Virtual Gourmet

MARIANI’S

Virtual Gourmet

OCTOBER 25, 2026 NEWSLETTER

Founded in 1996

ARCHIVE

HAPPY HALLOWEEN

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WITHOUT IMMIGRANTS AMERICAN
GASTRONOMY WOULD NOT EXIST
By John Mariani

NEW YORK CORNER
LA COLLINA
By John Mariani

PEARL
CHAPTER SIX
By John Mariani

VERY SUPERFICIAL
CHAPTER THREE
By John Mariani

NOTES FROM THE WINE CELLAR
WHAT'S NEW IN BURGUNDY?

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WITHOUT IMMIGRANTS AMERICAN
GASTRONOMY WOULD NOT EXIST

BY JOHN MARIANI

Italian immigrants arrive at Ellis Island, 1905

    It is too facile simply to say that all people on earth are immigrants from somewhere, but in the case of North America, everyone had to get here from somewhere else, and everyone brought with them their own culture, all of it eventually suffused throughout the American continent, giving us all the richest cornucopia of foods of any country on earth.
       Indeed, the way scientists date the first human settlers in America is based on digging through the remains of someone’s dinner, now dated back at least 15,000 years. But it was not until Christopher Columbus’s arrival in 1492 that the eastern and western hemispheres collided gastronomically in a titanic event to be called the Columbian Exchange. The Genoese explorer had specifically been hunting for a spice route to the Orient—spices then being worth their weight in gold for Europeans who craved them—but instead Columbus found a new world with foods like potatoes, tomatoes, corn, cacao, sweet and hot peppers, beans and strawberries, all of them shipped back to Europe where people were astonished by these wholly unknown foods.
       Imagine Italian food without the tomato, Irish food without the potato, Indian, Thai, and Chinese food without the chile pepper. And no chocolate anywhere but in Mexico. Now consider that the Columbian Exchange brought to America wheat, coffee beans, chickens, domesticated ducks, cattle, bees, pheasants and dozens of fruits and vegetables like artichokes, carrots, yams, eggplant, garlic, olives, lemons, apples, pears, rice and tea. Imagine the American prairie with millions of buffalo but no wheat fields waving, Ohio and New York with no apple orchards, the Hudson River once teeming with huge sturgeon but the Hudson Valley devoid of wineries, the Carolinas without rice paddies. Such was the radical transformation of gastronomy on both sides of the world, and it caused empires to grow and nations to go to war over American plantations.
       From every immigrant culture came new foods and new ways to cook it: pigs brought by the English to the earliest colonies were now roasted as barbecue; the Germans who settled in the Midwest in the early 19^th century grew hops to make beer, the Spanish grapes to make wine. Africans taken as slaves brought their yams and peanuts, which became important crops in the South; French Huguenots who emigrated to Louisiana from Acadia in 1755 adapted their native dishes to become chile-spiked Cajun jambalaya and crawfish boils. After the Civil War, poor Southern Italians brought the tomato back to America to produce a rich hybrid called Italian-American food; the Jews of Eastern Europe did the same, selling pastrami and knishes, latkes and bagels in delicatessens, while others ran the seltzer concessions and candy stores. Chinese workers on the western railroads of the 1860s adapted their noodle dishes to become chow mein, while the Irish made corned beef and cabbage into a signifying dish, though one totally unknown back in Ireland. The Greeks created an entire diner industry of which there was no trace back in Greece. For so many immigrants, entering into the United States’ welcoming food markets was easy access to the American Dream.
       American food culture was give and take, making do, diversifying, modifying and expanding, all the while maintaining a revered connection to the way it was done back in the old country. There was no such thing as “soul food” back in Africa, but here it was full of rice and beans, fried chicken and collards, pork chops and sweet potato pie, developing the name soul food in the 1960s as a part of ethnic pride in African-American culture. The French never ate potatoes or ever saw a French fry until the early 19^th century, but love of the spud was ubiquitous in America. Italians could open an Italian-American menu and not recognize dishes with names like veal parmigiana, chicken tetrazzini, pasta primavera, fettuccine Alfredo, chicken Vesuvius, hero sandwiches or Italian cheesecake, much less ever go to a New York-style Italian steakhouse that served huge baked potatoes, shrimp cocktail and five-pound Maine lobsters. No resident of Tokyo or Osaka had ever heard of negimaki or California rolls. And certainly no Mayan or Aztec had any concept of what chili con carne, chimichangas or fajitas could possibly be.

        The pizza, which originated in Naples in the 17^th century, became far better known and widely sold in America by 1950 than it was in Italy until the 1980s, and the Japanese imported the idea of Benihana of Tokyo teppanyaki grills, renaming them Benihana of New York. Neither the Germans nor the Dutch had any familiarity with Pennsylvania Dutch items like scrapple, sticky buns, funnel cakes and shoo-fly pie, and nowhere in Hong Kong or Sichuan province would the locals find General Tso’s chicken, chow chow pickle, chop suey, pupu platters or fortune cookies.
       Overwhelmingly the creation of these hybrid cuisines was due to two factors. First, the immigrants came with little and found so much. The streets were not paved with gold but with food markets, so the new arrivals often could spend less money for much more food in greater variety than in their home countries. Second, their practical need to adapt to their new world, coupled with a deep nostalgia that caused them to cling to the old, required using the former to satisfy the latter. Italian- or German- or Chinese-American, even Tex-Mex cuisines were all filtered through memory but made by necessity with what was available. Hunger may have driven them to America, but the ability of the immigrants to adapt helped them prosper and feed their families in ways unimaginable before.
       American immigrants’ passion for invention and reinvention was crucial to the nation’s symbol as a “melting pot,” where refinements of everything from passenger trains to auto assembly lines went right along with the creation of cooking advances, from the Dutch oven and deep fryer to the Cuisinart marketed by Carl Sontheimer and Teflon, created by Roy J. Plunkett for E.I. du Pont (whose namesake was a French immigrant). Griswold Manufacturing of Pennsylvania and the Wagner Company of Ohio perfected the cast iron skillet, and in 1913, refrigerators for the home were invented by Fred W. Wolfe of Fort Wayne, Indiana.
       American restaurants, too, have a history of hybridization—curry houses, chop suey parlors, pizzerias, rathskellers, Irish bars, delicatessens, cafeterias and chili parlors were all American adaptions by immigrants who may never have eaten at a restaurant back in the old country. The tiki bar, as envisioned by “Trader Vic” Bergeron in Oakland, offered a vast menu of dishes completely made up to sound like they came from Polynesia, like crab Rangoon, bongo bongo soup and the Mai Tai cocktail. A Greek immigrant named Thomas Andreas Carvelas perfected soft ice cream and called it Carvel. The remarkable first Horn & Hardart ‘s Automat, constructed using German machinery, opened in Philadelphia in 1902. Yogurt was popularized in the1940s by Barcelona immigrant Daniel Carasso, who created the Dannon brand, later adding fruit preserves to create the first “sundae-style yogurt.”
       Immigrants who arrived at the beginning of the 20^th century opened up lavish theme-based restaurants with names like the Black Forest Inn, The Cotton Club, Cocoanut Grove, El Sombrero, Pirates Den, The Brown Derby and Chock Full o’ Nuts. Drive-ins, soda fountains, the fast-food chains, the pancake houses, fish camps, ice cream parlors and barbecue joints lined the American highways, many of them done up in the shape of the food they served, like White Castle in Wichita, Randy’s Donuts and Tale o’ the Pup, both in Los Angeles.
       Then, in 1939, the exhibitors at the New York World’s Fair showcased the kind of cuisine that was more like what was actually being eaten in France, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Formosa and other countries. None was so influential as the Fair’s French Pavilion restaurant, later recreated as Le Pavillon in New York by French immigrant Henri Soulé (left), who set the standard and template for what became French-American haute cuisine. Its menu of frogs’ legs Provençale, consommé royale, pâté en crôute and chocolate mousse were slavishly copied by all French restaurants to follow, with names like La Grenouille, La Caravelle, and Le Périgord.
       Still, after World War II, American food and American restaurants were set on a dubious direction by industry innovations like Clarence Birdseye’s frozen foods. Improvements in canning and dehydration so eclipsed the use of fresh foods, including seafood, so that by the 1960s the nation’s gastronomy was in real danger of turning away from its immigrant roots based on seasonal, fresh ingredients and toward mere convenience and cost effectiveness. This era of convenience allowed for housewives to present a pretty but bland dinner to her family every night and restaurant chefs to maximize profits by cutting corners with canned foie gras from Strasbourg, frozen fish filets and bottles of flavorings for sauces. As Henri Soulé once moaned, “Some of the richest people on earth will dine here tonight [at Le Pavillon]. And for all the money on earth, I couldn’t give them the simple good things that every middle-class Frenchman can afford from time to time. Six Marennes oysters. A partridge—very, very young. Some real primeurs—the first spring vegetables. A piece of Brie that is just right. . . . And some fraises des Bois.”
       The post-war decline of American gastronomy was slowed in the 1970s, not by supplies of better provender from American farms and markets but, ironically, by foreign imports, delivered overnight by FedEx and DHL, of first-rate ingredients. Suddenly markets were selling wild mushrooms, fresh Mediterranean seafood, French cheeses (even if pasteurized), Polish hams and Italian prosciutto, extra virgin olive oil, and new products from Asia.
       But the most important change in the way Americans would eat came when a diminutive former Montessori teacher from New Jersey named Alice Waters (above) dared ask the question, “Why can’t the food in America taste the way it does in Europe?”
       Waters was thinking about how to stock her own restaurant pantry at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, but her ingenuously brash question challenged the American food industry, which more and more began responding to consumers’ desire for better, fresher, more flavorful and healthier foods. When coupled to the popularity of books like Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappé (1971) and the pronouncements about the healthfulness of the so-called Mediterranean Diet that stressed eating more vegetables, grains and oils over proteins and carbohydrates, the post-war baby boomers—many third- and fourth-generation children of immigrants—were relishing the “ethnic” foods of their own ancestors, leading to more interest and hunger for “real” Italian food, “real” Greek food, “real” Chinese food rather than the hybrid cuisines they had grown used to since the 1950s. At the same time, they were looking much further back to the 18^th and 19^th centuries for the kinds of grains, heirloom vegetables, fruits and sustainable foods that had somehow been shunned or even disappeared in many regions. There was a new interest in items like stone-ground grits, true country hams, a wide variety of chile peppers and artisanal cheeses.
       By the 1990s, Americans were well-read about food, allowing for the preparation of better and better examples of everything from shrimp remoulade and huevos rancheros to spaghetti aglio e olio and bulgur salads. The newspaper and food magazine pages were no longer filled with recipes that began with, “Open a can of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup. . . .” but instead insisted that a dish cannot be properly made using inferior frozen or canned ingredients. Amiable TV chef Julia Child took the fear of cooking away from timid American home cooks.
       As a result of more than 400 years of immigrant history, America has become not just the richest gastronomy in the world—one that ravenously accepts from other food cultures while influencing them in return—but one in which all those who accepted the challenge to come here contributed to and enjoyed. With all of them—from the seafarers of Alaska and the slaves of the South, the wheat-growing Swedes of the Plains and the Vietnamese boat people of Seattle, the cannoli-makers and pastrami-briners, the rollers of phyllo and the smokers of trout, the pretzel twisters and the tortilla pressers, every one of them has contributed to our vast and delectable potluck of so many wonderful things.

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NEW YORK CORNER

LA COLLINA
1431 First Avenue
646-449-9947n

Adriano Kercuku’s heart is in the right place, and so are his two upper east side restaurants, the three-year-old da Adriano and the brand new La Collina. I first tasted his cooking when he was executive chef at the high-end ristorante Casa Lever before it closed for a total rehab. It was fortuitous that it did, for he was able to go out on his own, and da Adriano was a small, trim gem of a trattoria that won over the neighborhood lacking in the style of rustic Italian food he was doing.

Owing to his success, he was able to open a new trattoria a bit further uptown, which is grander in size and highly convivial. You can tell that many of the guests have quickly adopted it as their own and are congratulating Kercuku on his new location.

During these still warm autumn nights, it is an enchantment to sit outside, since after 7 PM First Avenue is a fairly quiet street and inside the noise level is due to people simply having a good time. Within the restaurant's two connected, very comfortable dining rooms, in warm tones of terracotta.with wooden tables set with good glassware, wall sconces that cast a fine light, and wainscoting found in so many similar trattorias in Italy.

Kercuku decided that if people were going to expect pizza, he would create one of the very best in New York, with perfect crust and pliable interior topped with first-rate ingredients. Were it not so good, I would say just go for the antipasti, but go with three friends and enjoy everything to the hilt. Portions are generous and everybody shares.

La Collina offers an expanded menu from da Adriano, with some of the same favorite dishes. So, you should start off with the baseball-size arancini (above) rice ball stuffed with mozzarella, green peas and zucchini, aromatized with saffron and a tangy caper sauce; or the thinly sliced eggplant alla parmigiana in a tomato sauce with fresh basil.

All pastas are made on the premises, giving them the toothsome quality of those Roman favorites, tonnarelli alla cacio a pepe and spaghetti carbonara. And the kitchen turned out perfect orecchiette (below) with a lush pesto. I was so happy to see and taste a finely made saffron risotto (left). The linguine al vongole uses Manila clams rather than vongole, which would have been better. One of the dishes that the chef made his own was pappardelle alla chiantigiana of pasta made with coconut nibs, cooked with slowly braised beef and a tomato sauce with a balsamic red wine. And his new creation that I really love is maltagliati alla anatra, pasta with a slowly cooked duck ragù tomato sauce and Parmigiano.

A fish special one evening was orata cooked inside a parchment pouch, keeping all its juices in. Among the meats, there is an impeccable costoletta alla milanese, which takes over the plate and is topped with an amount of wild arugula, cherry tomatoes. Scallopine of veal in a lemon sauce was nothing special because its sauce was rather bland. And there is also a sliced sirloin steak with roasted potatoes.

There is a delicate and delicious pannacotta with mixed berry sauce for dessert. You can also have an affogato espresso with vanilla gelato.

The bar offers a wide variety of after dinner drinks. Including half a dozen grappas, while the wine list is hefty and many of the Italian bottlings are unfamiliar, and plenty of them under $80 a bottle.

La Collina (the hill) may remind you of other Italian restaurants on the upper east side, but this has a more casual cast and amiability that is very personalized, so that you might expect Kurkucu to be waiting for you outside when you arrive to greet newcomers and regulars with the same warm greeting.

Open daily for lunch and dinner.

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PEARL

The Mysterious Death of Janis Joplin

By John Mariani

CHAPTER SIX

       Katie spent the rest of the day at the pool at her hotel, had dinner downstairs at the café and flew back to New York the next morning. She called David, telling him the whole story Wright had spilled.
       “So, whaddaya think?” she asked.
       “If this was a cold case I was investigating I’d put it in a folder marked ‛B.S.’ Without this guy Mike to back anything up—and if there was any truth to it he probably told others and bragged about it—I don’t see anything further to investigate. Coroner’s report is a blind alley, Scotland Yard seemed to want no part of it. Doesn’t make much sense Jimi’s girl Monika would be so fast asleep that she wouldn’t notice Mike stuffing pills down her boyfriend’s throat.”
       “What if she was in on it?” asked Katie.
       “I take it she’s not alive either?”
       “That I don’t know.”
       “Well, if she is alive she certainly hasn’t spoken out about Tappy going around telling this story. Sounds to me like Tappy knows there’s nobody out there to contradict him, and you can’t libel the dead anyway, so he’s just trying to write a sensational book with a bunch of bullshit in it.”
       “Maybe you’re right, but the fact is the case was never closed. The official report is oddly incomplete. The body was never exhumed. It just all seems a bit too pat. Or maybe really fishy.”
       “Suit yourself, Katie. You need any help, you know where to find me.”

       Like most journalists, Katie carried around ideas for stories no one seemed interested to publish. That had been the case at first for several of the stories that eventually appeared in McClure’s and went on to win her awards and a reputation for fearlessness, even though putting her life in danger was the furthest thing from her mind. She had never covered a war, never went undercover, and, when on a story with David, neither ever carried a weapon. The ideas she came up with just seemed like a really interesting story with some mysterious element to it. Most involved events that had happened decades ago and had been pretty much forgotten. Yet the more she got involved, the more dangerous they became.
       So, while she continued to believe that there might well have been a connection among several of the cases involving rock stars’ death from drugs, most of the principals seemed dead or long gone. If there were any still alive, she couldn’t imagine her investigation could cause her any harm.
       Plus the fact that while she doggedly investigated stories like the one on Medvedev she’d worked on with her colleague Anne and those involving corrupt practices in various industries, she had never had any interest in stories about living celebrities but remained intrigued by those dead rock stars for reasons that went far beyond their pop culture sensationalism. It just seemed too easy to dismiss all the missing parts to each story and why the official investigations turned up nothing but a supposition that they were accidental or suicidal.
       She was determined to find anyone who could add pieces to what she saw as a jigsaw puzzle never completed. Finding out more about Sid Vicious seemed a good way to begin. But where?

Aside from the overnight obits and following flurry of sensational stories about Sid Vicious’s death, there had been little in the ensuing decade in the form of a biography or memoir until 1996 when Deborah Spungen, the mother of the longtime girlfriend Nancy whom Vicious was supposed to have murdered, wrote a wrenching, highly personal story entitled And I Don’t Want to Live This Life: A Mother’s Story of Her Daughter’s Murder; a year later Sid Vicious: Rock ‘n’ Roll Star by Malcolm Butt appeared. Then nothing.

The facts were, as usual, hazy, about how Vicious had died and who might have murdered Nancy. Katie went through the first reports about Vicious’s death and the next-day obits, which contained information from the police who arrived on the scene after the body had been discovered.

The bare facts of Vicious’s demise—he was born Simon John Ritchie—were that he had died from an overdose soon after getting out of prison for the alleged murder of his long-time girlfriend Nancy (left). Her death was itself clouded in mystery, and though Vicious confessed to killing her in the Chelsea Hotel, he was, as usual, so stoned that his confession—that they’d made a suicide pact—was suspect. There had been at least nine other people in the room at one point or another that night, coming and going, all high as the moon, all wanting to be in Vicious’s entourage.
Depending on who was telling the story, on his release from prison, Vicious immediately attended a party where he was offered a strong strain of heroin that, having been weaned off it in prison, was a jolt to his body, and that he took another dose on his own—or may have been provided by his drug-addicted mother Anne Beverley (right). He was found dead around eleven the next morning. There was much talk about the heroin being 100 percent pure, much higher than what Vicious had been used to.

       The coroner’s report confirmed the death as an overdose, as he'd reported to the investigating officer, Sgt. Richard Houseman (below), who’d arrived on the scene first. Katie wondered if Houseman were still alive to tell her what he’d seen that morning.
       She called David and asked if he knew Houseman, who would be somewhat older.
       “I never knew him,” said David. “We weren’t on the force at the same time, but I can check and see if he’s still kicking. I’ll call you back.”
       It wasn’t difficult finding out if Houseman was still kicking, and in addition it appeared that after retirement he’d moved to Great Neck, Long Island. David gave him a ring.
       Houseman was very cordial on the phone, saying he knew about David from his mob squad days and even more so since he’d made the papers assisting Katie in her adventures.
       “So, how can I help you, David?”
       When David told him, there was a brief pause on the line, then Houseman said, “Y’know, I always thought that kid didn’t off himself. I never believed it was an accident. But being in show biz, that’s the kind of shit that gets swept under the rug.”
       “Would you let Katie interview you?”
       “Absolutely. I’ve turned that thing over in my mind a thousand times since it happened. How about we have lunch out here on the Island? It’s a little tough for me to get around these days. You know Peter Luger’s?”
       “The Brooklyn steakhouse? Sure, but I never could get a table.”
       “I know, it’s ridiculous. People drive all the way out to freakin’ Brooklyn to eat there just because it’s impossible to get into unless you know someone. But what those same people don’t know is that if they drove a little farther east, there’s a Luger’s out here in Great Neck, and you can walk in and sit down for lunch any weekday without a reservation. You up for that?”
       David assuredly was and said he’d be happy to drive out there and pick Houseman up.
       “Tomorrow at 11:30?”
       “Done deal.”

VERY SUPERFICIAL
AMERICAN POP CULTURE IN THE SIXTIES
Chapter Three

By JOHN MARIANI

Even before rock-and-roll, there had been literature, music and films that enjoyed great popular success in the early Fifties based on the sensationalism of media promoting the idea that juvenile delinquents were taking over American society. Crime among America’s youth was becoming a major concern by the 1950s: One study estimated that half the thieves in New York and Los Angeles were under 21. In 1957 Herbert A. Block and Frank T. Flynn published Delinquency: The Juvenile Offender in America Today, pinning the blame on everything from hormones and comic books to absentee parents and broken homes.
Hollywood, of course, had earlier depicted juvenile delinquency as a lode for exploitation since the in the ‘30s, often blaming the deprivations of the Depression for wayward teenagers in films like The Mayor of Hell (1933), Wild Boys of the Road (1933) and Angels with Dirty Faces (1938). But the sensational newspaper and magazine imagery of the early ‘50s turned the juveniles into stereotypes: Leather jackets, blue jeans, black boots or pointy shoes called “shit-kickers,” white t-shirts and slicked-back hair showed splendidly in black-and-white movies, with menace added via switchblade knives, zip guns, bicycle chains and lead pipes. The visceral appeal of this new, menacing look, which would quickly take on homoerotic icon status, was hard for teenage boys to resist and teenage girls not to be titillated by. Teens-gone-wrong movies of the fifties included Running Wild (1955), Teen-age Crime Wave (1955), Teenage Rebel (1956), The Violent Years (1956), Untamed Youth (1957), Teenage Thunder (1957), The Cool and the Crazy (1958), Dragstrip Riot (1958), High School Confidential (1958), Girls Town (1959) and This Rebel Breed (1960), all made on low budgets in which good girls were often accosted and usually attracted to the bad boys or the girls were themselves bad, given to wearing similar outfits to the boys along with skin-tight skirts and sweaters, thick eyeliner and highly bleached blonde hair.

Two post-war movies, however, better budgeted and with emerging stars, had more than mere sensational appeal, with a greater depiction of the psychological duress their teenage characters were undergoing. One used a violent incident from the news as its subject, a Fourth of July weekend in 1947 when 4,000 members of the American Motorcyclist Association descended on the town of Hollister, California, where many got drunk and rioted. The event was the basis for a short story by Frank Rooney that in 1953 director László Benedek and producer Stanley Kramer used to make the first “biker”film called The Wild One for Columbia Pictures. The film was shot in black and white but was not a “B” movie. It starred a young movie star and Method Actor named Marlon Brando whose portrayal of Johnny Strabler, a cyclist in the Black Rebels Motorcycle Club, begins with his gang biking straight towards the audience in a classic stranger-rides-into-town motif. They roar into the fictional town of Wrightsville, a fight breaks out with an opposing gang, and, when a pursuing mob causes Johnny to fall from his bike, an elderly man is accidentally killed by the cycle. The police arrest Johnny and beat him, but he is freed and leaves town with his gang, just as he had ridden in.

Brando’s performance, done with a hipster’s Southern Cal accent, is both menacing and endearing to a local girl named Janie (Mary Murphy) whom he protects from the bikers. Its key scene is when Johnny is explaining why he rides with the gang:

Kathie: Where are you going when you leave here? Don't you know?
        Johnny: Oh man, we just gonna go.
        Kathie: Just trying to make conversation. It means nothing to me.
        Johnny: Well, on the weekends, we go out and have a ball.
        Kathie: And what do you do? I mean, do you just ride around? Or do you go on some sort of a picnic or something?
       Johnny: A picnic? Man, you are too square. I'll have to straighten you out. Now, listen, you don't go any one special place. That's cornball style. You just go. [He snaps his fingers.] A bunch gets together after all week, it builds up, you just. . .the idea is to have a ball. Now if you gonna stay cool, you got to wail. You got to put somethin' down. You got to make some jive. Don't you know what I'm talkin' about?
        Mildred: Hey, Johnny, what are you rebelling against?
        Johnny: What've you got?

That last line became famously emblematic in describing seemingly aimless postwar American youth intent on being “cool,” whatever that meant in any situation. Johnny’s character talks jive and seeks to break free of all social norms—at least on weekends; in fact, we know nothing of what he does during the week, when his persona might return to a conformist norm. His appearance is meant to be both utilitarian and off-putting, a style of counterculture that resembles but sexualizes that of California’s Highway Patrol cops (left). Johnny’s leather jacket has his name on it and is emblazoned with his gang’s logo of a skull with crossbones made from pistons; he wears a white t-shirt, bluejeans with the cuffs turned up, aviator sunglasses, gloves and he sports long sideburns; he wears an actual Highway Patrol cap at a jaunty angle. His outfit was the antithesis of what most Fifties American teenagers then wore—tan chinos, button-down shirts, white socks and sneakers, perhaps with a crew cut. The girl bikers follow suit with similar leather accessories in contrast to the starched, prim look of the town’s good girls.

      The Wild One had such an impact that it was parodied on TV, movies, even Mad comics (right). It also sparked an entire genre of biker movies to follow, most of them sleazy “B” pictures, many featuring female characters using the word “Angels” in the titles, like Angel (1958), The Wild Angels (1966), Devil’s Angels (1967), Angels from Hell (1968) and Hell’s Angels (1969), most of them lasciviously fetishizing the black leather outfits.
          The second most important film of the era dealing with neurotic teenagers to have a daunting effect on American culture was Rebel Without a Cause (1955), directed by Nicholas Ray and released in sunny Technicolor by Warner Bros., also about Southern California, but not the inner city. Starring another brilliant newcomer, James Dean, the main character, Jim Stark––the name is telling––has none of the bikers’ bravado. He is a middle-class high school student arrested for drunkenness whose psyche has been battered by indulgent but demanding parents who cannot imagine why he acts the way he does after being given every material gift and opportunity afforded children in post-war America.
        The trailer proclaimed the movie “Meets today’s most vital controversy!” The delinquents in the movie are fellow high students who badger and bully Jim as a newcomer, challenging him to a switchblade knife fight and to a game of “chicken,” in which two cars race towards the end of a cliff to show which driver has more guts. But a malfunction causes the other teenager’s car to hurdle over the hill, killing him. Another troubled student, named Plato, is shot down by the police when he confronts them with an unloaded gun.
      Because of its middle-class Los Angeles setting with its perfectly mowed lawns, palm trees and vast starry nights, Rebel Without a Cause was more troubling to adult audiences than the films of the more focused world of the biker gangs. James Dean played Jim Stark with an anguish never seen on the American screen before, incapable of opposing the status quo yet causing havoc wherever he goes. He rages uncontrollably at his parents’ bickering: “You’re tearing me apart!” and almost chokes his father to death on the living room floor.
      The success of Rebel quickly encouraged independent movie companies to cash in on the subject of road racing. Hot Rod Girl, made by Nacirema Productions ("American" spelled backwards), was a cheap knock-off that came out a year later (appearing on a double bill with Girls in Prison). The film focused on hot rod street racing in Los Angeles, with its poster ads promising "CHICKEN-RACE ... ROCK 'N ROLL ... YOUTH ON THE LOOSE! . . . "ARE THESE OUR CHILDREN? . . . teen-age terrorists tearing up the streets!" The next year Hot Rod Rumble came out, followed by Hot Rod Gang (1958) and The Wild Ride (1960), all very low budget films. By the 1960s the genre of “biker movies” exploded, with many in the soft porno category, with titles like Teenage Gang Debs (1966).

Two years after Rebel Without a Cause, the 1957 Broadway musical West Side Story by Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents married the established Blackboard Jungle-type urban delinquents to a Romeo-and-Juliet love story, and, by pitting white and Puerto Rican kids in New York against each other, adding a racial element at a time when fear of gang wars was rampant in the city. In a comic back-and-forth verbal battle, the Puerto Rican girls insist that “I like the shores of America!/Comfort is yours in America!/Knobs on the doors in America,/Wall-to-wall floors in America!” to which the boys answer, “Lots of doors slamming in our face” and that life is all right in America, “If you are white in America.”

In an equally comic take the white kids parody the public’s prevailing views on delinquency, explaining to the local policeman,

     Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke
     You gotta understand
     It's just our bringin' up-ke
     That gets us out of hand
     Our mothers all are junkies
     Our fathers all are drunks
     Golly Moses, naturally we're punks!. . . .
     Gee, Officer Krupke, we're very upset;
     We never had the love that every child oughta get
     We ain't no delinquents
     We're misunderstood
     Deep down inside us there is good!. . . .

     My father is a bastard
     My ma's an S.O.B
     My grandpa's always plastered
     My grandma pushes tea
     My sister wears a mustache
     My brother wears a dress
     Goodness gracious, that's why I'm a mess!. . . .

     Gee, Officer Krupke,
     We're down on our knees
     'Cause no one wants a fellow with a social disease.
     Gee, Officer Krupke,
     What are we to do?
     Gee, Officer Krupke,
     Krup you!

Such self-satire provided the teenage gangs of West Side Story an anti-hero’s justification for the reasons they turned to violence but also gave them a feverish, romantic edge—and dazzling dance routines—that distinguished them from the thrumming menace of Leith Stevens’s sound track for The Wild One and the dissonance of Leonard Rosenman’s score for Rebel Without a Cause.

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NOTES FROM THE WINE CELLAR

WHAT'S NEW IN BURGUNDY?

I received a report about something rare and significant among the grape growers of Burgundy, and, rather than summarize it, I thought it better to publish the whole announcement.––John Mariani

At the end of September, near Rully, the Bourgogne Wine Board* inaugurated a plot to test eight varieties resistant to downy mildew and powdery mildew. The CEPINNOV programme, launched in 2015, has just reached a new milestone. After ten years of research and selection, three white-berry varieties and five black-berry varieties have been planted under real vineyard conditions on a 17-are plot (0.42 acres).

These new grape varieties have been developed through natural crossbreeding between varieties carrying genes for resistance to downy and powdery mildew and Bourgogne’s iconic grape varieties, Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. The aim is to combine greater resistance to these two major vine diseases with the distinctive qualities of Bourgogne’s traditional grape varieties.

The selection process began with 16,000 seeds, which were studied to identify those carrying the required resistance genes. From 2018, an initial selection led to the planting and study of more than 350 varieties. Year after year, the most promising were selected for their agronomic characteristics- particularly disease resistance - as well as their oenological and organoleptic qualities. Eight of them are now being put to the test in the vineyard. And this is only the beginning.

More than 100 vines of each variety have been planted. They will be monitored under real vineyard conditions. The harvested grapes will be vinified and may then be blended, at a maximum proportion of 10%, into wines that will subsequently be tasted and evaluated. Additional varieties will join the plot each year until 2029. Ultimately, around 40 varieties will be assessed.

Run jointly with Champagne, which shares several grape varieties with Bourgogne, CEPINNOV aims to reduce the use of plant-protection products while preserving the typicity of the wines. A mirror plot will also be planted in Champagne to compare how the same grape varieties perform in the two wine regions.

If the trials are successful, some varieties could be selected for their ability to meet the objectives and added to the French catalogue of grape varieties by 2035. Some Bourgogne AOCs could then add them to their specifications under the VIFA scheme (varieties of interest for adaptation purposes).
As “secondary grape varieties”, they would be limited to a maximum of 10% of the blend.

This interregional programme is led by the Bourgogne Wine Board and Comité Champagne, with support from the Chambre d’Agriculture de Saône-et-Loire and Lycée de Fontaine.

* Managed by elected members, the Bourgogne Wine Board (BIVB) brings together the wine region’s two families – viticulture and négoce – in order to define strategic aims. It comprises 266 maisons de négoce, 16 cooperative cellars, and 3,577 wine-producing estates.The trade board represents and defends the interests of Bourgogne wine producers. To that end, it carries out initiatives involving those in the trade and wine lovers, while at the same time providing technical support and market advice to wine professionals. Subjected to state financial control, the BIVB has an annual budget of around 10 million euros. Its revenue comes from obligatory subscriptions paid by wine professionals, which vary according to the category of appellation and the quantities produced.

MARIANI'S VIRTUAL GOURMET NEWSLETTER is published weekly. Publisher: John Mariani. Editor: Walter Bagley. Contributing Writers: Christopher Mariani, Misha Mariani, John A. Curtas, Gerry Dawes, Geoff Kalish. Contributing Photographer: Galina Dargery. Technical Advisor: Gerry McLoughlin.