Colosimo's Chicken Vesuvio
Preheat oven to 425˚.
Cut 3 large russet potatoes lengthwise into 6 wedges.
Heat 1/3 cup olive oil in a Dutch oven. Add the potato wedges and saute until golden brown, then remove and put aside.
Quarter a 3.5 to 4 pound roasting chicken. Sprinkle the chicken pieces with 1 tablespoon fresh oregano, 1 teaspoon garlic powder, salt and pepper to taste.
Add the chicken to the pot and brown until golden on all sides. Add 6 large whole garlic cloves (or 6 minced garlic cloves if you
really like garlic) and continue to saute for 2 to 4 minutes, until the garlic starts to turn golden. Remove chicken and drain on paper towels.
Return potatoes and chicken to the pot and add 1/4 cup dry white wine, and continue cooking for several minutes. The wine will whoosh up in a cloud of steam, "like Mt. Vesuvius." It will bring up all the bits of potato and chicken that are stuck to the pot and make gravy. Cover the pot tightly and put it in the oven to bake for 30 minutes. Then remove the pot, add one cup of defrosted frozen peas, and bake for 5 minutes more. Arrange potatoes and peas around the chicken on a serving platter, pour remaining gravy over the chicken and serve.
Here it is:
http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc193/prouditaliancook/ckvesuvioinpanwithhandle.jpg
This isn't fine Italian cooking. Marcella Hazan would turn up her nose at this simple Italian-American dish. When you ask old guys in the restaurant business, some claim they invented it themselves, but most agree it was originated here in Chicago at
Colosimo's.
Giacomo "Big Jim" Colosimo came to Chicago in 1895, a likely lad of 18. He had been a pickpocket, pimp and protection extortionist in Calabria, and he wanted to better himself in the New World. He got a room on Taylor Street and a street sweeping job with the city. His quick fists and quick wits soon made him a foreman, and brought him to the attention of 1st Ward Alderman "Bathhouse John" Coughlin, who made him a precinct captain and bagman.
While collecting the alderman's payoffs, Big Jim met Victoria Moresco. Victoria was a successful madam; she was looking for a cute young guy with enough muscle to keep order in her brothel, and a little brains to go with the brawn. They married in 1902, immediately opened a second brothel, and then quickly added two more. With the help of friends and relations in New York, Milwaukee and Italy, they organized a "white slavery" ring. This racket, in which poor immigrant girls are lured with phony job offers and then beaten, raped and terrorized into brothel work, is still very much alive in Chicago and elsewhere. Big Jim was a natural genius at pimping and white slavery. By 1909 he and Vicky owned two hundred brothels, and they needed some serious firepower.
Black Hand extortionists and other hoodlums were bombing his classier joints. Big Jim had muscle on his payroll, but he needed a major league player, someone who could terrorize the local gangsters the way he terrorized the girls in his houses. He sent for Vicky's nephew Johnny Torrio in New York. Johnny had been personally trained by Paul Kelly (Paolo Vaccarelli) in New York's Five Points gang. He massacred the Black Hand in the Archer Avenue viaduct under the Rock Island Railroad tracks. (Never meet anyone in a viaduct!) Other gangsters who tried to bleed Big Jim turned up floating or simply disappeared.
Like many pimps before and since, Big Jim secretly dreamed of being a celebrity. As a successful restauranteur, he could rub shoulders with the rich and famous; it would be his entree to High Society. In 1910, with Johnny Torrio guarding his back, he opened
Colosimo's Restaurant & Cafe at 2126-2128 South Wabash.
And guess what? Big Jim was even better as a restaurant and nightclub owner than he was as a pimp!
Colosimo's soon acquired an international reputation, it was
the place to go in Chicago. Big Jim loved opera and had a fine singing voice. The Great Caruso was his friend and his guest, and so was Tetrazzini, Galli-Curci, and John McCormack. Flo Ziegfeld and George M. Cohan, Al Jolson and Gentleman Jim Corbett. The Palmers and the Fields, the Barrymores and Clarence Darrow. The politicians and the gangsters! But only the classy ones, the ones who could keep up a front. In 1915, Big Jim turned over day-to-day brothel management to Johnny Torrio. The brothels made money like never before, and Big Jim opened a second Colosimo's in Burnham.
Prohibition began January 1, 1920, and the partners in crime had different ideas about the future of their business. Johnny Torrio and his new-hired enforcer Al Capone wanted to focus on big-time bootlegging. Big Jim was happy with his brothels and Colosimo's. He'd just divorced Victoria and he was about to marry Dale Winter, the 19 year-old singer with the Cafe's house band. Dale was a real cutie.
Johnny Torrio had made Big Jim too rich. He didn't want a bootleg turf war, he just wanted to enjoy what he had.
Johnny needed an outsider to solve his problem, someone with a face nobody knew in Chicago. He called his ex-partner in New York, Frankie Yale (Francesco Ioele). Frankie was the man who trained Al Capone and a stone killer. On May 11, 1920, a week to the day after the wedding, Johnny called Big Jim and asked him to open Colosimo's early and sign for a bootleg delivery. Jim's Pierce-Arrow limo took him to the kitchen entrance. He walked through the dining room to his office, where his secretary and the chef told him that one of the trucks was already waiting in front. As he walked through the dark foyer to unlock the restaurant's front door, Frankie Yale stepped out of the cloakroom behind him and put two slugs in the back of his head.
I've attached some souvenir postcards. On the left is the Cafe entrance at 2128 South Wabash; next the Cafe, or nightclub; next the restaurant; and last, a private dining room. Isn't that great? Wouldn't you like to go there for some Chicken Vesuvio? I could go for it right now!
