism is that it changes its mind on a daily basis as new information becomes available. The nails in yesterday's coffin are transformed into the pillars of today's health with amazing alacrity. Eggs, for example. And yesterday's nutritional marvels, like margarine, become today's detritus just as quickly. See, what the floggers of margarine didn't tell us – because they didn't know – was that the very process by which liquid vegetable oil becomes solid – a process know as “hydrogenation” – creates a compound called trans-fat, an almost completely unnatural and chemically produced substance that will grease your slide into heart disease, diabetes, and some forms of cancer faster than any natural fat – saturated or otherwise – ever found in “that butter crap.” Can you say “oops?”

Another problem with nutritionism is its persistence in the public mind. Like any good lie, once told and spread around, it can never be untold. We raised at least two generations on the fallacy that chickens laid little death bombs and that in order to survive, you needed to eat either just the whites or, better still, packaged, processed, pasteurized egg substitutes. Only through science, brothers and sisters, could you truly be safe. Eventually that lie was thoroughly discredited, but because it was around for so long and believed by so many, it will never entirely go away. I guarantee that if you were to ask any ten random people today, eight of them would still say eggs are bad for you. The same holds true with “healthy” margarine.

For me, if I am going to be led to my premature death by a natural substance that is lightly sweet with a pleasing mouthfeel, containing an amazing variety of natural vitamins and minerals and that has been a part of man's diet since prehistoric times or a stick of bland, greasy, hydrogenated, bleached, deodorized, artificially flavored and colored, chemically processed goop containing mutagenic and carcinogenic trans-fatty acid compounds – well, I think you know upon which side my bread is buttered.

“Well, margarine's all we had growing up and it hasn't hurt me yet.” Not that you know of, anyway.

“I don't taste any difference between butter and margarine.” Really? And you probably liked New Coke, too, didn't you? Can I interest you in palate replacement surgery?

“I can't afford butter. It's too expensive.” Okay. Put the money you save into a fund for a nicer funeral.

“Well, if it wasn't safe or good for you, the government wouldn't let it be sold.” Thalidomide anyone? By the way, do you smoke?

You know what else is cool about butter? With cream and a little salt, I can make it myself. I can make a small quantity by putting the cream and the salt in a tightly covered glass jar and shaking it up for a few minutes. Tah-dah! Butter!

Have you had any fresh homemade margarine lately? Let's see......first you steam clean the vegetable oil to remove impurities – and any vitamins and antioxidants it might contain. Then you heat it to extremely high temperatures, which makes it go rancid. Then you inject it with hydrogen and nickel – two of my favorite all natural ingredients. This produces a lumpy gray grease. Tah-dah! Margarine! But wait. We're not finished. Next you add emulsifiers to smooth out the lumps. And don't forget the bleach. It takes away that ugly gray color and makes the grease a nice milky white. The unpleasant rancid smell is then removed by another steaming session. Now you're ready to add the synthetic vitamins and the artificial flavorings and colors. Yum-yum.

Butter is “crap?” I think not.

And apparently a lot of people are right there with me. According to recent industry figures, US butter consumption has reached a forty year high, increasing twenty-five percent in the last ten years alone. The word about the healthy antioxidants in butter, the omega-3 fatty acids, the protein, folate, vitamins A and D and other nutrients is getting around. Does that make butter a health food? No. Not by a long shot. It's still loaded with saturated fat and cholesterol, and should be used in moderation, not as a snack food. But it's far and away healthier than its plastic counterpart. Especially, the medical folks say, if you're a man who has already suffered a heart attack, which, by the way, the “butter crap” man is. Oh well. His funeral. Literally.

People have also figured out that there is no substitute for the natural flavor and texture of butter, not only on toast at the table but in the preparation of foods. A savvy new generation of home cooks has caught on to the fact that margarine has never been used in quality food preparation. Even while home cooks of the '50s and '60s were using “margarine or butter” in accordance with the directions on their box mix recipes, the pros have always relied on real butter. Just ask the folks at New York's International Culinary Center where they go through 21,946 pounds of butter a year. That's a lot of “crap,” wouldn't you say?

To the people who persist and say, “Well, they make healthier margarine now that they used to,” I can only ask, “why do you insist on putting chemically processed man made artificial food-like substances in your body when nature provides everything you and your ancestors have needed since they came up from the seas and down from the trees?” The words “they make” should scream at you. It is precisely the things that are “made” and “processed” that are turning us into a nation of obese, disease-ridden corpses that are, at the same time, artificially sweetened and wonderfully well-preserved.

Margarine was created to win a prize. Today, the only prize it should win is a booby prize. Butter is "crap?” Get real – and get real butter.

Pizza With a Knife and Fork? Sorry, New Yorkers – Mayor de Blasio is RIGHT!

I've been flapping my gums for years about the proper way to eat certain Italian foods. I've already expounded at length about the proper way to eat spaghetti. You don't cut it, you twirl it. And there's a proper twirling technique, too, one that never, ever involves a <shudder> spoon. But right now I want to reiterate the right way to eat pizza. By “right,” of course, I mean the traditional Italian way.

 
No offense to youse guys in New Yawk and New Joisy whose Italian ancestors arrived at Ellis Island two or three generations ago, but those vecchi nonni would absolutely spin in their graves if they could see a lot of what has been done to their beloved traditional food – to say nothing of their native language. Yeah, I'm talkin' to you, people who say “moozzarell” and “proshoot” and “ragot.” But that's a topic for another time.
 
There's been a real tempest brewing in a teapot in the New York media lately because the new mayor, an Italian-American guy named Bill de Blasio, got caught eating his pizza with a knife and fork. I live hundreds of miles away and I swear I can hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth from here. Everybody in New Yawk knows dat da way to eat a slice 'a pizza is to pick it up wit yer hands, fold it ovah and stuff it in yer face. Capeesh? So when the mayor gets caught with a knife and a fork, why it's like he roots for the Red Sox or somethin'. Oh, wait........he does root for the Red Sox.

“Disaster!”, cries one New York writer. “Forkgate”, screams another.

In his own defense, de Blasio, whose mother was Italian, says, “In my ancestral homeland, it’s more typical to eat with a fork and knife.” He added, “I have been in Italy a lot and I have picked up the habit for certain types of pizza,” noting that the pie he allegedly butchered at Goodfellas “had a lot on it.”

And you know what? He's absolutely right. It is indeed proper etiquette, especially when dining out, to eat pizza with a knife and fork. Nobody wants to see grease dripping down your fingers and toppings falling out of your mouth as you fold a slice like a freakin' sandwich and shovel it into your pie hole. Italians don't even let their children eat that way.

In the first place, real Italian pizza isn't served by the slice. I didn't used to be served that way in America either. Those old guys at those early pizzerias sold it by the pie. You go in and ask for a slice and they show you the door molto rapidamente. It took a long time for “by the slice” to catch on, and it still hasn't caught on in some more traditional places. So the way you eat a pizza in Italy is to cut it in quarters with your knife and then cut small bites and transfer them to your mouth with a fork.

Now, because a lot of traditions “evolved” once they came to America, a lot of people – yours truly included – will take those first molten hot bites with a knife and fork. You know, the ones that leave burned places on the roof of your mouth if you just stick the pointy end in and bite down? And that pointy end is usually pretty droopy, too, and everything sort of slides off on the way to your face and ends up on your shirt. Once I get far enough into the slice that it has cooled a bit and is a little more stable, I'll eat it with my fingers, American style. Sometimes. Depends on who I'm with and how much crap I want to take.

And Hizzoner says that's the way he does it, too. “I often start with a knife and fork but then I cross over to the American approach and pick it up when I go farther into the pizza,” he explained.

In fact, although the Italians did not exactly “invent” the fork, they were responsible for its refinement into an eating utensil and for spreading it around Renaissance Europe. So Italians and forks go way back.

A lot depends on the pizza, too. In Italy there's no such thing as “supreme” or “meat lover's.” They don't load their pies with everything but the kitchen sink. Authentic Neapolitan pizza, made according the the strict standards of Vera Pizza Napoletana, requires that the crust be no more than 14 inches in diameter and no thicker than 0.8 inches. The allowable toppings include tomatoes, basil, mozzarella, oregano, and garlic. If you want pepperoni pizza in Italy, go to an American tourist trap. The real pizzerias won't know what you're talking about.

The cardboard-crusted abominations foisted off on an uneducated American public by the likes of Pizza Hut, Dominoes, Little Caesar's, Papa John's and the rest wouldn't even qualify as pizze in Italy. And many of the pies produced by supposedly “authentic” pizzerias barely make the grade. If you have to juggle your pizza and fold it in half and hold your mouth just right so the grease doesn't drip and the copious toppings don't slip, you're not eating a decent pizza anyway. It's like those tomato and cheese casseroles they call “deep dish pizza” in Chicago. I dare you to fold up one of those bad boys. And even if the crust is thin and crispy on the outside with a nice chewiness on the inside, if you load it down with so much garbage that it all slides off in your lap, what's the point?

So cut Bill de Blasio some slack, anti-forkers. He's right, you're wrong, live with it. I don't care if 8.3 million New Yorkers think they're right. Sixty-one point three million Italians will say they're not, and that pretty much settles the question. Capisce? 

I'm outta here. All this talk has me craving a nice thin-crust pizza Margherita, so I gotta go get my knife and fork. Ciao!

Concassé – A Classic French Technique For Classic Italian Dishes

Okay, we all know that if the French hadn't had the good sense and good fortune to make Caterina de' Medici their queen back in 1547 and if she hadn't brought her own staff of Italian cooks with her to make the disgusting French food more palatable.....well, French food would still be disgusting. But they did and she did and it's not, so everybody wins. Especially the French, who get to brag about being the best cooks in the world......after the Italians taught them how to be.

Seriously, regardless of how it developed, French technique is the worldwide culinary standard. Fussy French chefs in their fussy brigades wearing fussy starched uniforms and fussy tall hats making their fussy sauces and fussy knife cuts and fussy garnishes for their fussy dishes make a bunch of plain old Italian grandmothers look pretty unimpressive by comparison. Even if nonna's food is better.

One of those fancy French techniques that can be applied to simple Italian cooking is concassé. (Pronounced kon-kah-SAY.) Taken from the French word concasser, which means “to crush or grind,” to concassé an ingredient is to roughly chop it. The term is usually applied to vegetables, especially tomatoes.

Now, Italians use a lot of chopped tomatoes. They use them in sauces and salads and pasta dishes and as toppings on bruschetta, just for a few examples. So if you're going to make any of these things, it helps to know how to concassé a tomato.

As it applies to tomatoes, concassé is actually a technique for peeling and seeding as well as for chopping. Yes, you can just take a knife and whack up a whole tomato skins, seeds, and all. But don't. Tomato seeds can be bitter tasting and devilish to pick out of your teeth and tomato skins can be tough and unpalatable even when cooked. When you buy canned Italian tomatoes, they are pomodori pelati; peeled tomatoes. They're peeled, but not always seeded. So let's take the next step to tomato concassé.

Start with fresh, ripe tomatoes. I prefer Roma tomatoes because they have fewer seeds, but any good fresh tomato will do. Fill a deep pot with enough water to cover the tomatoes and bring it to a boil. While that's happening, use the tip of a paring knife to cut around and remove the stem or its remainder on the top of the tomato. Then turn the tomato over and make a small “X” incision in the skin on the bottom. Make your cuts about an inch long and just deep enough to score the skin.

When the water comes to a boil, place the tomatoes – a few at a time if you're working with a big batch – in the boiling water. Leave the tomatoes in the water for 30 seconds to a minute, depending on the freshness of the tomato. When you see the skins start to curl up a bit where you cut the “X,” they're done. Use a spider or a slotted spoon to remove them from the water. This is called blanching or parboiling and it helps loosen the skin.

Cool the tomatoes in an ice water bath. Also called “shocking,” this method immediately stops the cooking process. Just don't leave them in the ice water too long or they'll become waterlogged. A minute or two should do it.

When the tomatoes have cooled, pick one up and slip the tip of your knife under one of the points of the “X” you cut in the bottom. Use your thumb to hold the flap of tomato skin against the blade of your knife and slowly peel back the skin. It should come off easily in nice strips. Do this all the way around.

Next, cut the tomato in half horizontally – around the middle, not top to bottom – and either squeeze out or scoop out the seeds. Some people quarter the tomatoes and seed them; whatever works for you. Now you can easily dice the tomatoes to whatever size you need. Rough chop or fine dice, they'll be a breeze to cut because the tough skin is what makes cutting tomatoes difficult to begin with.

Concaséed tomatoes are less watery when you're cooking with them than diced raw tomatoes. Not so much of a deal if you're putting them in a sauce, but it makes a big difference when you're using them to top bruschetta or putting them in a frittata or something like insalata Caprese. Besides, they look fancier and more finished and that's half of what French technique is about anyway.

So use some of that classic French technique in your classic Italian cooking. It's only fair, right?

Buona fortuna e buon mangiare!

Hooray for Non-GMO Cheerios.......Sort Of

“Original Cheerios to Go GMO Free!” screamed the recent headline on my newsfeed. Well, hooray

for Non-GMO Cheerios.......sort of.

Okay, let's start with the basic question; what's a GMO? GMO stands for genetically modified organism and refers to....well.....an organism that has been genetically modified. But in this case we're not talking about some weird science fiction creature dreamed up in a mad scientist's laboratory. No. We're talking about your food supply. Specifically, your processed food supply because nearly all corn and soy crops in the United States are genetically modified.

What kind of modifications are we talking about? Oh, nothing that would be bad for you, heaven forbid. The toothless tigers at the FDA and the USDA would never think of letting anything bad for you slip into the food system. Unless there was enough money and influence involved. Anyway, these modifications are designed to produce bigger, fuller products and more of them. They are designed to be disease and pest resistant. Isn't that all wonderful and beneficial-sounding? We won't talk about the possible effects such engineering may have on the overall quality and nutritional value of the food involved and we won't speak of creating toxic or allergenic compounds within the molecular structure of the food. We wouldn't want to alarm the sheeple, would we?

Never mind that every other country on the planet requires labeling of GMO products or bans them outright. Our forward-thinking, progressive food system is, by and large, run by shills for the industrial food producers they are supposed to be regulating. Think foxes guarding the hen houses. So GMO labeling is not required in the good ol' US of A and since GMO are not even considered food additives, there are no requirements in place to prevent them from being added to just about anything and everything food manufacturers desire. And we the sheeple need not be told. What we don't know won't hurt us. Much.

But, as I said, hooray for Cheerios and its producer General Mills. They are taking a bold step forward and, in response to consumer demand, they are eliminating GMO ingredients from original Cheerios. Read the press releases. The forces of good have overpowered the evil dark side. The consumer has spoken. We are changing our wicked, wicked ways. Now, don't you feel good about us?

Meh. There's one little detail they kind of gloss over. Cheerios are made of oats. And there's no such thing – yet – as genetically modified oats. So they want you to get all excited over the fact that they are not genetically modifying something they weren't genetically modifying to begin with. Rather like the “gluten free” pushers who slap “gluten free” labels on scores of rice and corn and potato products – products that are inherently gluten free – in order to look politically correct and to sell more stuff.

Want to know what's in Cheerios? Hang on: Whole Grain Oats, Corn Starch, Sugar, Salt, Tripotassium Phosphate, Wheat Starch, Vitamin E (mixed tocopherols) added to preserve freshness. Tripotassium Phosphate is an emulsifier, in case you were dying to know, and “mixed tocopherols” are preservatives used because of their resistance to high temperatures in food processing, their low volatility and good solubility in fats and oils.

But the point is, the only thing in Cheerios that contains any sort of genetically modified material are the relatively small amounts of corn starch and sugar. So they're promising to use non-GMO corn and sugar in original Cheerios. But not in any other variety. See, there are boatloads of GMO ingredients in other Cheerios products. Honey Nut Cheerios, for instance, not only has corn starch and sugar, but brown sugar as well and canola oil, which can also be genetically modified. Multi-Grain Cheerios contain lots of corn – corn, corn starch, and corn bran. And the other varieties are pretty much the same story. By their own admission it would cost General Mills too much money to stop using GMO in all their product lines, so they're only going to respond to consumer demands where it won't hurt them much by trumpeting their corporate responsibility and slapping their “No GMO” label on the product that's least affected in the first place.

But, hey, if nothing else at least it raises awareness of GMO in the industrial food supply and maybe if enough consumers start asking, “What's that doing in there?” and start voting with their dollars at the grocery store, things will change. The last thing food manufacturers want is an educated populace. Sheeple are easier to feed. So why not wake up and be a pain the corporate ass today, hmmm? You never know, you could make a difference.

In the meantime, even though it's nothing more than a self-serving publicity and marketing ploy, it's still a step in the right direction, so hooray for Non-GMO Cheerios......sort of.

Stop Screwing With My Christmas Music!

This is an open letter to radio station music directors, school administrators, pop music “artists,” and wrongheaded carol singers in general: stop screwing with my Christmas music!

First off, believe me, I am the farthest thing from a Bible-thumper that you could possibly imagine. But this whole thing about Christmas music “offending” people is illogical and insane. I know Jewish people who sing Christmas songs just because they like the music.

Some things are meant to be traditional. So what is “traditional?” The dictionary defines it as relating to the passing down of elements of a culture from generation to generation; a time-honored practice or set of practices. Synonyms include customary, established, classic, and standard. “Christmas comes but once a year,” so the saying goes. Admittedly, these days it comes in September and lingers until January, but the traditional trappings of Christmas are just that; traditional. Oh, I suppose there's room for new traditions now and then, like Rudolph and Frosty. And it just wouldn't be Christmas without Charlie Brown and the gang or the Grinch. Or Bing Crosby. But we have to be careful when adopting new traditions not to neglect the old ones or relegate them to inferior positions. After all, Christmas is a commemoration of the birth of Jesus Christ and whether or not you believe in his divinity, you can't deny that he is “the reason for the season,” as the religious folks like to say.

Don't start with me. I know Jesus wasn't actually born on December 25 and I know all about the pagan holidays that were co-opted by the church in order to make the transition more palatable to the people who were being more or less forcibly converted to Christianity. As I said, I'm not a Bible-thumper. But, c'mon. A traditional Christmas carol is a traditional Christmas carol. Like it or not, it's a song about Jesus. Live with it. I'm not Jewish either, but I don't get all bent out of shape about people singing “Hanukkah, Oh Hannukah” as part of their tradition. You feel like singing “The Kwanzaa Song?” Go for it. You won't offend me in the least. And if secular tunes about snowflakes and Santa Claus are your bag, sing 'em long and loud. They're all part of the season and nobody should be offended by any of them. 

What really offends me are people who are afraid of offending me. Like public school administrators. I must have read twenty stories this season about schools booting traditional Christmas music from their “holiday” concerts for fear of “offending” someone. The latest such idiocy comes out of a middle school in Long Island where they changed up the words to “Silent Night,” eliminating references to “holy infant” and “savior.” Let me see if I remember, now; “Silent Night” was written by a priest in an Austrian church and first performed in that church on Christmas Eve in 1818. I do believe that kind of qualifies it as a religious song. It has since become one of the best-known and best-loved examples of its genre, to the extent that it has actually been declared by UNESCO to be an “intangible cultural heritage.” And this gives some moron music teacher in Long Island license to screw with it in what way? “Oh, but we must not be offensive.” I'm sorry, but the ridiculously specious nature of your silly argument is highly offensive to me or to anybody with any common sense.

The only people who really seem to be offended are the virulently anti-religious fringe who would like to see all traces of any faith removed from our culture. “Jesus is a myth,” these people say. Like Santa Claus isn't? Why is it okay to sing about one myth and not another. So you don't believe in gods and saviors and holy infants. Fine. Your prerogative. I don't believe in dancing, singing snowmen, but I like singing about them. It's music and it's pretty and it's fun.

The folks at the Freedom From Religion Foundation believe that there are plenty of secular songs out there and that “holiday” music with religious overtones should be abolished. You let me know how your campaign to reverse Constantine and the Edict of Milan and undo seventeen centuries of Christian culture goes. Until it's successful, stop screwing with my Christmas music.

If you're going to start censoring music programs to eliminate “offensive” religious references, you'd better be prepared to usher Bach with his “Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring and Handel and his “Messiah” right out the door along with Beethoven and Brahms and the rest and replace them with secular neo-classicists like Madonna, Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber. Religious music has a valuable place in our culture, and since Christmas is, at its core, a “religious” occasion, one celebrating the birth of a major “religious” figure, how can any right-minded person be offended by Christmas music presented in its traditional context?

Next, I have a bone to pick with radio station music directors. “Happy Holidays from WZZZ, where we play your favorite Christmas songs twenty-four hours a day starting in mid-November and continuing until you're thoroughly sick of it.” Except they don't. Not really. My favorite Christmas songs include the songs I grew up with. The “traditional” songs. “Oh, Little Town of Bethlehem,” “Hark, The Herald Angels Sing,” “Joy to the World,” “O Come All Ye Faithful.” No offense to Mariah Carey, but if I hear “All I Want for Christmas is You” one more time this season, I'm going to spit up. Same goes for Bruce Springsteen's off-key warbling of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.” Listen carefully and you'll find that these “Christmas stations” are all playing the same ten songs done by twenty different artists.

And I'm terribly, terribly sorry, but just because a tune mentions the word “Christmas” somewhere doesn't make it a Christmas song. Case in point: Dan Fogelberg's “Same Old Lang Syne.” “Met my old lover in the grocery store; the snow was falling Christmas Eve.......” And from there, the song is all about lost loves and lamenting missed opportunities and drinking a six-pack in her car. This belongs in a Christmas rotation? Really?

But at least it mentions Christmas. Unlike “My Favorite Things,” a lovely song from “The Sound of Music” that has absolutely, positively nothing to do with Christmas. In the stage play, Maria sings it to overcome her fears of her impending new placement with the von Trapps. In the movie, she sings it during a storm to assuage the fears of the children. In any case, other than references to mittens, sleigh bells, and snowflakes, it's not a Christmas song! Okay, I guess that puts it in the same category as “Jingle Bells” and “Sleigh Ride,” so I'm willing to overlook it. Of course, I can't overlook the dreadful Barbara Streisand over-performance of the song that dominates the airwaves. Please, radio guys, limit it to versions by Julie Andrews, Jack Jones, Kenny Rogers, Rod Stewart, Herb Alpert, Andy Williams, Johnny Mathis, Lorrie Morgan, Tony Bennett, Kenny G, Barry Manilow, or any of a dozen other artists who have covered it.

Years ago, I volunteered to do a live Christmas Eve show on radio. My program director said we could just do a “canned” show like everybody else so I could be home with my family. But I insisted because I knew there were people out there who had to work on Christmas Eve or maybe some who were alone with only the radio for companionship, and I wanted to be there for those people, playing their requests and being a real person to whom they could relate. So I brought my family into the studio with me and we spent the hours between six and midnight taking phone calls and playing what people wanted to hear on Christmas Eve. Yes, I had to limit the playing of “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer” to once an hour and I had to restrict Alvin and the Chipmunks and Seymour Swine as well. (You know......the “Porky Pig” version of “Blue Christmas.”) But you know what people wanted to hear most? Carols. Good old-fashioned, traditional Christmas carols. Not one request came in for John Lennon's “So This Is Christmas” with it's repetitive “war is over” background refrain. Nor did they want to hear Bob Geldof's Band Aid exhort them to “feed the world” with “Do They Know It's Christmas?” Listeners wanted “Do You Hear What I Hear?” and “The Little Drummer Boy” and “Silent Night.” They didn't ring the phones off the hook for pop/rock artists like Elton John and “Step Into Christmas” or Wham! singing “Last Christmas.” They requested “The Carol of the Bells” and “What Child Is This.” They called in for “The First Nowell” and “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.” The didn't want political message songs. They wanted the songs they sang in church; the songs with the real message of Christmas that was important to them and that they carried in their hearts and passed on to their families. Not the “inoffensive” secular dreck that the so-called “Christmas stations” play today. There's a slick plastic automated computer operated Clear Channel station in my area that plays the “modern” Christmas songs and there's a little local “mom and pop” station with real DJs that plays the old stuff. Guess which one I listen to.

I was working around the house and wanted some background Christmas music. I tuned to DirecTV's alleged “holiday music” station. Yikes! I don't know what the hell that was, but it surely wasn't Christmas music. Instead, I brought up Pandora's “Classical Christmas” station on my computer. Much better. Like washing my ears out.

You know what else offends me? People who screw around with those traditional classics. I'll hear some good old song come on the radio and I'll warm up the pipes and start to sing along and.......Whammo!........somebody changes the words! Or the tempo. Or the overall arrangement. Why? We've been singing some of these songs the same way every December since medieval days. Why do they need changing now? I don't know who the guy was that I heard singing “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” today, but the song goes, “God rest ye merry, gentlemen, let nothing you dismay. Remember Christ our savior was born on Christmas Day.” It doesn't go, “Remember Jesus Christ our lord was born on Christmas Day.” Where did that come from? And the fifth line of the second verse starts, “How that in Bethlehem was born” not “Now that in Bethlehem was born.” Doofus. Way to wreck a song. If you're really clueless and don't know the words, learn them before you attempt to sing them.

(Kind of reminds me of the amateur redneck band I once heard attempting to perform the Randy Travis hit “1982” and mangling the verse by singing, “They say eyesight's 20/20 and I'm nearly going blind.” You country fans will know difference.)

I heard Carrie Underwood the other day singing “Oh Holy Night.” She did a fine job and I was ready to go with her to the second verse. And then she just repeated the first over again. Why, Carrie? The song has three lovely verses. What's wrong with the other two?

Maybe it's my musical theater background. Trust me, when you're performing Rodgers and Hammerstein or Lerner and Lowe, you don't screw with the words. Or the melodies. Or anything else about the song. There's no room for “stylizing” in musical theater. You sing 'em like they wrote 'em. Same thing applies to Christmas music. Leave the songs everybody knows and loves alone. And if you want to be the next Frank Sinatra and do it your way, fine. Write your own song and do it any way you want to. Maybe in a hundred years or so, your idea of a Christmas song will be considered a classic. But for now, stop screwing with the real classics, okay?

Again, I'm not saying a Christmas song has to be five hundred years old to be traditional and I'm not discounting newer secular classics like Mel Torme's “The Christmas Song” as performed by Nat King Cole or Bing Crosby's rendition of Irving Berlin's “White Christmas.” But for goodness' sake, sing them straight. Nat and Bing and Andy Williams and Perry Como and Johnny Mathis all did pretty well just singing 'em the way they were written, you know?

Some years back I did a Christmas show at a nursing home. It was just a bunch of us from the cast of a musical who put together a little show to entertain some folks who needed it. I remember singing “I'll Be Home for Christmas” and having an old gent come up and shake my hand and thank me. “That song helped me a lot back in the war,” he said, “and you did it just like I remember it.” Wow. We closed another show with “White Christmas” and I almost didn't make it through because there was this little old lady sitting on the front row smiling at me with tears running down her cheeks as her memories played out in her mind.

That's why you don't screw with Christmas songs. For every thin-skinned idiot who finds them offensive, there are a thousand people who cherish them. And for all you “song stylists” who think that your trills and yodels and crescendos and vocal gymnastics and new arrangements are making you a superior “artist,” remember that you're messing with people's memories. Consider your audience. You ain't up there singing for yourself, Jack. You get up and screech and holler your way through some dusty old Christmas song, doing it your way and making it yours and you might see some tears in the audience, but not for the same reason I saw them. For a lot of people, Christmas songs are part of Christmas memories that you don't have a right to screw with because you want to stroke your oversized ego. It's really kind of sad when you think about it. Don't give me crap about “art” being “subjective.” I'm an artist, too and you can BS about it all you want but you can't “improve” or “stylize” the Mona Lisa with a mustache and you can't make traditional carols, hymns, or even secular classics better by screwing with the lyrics or the arrangements.

Does anybody remember the story a couple of years ago wherein a painting of Christ in a Spanish church was utterly ruined by an amateurish attempt to “restore” it? The original work dated back to around 1930 and it was getting a little flaky around the edges. But before a proper restoration could be funded, some ham-handed local “artist” with more hubris than talent totally and irrevocably screwed it up by painting over it and replacing and old but still beautiful image with something so indescribably horrid that it was ridiculed the world over. Exactly as has been done to some of the world's most treasured music by alleged “artists” who don't know when to leave well enough alone.

Okay. I'm done. If it's true that a picture is worth a thousand words, well........I've churned out more than two thousand words here, so I hope you get the picture. Christmas music should not “offend” anyone and it should not be trifled with for trifling reasons.

Stop screwing with my Christmas music! And, by the way, have a Merry Christmas.

In Defense of Proper Italian

To paraphrase an iconic Bette Davis line, “Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy rant.”

I'm sick and tired of being called “elitist” and “snob” because I insist on proper pronunciation of so-called “foreign” words. (Remember, they're only “foreign” if they're not your native language.) In this country we laugh at “foreigners” who mispronounce common English words, but we are apparently immune to such criticism when it comes to our own blatant ignorance of other languages. That's okay. We're Americans. Everything we do and say is right, right?

Whenever I hear words like “marinara” and “bruschetta,” “bolognese” and “calzone” being mispronounced, I literally cringe. I mean, I physically react before I even have time to think. I've gotten better. I used to fly in the offender's face, but I have found a calmer place in my advancing age. Now I just sit quietly and turn colors until the urge to strangle passes.

Italian is, bar none, the single most abused and bastardized language in the United States. This is especially true because even Americans of Italian descent badly, badly mispronounce common Italian words. Part of it is the aforementioned cultural arrogance and ignorance. Some of my friends tell me, “Well, you shouldn't be so harsh. It's just the American pronunciation and that's the way people learned it.” Okay. And if somebody “learned” that the capital of Alaska is Nome, should I, knowing better, correct them or should I just tell everybody in Juneau the bad news?

Some say that a contributing cause of adulterated Italian can be traced to dialects. I can buy that in some cases. Not all Italians speak Italian. There are twenty distinct regions on the Italian peninsula and twenty distinct dialects. People in one area frequently have different words for things than their neighbors in another area. It would be like crossing from North Dakota to South Dakota and finding that people had different words for “cow.”

Officially, the Italian language is based on the Tuscan dialect, but people in Campania and Sicily and all the other regions still retain much of their native way of speaking. And when these people emigrated to the United States, they often brought their different dialects with them, so that your Italian grandmother and my Italian grandmother may not have called the same object the same thing. All that said, there are regional dialects in English, too. But when it comes down to it, proper English is still proper English. It's the English that is taught in schools and used in common speech. The same principle applies to proper Italian. Regional distinctions aside, English is English and Italian is Italian.

Probably the biggest reason for bad Italian in America is the politeness of Italian people. They know you're butchering their language when you flatten out “a”s and drop “e”s, but unlike the French, they are too polite to correct you, and so abominations like “mare-uh-NARE-uh” are allowed to pass into common usage. I guess the politeness has been bred out of me in the successive generations since my ancestors left Italy, because I'll correct you in a heartbeat. But whenever I do I get flak for being snobby.

What was it Alan Jay Lerner wrote in My Fair Lady? “Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?” The song concludes, “But use proper English and you're regarded as a freak.” Can we also apply that to using proper Italian?

One of the most common criticisms of Giada De Laurentiis is what some consider her “over-pronunciation” of Italian words. There she'll be, tripping along in her California-accented American English and she'll come to an Italian word or phrase, which she will, of course, render in perfect Italian. And for this she gets called snooty and pretentious. I don't get it. She's being snooty and pretentious for pronouncing something correctly in her native language? When an Italian pronounces an English word incorrectly, he's stupid and ignorant, but when an American pronounces an Italian word incorrectly, he's just saying it the American way. Never mind that it's wrong! Why isn't he equally stupid and ignorant? It's because of the American ethnocentric bias that maintains that everything we do is, by God, right because it's American. And we wonder why people in other countries don't like us.

What I always wonder about is why this bias only seems to apply to the Italian language. There are many ethnicities in America. They all come with their own unique languages. And English-speaking Americans seem to accept all of them and adapt to all of them – except for Italian. We're meticulous with French and proper with Spanish. We are careful to pronounce German words correctly and even attempt to get the right inflection in Japanese and Chinese. But when it comes to Italian, all bets are off. We can pronounce it any old way we want to and excuse it by saying, “It's the American pronunciation.”

Think I'm exaggerating? Consider: Do you drive a “Shev-ro-lay” or a “Chev-ro-let? When you order a layered dessert, is it a “par-fay” or a “par-fate?” Crème brûlée is “krem-broo-lay” and not “creem-bruh-lee,” right? When you go to one of those all-you-can-eat places, you're eating from a “boo-fay” and not from a “buff-et.” So why do you ask for “broo-shet-uh” at an Italian place instead of “broo-sket-ah?” Why is it more important to be correct in French than in Italian?

Or Spanish? Just to be annoying and to carry home my point, I've begun to be deliberately obtuse in Mexican restaurants. I figure if you can order “boh-loh-naze” and “mare-uh-nare-uh” in my Italian place I can order “tack-ohs” and “kwes-uh-dill-uhs” in your Mexican joint. Why should I care any more about correct Spanish than you do about correct Italian?

Of course, as I alluded earlier, one of the biggest obstacles has been Italians themselves. More specifically, Italian immigrants who wanted desperately to fit in in their new country and wound up anglicizing a lot of their own language. But dropping final vowels from Italian words does not make them English words. It just makes them bad Italian words. East coasters make my ears bleed with their “mozz-uh-rell” and “pro-shoot” and “ruh-got.” And just because there are silent final “e”s in English doesn't mean the same holds true in Italian. “Cal-zoan” and “pro-vuh-loan” are emphatically and painfully wrong. I don't care if they're common; they're WRONG! How about this? If it's so American and correct to drop the final “e,” I'll just order up some nice “gwahk-uh-mohl.” Or maybe a tasty “tah-mahl.” Ooops! Gotta watch those “a” sounds. Better make that a “tuh-măl.” And obviously only snooty, pretentious people ask for “moh-lay,” so I'll just have some “mohl.”

Is it all beginning to sound really stupid to you? Good.

Tell you what, next time you sneeze, instead of saying “gesundheit” the proper German way, I think I'll say “jess-und-heet.” Surely that will catch on and become correct through common usage.

Next, I'll go after the Chinese and order me some of that “kung pay-oh” chicken. What do you mean, it's “kung pow?” That's not the way it's spelled. In American English, “pao” should be pronounced “pay-oh,” shouldn't it? Well, shouldn't it?

English is a weird language, loaded with tricky diphthongs and silent letters and homophones. I could go into pages and pages of scholarly dissertation on why English developed the way it did. I could talk at length about the “Great Vowel Shift” that effected major changes in the sound of English between the mid-14^th century and the beginning of the 18^th. But what it all boils down to is the fact that there are a lot of phonetic elements in English that just don't exist in other languages. For example, there are fifteen vowel sounds in English. The letter “a” alone has three sounds; the long sound, as in “lake,” the short sound, as in “apple,” and the schwa sound, as in “father.” There are only seven vowel sounds in Italian, and the letter “a” only has one. There are just five vowel phonemes in Spanish and the Spanish “a” is sounded the same as it is in Italian, which would be the equivalent of the English schwa, producing the “ah” sound. That is why you have “tah-coh” instead of “tack-oh” and why you should have “mah-ree-nah-rah” instead of “mare-uh-nare-uh.” But for some unfathomable reason, Americans recognize and honor the difference in Spanish while totally ignoring it in Italian.

I maintain that it is the height of ethnocentric hubris to change somebody else's language rather than to learn to correctly pronounce that language ourselves. We demand that people for whom English is a second language speak it properly and correctly and we ridicule and deride those who do not. And yet we mangle and massacre “foreign” tongues with impunity simply because we are Americans and we have the intrinsic, God-given right to do so. There's no such thing as "the American pronunciation." That infers that there is something wrong with the original, correct pronunciation and that the "American way" is somehow better. Just because some tongue-tied Americans have to dumb some things down in order for them to meet their inferior philological abilities doesn't mean that such linguistic laziness is correct.

Okay. I am quietly putting the soapbox back under the porch now. I have sufficiently ranted and railed and harangued enough for today. But I'm not giving up my crusade, quixotic though it may be. I will continue to lobby for proper Italian pronunciation if for no other purpose than to show my respect for another culture and its language. If I want other people to respect my culture, then it is inherent upon me to respect theirs. And if that is seen by Joe Average American as being snooty, snobby, elitist, and pretentious, then so be it. Guilty as charged.

But rather than point fingers at me and call me names, why don't you join me? It's lonely here on the mountaintop and I'm getting hoarse from all the shouting. Stupidity is permanent but ignorance is curable and some people are actually willing to learn. I am gratified by the number of folks who, when I point out their mispronunciation, say, “I didn't know that,” and then go on to modify their speech. Of course, there are many others who just look at me like a doddering, pompous old fool and go on about their erroneous way, not really caring to change because they're content in their stupidity. But I remain extremely hopeful for the merely ignorant.

Go on. Learn a proper Italian word today. It won't hurt, I promise. And if you're successful, maybe you, too, can be snobby and pretentious someday. It'll be nice to have company.