MAMMA MARGHERITA!

Is there a more endlessly reinventable food than pizza? Tamar Adler tries a few of the country's most beloved, creative, and craved-after new pies.

- Tamar Adler

It happened the way Hemingway described bankruptcy: gradually and then suddenly. I was a young Brooklynbased food writer cataloging differences between crusts at Saraghina and Motorino while nibbling a slice from Roberta's hopping nimbly onto my red steel Specialized for a second slice at Joe's or Di Fara or Best Pizza. Then I was married, pregnant, living upstate, ignorant of the changing nature of American pizza. Such ignorance may seem trivial in your line of work. In mine, it's fatal. Pizza is the defining food of our country, the key to the American gestalt. Unbeknownst to me, it was evolving, severing ties with tradition in some cases while fixing firmly to others, all at the hands of chefs whose names I didn't recognize. Meanwhile, I was making baby food.

My son's now eight. He's (basically) asking for the car keys and heading out for the evening. And I'm determined to scour the country for the bleeding edge of pizza. To explain my mission to my husband, I used the words of another great American man of letters, Washington Irving: "I was myself last night, but I fell asleep on the mountain.... Everything's changed, and I'm changed." I took his stunned countenance as comprehension, and bought a plane ticket to Oregon.