Days Afield: Day 88 - Lost Between Pizza, Ploughshares & Pitchers

The lure of a rental car that was one-third the price of a Manhattan rental was just one thing that drew me to Philadelphia on Halloween. In fact, it was just one-third of the lure. The other two-thirds? A pizza pie from Tacconelli's before setting off on a road trip to see family down south.

Tacconelli's is a neighborhood joint tucked into the ground floor of a rowhouse in a working class neighborhood lined with three-flats. A little further east, down a gentle slope, Sommerset Street passes under I-95 before it stub-ends onto the old port's piers which reach arthritically into the Delaware River. The waterfront is still lined with industrial concerns but few, if any, seem still to rely on the river for much other than buffering them from development. The modest brick and woodframe houses up on the hill were home for the Polish and Italian dockworkers. And based on who I saw and heard sitting out on front stairs in the straining daylight, patiently waiting for trick-or-treaters with candy supplies in hand, easily calling to neighbors on the next set of stairs or across the narrow street, they're the same folks. It's their kids' kids now scampering from stoop to stoop filling bags with goodies.

Tacconelli's is unpretentious: pizzeria meets red-sauce sit-down joint, only without anything but pizza. It's a few steps up from the sidewalk into a faux-paneled vestibule and then into a 1980s era dining room with booths beneath a drop ceiling. Along one wall is a soda fountain and ice chest with a plastic rolling cart holding paper cups and plastic lids. It reminds me a bit of what a finished basement would look like if you turned it into a pizzeria.

Despite (or maybe because of) the lack of pretension, Tacconelli's is sometimes hard to get into. But reservations are needed not so much to hold a seat as to reserve a dough. They make only enough dough each day as is needed for the number of pizzas folks have reserved. Reserve 3 doughs for your party of seven and decide you want just one more gorgeous tomato pie? Sorry. Unless, of course, someone before you committed the treasonable act of taking fewer pies than they reserved. The menu and website both admonish diners to take what they've ordered and warn them not expect an extra.

Belied by the décor are brick oven masterpieces of exceeding simplicity. Each pie, individually made, has some combination of the following: dough, oil, cheese, tomato sauce. A “white pie” will be just oil and cheese on the dough with salt, pepper and liberal handfuls of garlic. The tomato pie, probably my favorite with a few anchovies added, is sauce on dough done to perfection. There are a couple of other equally simple combinations—and the standard toppings. But few, if any, are needed.

The brick oven into which the current pizza maker slips his works of simple artistry into is do deep that his wooden spatula has a handle that is nearly 20 feet long--so long that when it's at rest just outside the mouth of the oven the tip-end rests on a standing roller ten feet behind him to keep it from snapping. When feeding the spatula in to the oven to slip a pie in or retrieve a perfectly crusty one from it, the roller supports the handle gliding along behind the oven master. It's a beautiful one-man pizza operation. Stop by for a pie (call ahead!) and ask them if you can peek into the kitchen. If it's not busy, they'll simply step aside and let you ogle the place for awhile. Heaven on earth—in Philadelphia.

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Most of you know how tickled I am by maps. And gadgets. So it's with some curiosity that I haven't embraced the advent of GPS and, for instance, chosen a cell phone with one if only for plotting my bicycle rides. But I also don't use them when I'm driving. I dunno.. seems a little like cheating. I pride myself in being able to find my way around just about anywhere with an admittedly keen sense of direction and a good, old-fashioned paper map. But I have to say that I was mesmerized by my friend Lucinda's on-board navigation system while we were making our way around Philly and its environs. For a little while after dinner, I really thought that it might be fun to be navigating my cross-country journeys with a dash-mounted map instead of having to pull over and consult a bound volume to double-check a coordinate or confirm a missed turn.

But then the next morning I got lost in central PA. Not the first time, frankly, and I hope it’s not the last.

I was cruising west along the Pennsylvania Turnpike waiting for my exit for I-81 south. A combination of insufficient caffeine levels and a rather robust two-fer of Bryan Adams on the radio is the likely reason that I realized I was zooming past my exit only as it was happening, doing 70. But, being unemployed and on a vacation within my vacation, there was little I could do to justify being angry. After all, what was my rush? I’d simply get off at the next exit and get back on in the other direction and get back on track. Ten miles passed. Then 10 more. Despite my best efforts, I was getting annoyed. Mostly it was this: I had no idea how far it was until the next exit—and I didn’t have a paper map; I forgot to take my road atlas from home. A keen sense of direction is a gift (as well as a developable skill) I’m proud to have, but it’s only part of what makes a successful trekker. I didn’t know if the exit was in 5 more miles or 25 more miles. Then when you add on the distance back to 81, it’d be double that. Two-x, x being an unknown value. Luckily it was only 5 more.

I scooted off the turnpike and found a gas station with a set of maps. I snuck a perusal and put back on the rack. Rather than go all the way back I found a route that let me triangulate to I-81 from where I was now. It required wending through some small roads but it was mostly a straight shot. And, secretly, I was pleased to be off the highway and tooling around in a new place.

Penna. Route 997 twists southward from the Turnpike through the great, fertile Cumberland Valley. It passes through a few small farming villages that seem like period pieces—further reinforced by Amish and Mennonite farmers who were out tilling their maize stalks into the ground for the winter on sled-plows drawn by small teams of 2 or 3 horses. Route 997 eventually merges with old US Route 11—one of the original Federal highways from the 1920s that picks a route from north to south from the Canadian border to New Orleans, largely through the north-south valleys paralleling the ridges of the Appalachians. I-81 runs nearly parallel to it for hundreds of miles, taking advantage of the same geographic advantages US 11 does.

Through these parts, US 11 is known as Molly Pitcher Highway. It was the nickname given to a Pennsylvania woman reported to have fought in the Revolutionary War beside her husband. In late June of 1778 in searing 100-degree heat, the Battle of Monmouth took place on the Jersey shore as the Continental Army attacked the evacuating British troops as they tacked north from Freehold. Molly’s husband was manning a gun or cannon was either wounded or felled by the heat as nearly half of the fighting force was that hot day. She took up his position and began firing on the British without missing much of a beat.

Historians seem to differ on whether or not Molly Pitcher actually existed or was, rather, a folklore composite of many women who contributed in heroic ways to the war effort. Whether real or apocryphal, Molly is memorialized along this section of Route 11 here in south-central Pennsylvania. There is also a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike, closer to the site of the battle, named for her. One woman with better documented contributions of heroism—Margaret Corbin—took position at her mortally wounded husband’s cannon against the British at Fort Washington two Novembers earlier. She herself was apparently wounded by enemy fire and became, after much haranguing, a pensioned invalid soldier—as a woman. Corbin’s contribution is similarly commemorated near the former site Fort Washington, just south of the Cloisters, at Margaret Corbin Circle. God help me if I ever do something important enough to name a road or rest stop after me.

The things you can learn from getting lost.