Pizza

Pizza was a novelty food in 1946 to non-Italians. According to Arthur Schwartz's New York City Food, the first place in New York to serve pizza was Lombardi's, a grocery store in Little Italy, in 1905. Some of Lombardi's pizza makers later opened their own places including Totonno's on Neptune Avenue in Coney Island in 1924; John's (1929) on Bleecker Street in 1929 and Patsy's (1935) on First and 116th in East Harlem, then an Italian neighborhood. According to Eliot Wilensky in When Brooklyn Was the World the pies were known as "ah beetz" and spelled apizza in Italian Brooklyn at the time.

This Neapolitan specialty did not become widespread until after the Second World War, supposedly spurred on by returning vets who had eaten it in Italy. The culinarily adventurous had discovered it earlier. In the June 20, 1944 New York Times, food columnist Jane Holt wrote about Luigino's Pizzeria Alla Napolatana on West 48th Street that sold pizza to go. It is described as a dish that is popular with southern Italians. In 1945 she offered a recipe from Best Foods for a bastardized version made with biscuit batter and cold cuts such as liverwurst as a strategy to address the wartime meat shortage. Liverwurst pizza??? Jane Nickerson had a recipe for Italian pizza among her breads in The New York Times of October 20, 1946.