I have never been able to join the debate between Chicago Pizza and New York Pizza. Or New Haven Pizza or deep dish pizza or tavern style pizza or thin crust pizza or ketchup-on-toast pizza (what your thin crust people call pizzas made with a breadlike crust). I have recently realized why this is. And the revelation is fairly startling.
Because I like pizza. I do know people who do NOT like pizza, a claim I regard as odd as saying you don’t like cheese. There are so many different kinds of pizza that there really ought to be something that…. But that’s the heart of my story.
You wouldn’t think I’d grow up to like pizza. See, as best I can recall, my introduction to pizza was a dish my grade school hot lunch ladies referred to as “Pizza Meat and Cheese”. I assume there was supposed to be a semicolon or a dash in there, but that was the way they wrote it on the menu and I shall not meddle with it. Our hot lunch ladies were a hardworking crew, and some of the dishes they created linger in a rosy glow in my memory to this day.
I am not the only one, apparently, for at some point, they published a cookbook of their biggest hits. These were scaled down, of course, since you are probably not preparing food for what, in my day, amounted to a thousand children each day. And they included “Pizza Meat and Cheese.” This dish is HEARTY. No wonder they gave us only a three-inch square of the stuff. It requires two types of meat, two types of cheese, and ideally results in a crusty orange top I have seen on no other pizza ever. The scaled down recipe provided me and a sibling with one meal and leftovers for use throughout the ensuing two weeks.
My next pizza was frozen pizza, something my mother figured would be quick and warm for a winter weekend lunch. The only brand available was Roma, a thin crust pizza with sausage and a cheese that did not brown. Ever. Cook it too long and it would blacken, but otherwise it was as pale white as I was in those days when the teachers would send home notes demanding I be checked for anemia. If you let it cool, the grease would congeal into little green puddles, especially on top of the little round sausage pennies. This tasted exactly the same and did not in the least discourage me, despite my deserved reputation as a picky eater. Later on, Roma, facing competition from new frozen pizzas, upgraded the recipe to enable the cheese to brown and providing less colorful grease, but it never tasted the same. (I was bereft except for a brief period in grad school when the cafeteria served a identical pizza, right down to the anemic cheese.)
I moved on from pizza to pizza, encountering pepperoni in a minced state on one of the new frozen brands, and discovering another sibling’s favorite delivery order (ham and onion, extra cheese). Pizza place pizzas followed, including all you can eat pizza buffets (I did my very best to lower their profit margin), artisanal pizzas (sliced potato and rosemary?), Only in America pizzas (Thai Chicken Taco Pizza), Wal-Mart pizza, grocery store hot bar pizza, Australian pizza, folded pizza (ALMOST but not quite a calzone), unsliced pizza, pizza with dipping sauce for those bits of crust with nothing on them, salami pizza, hot dog penny pizza, hot honey pizza…and although there were a tiny number of losers in the batch (I have learned to shy away from anything called “authentic”) I’d have to say my pizza memories are as golden as the crust on top of that elementary school hot lunch square.
The verdict of my nearest and dearest is that I am not so much a gourmet as a gourmand (which Cajun TV chef Justin Wilson translated as “P-I-G, hog”.) I prefer to think of my tastes as eclectic. Let a competent cook prepare something with cheese, crust, a modest amount of sauce, and, by preference, sausage (plus seating where there is nobody counting how many slices I put on my plate), and I am content.
Mind you, this largely ignores the question of homemade pizza. So if you came into this blog expecting to find my top secret recipe for chicken liver pizza, well, you will have to wait. I know, I know. But I still don’t have clearance from the United Nations Security Council.
Blogsy Babbles 