I love pizza!

I love pizza. I don’t remember how this romance started, perhaps it was because of a stint I spent when I was young living near New Haven, Connecticut. My mother was reaching the point in her life where she was resenting cooking (though she was a great cook) and I filled in the spaces with pepperoni pizzas from a nearby pizza joint, named (as they always were at the time) “Tony’s Pizza”. I still remember the hot ovens with the smell of tomato and oregano with the rudimentary counter, all the boxes stacked up against the wall. Each pie “Tony” made for me was a perfectly rendered American pepperoni pizza. I don’t remember ever ordering anything else. I think a 12″ round cost $2.70 US. Those were the days.

My range increases

When I got so I could drive New Haven came into the picture where there were legendary pizza “restaurants”. My favorite was Frank Pepe’s. I usually hated clams but for some reason at Pepe’s my favorite was their white pizza, spread with a generous helping of the slimy little animals. It was probably the garlic, olive oil, and the parmesan (romano?) that attracted me, a sure combination. Pepe didn’t go in for any obvious aesthetic. The pizza was served on a rectangular aluminum serving tray with parchment paper, and there were diner-style booths for sitting. But the crust was to die for. Pepe had a legendary coal oven with a baking chamber the size of a small car, and to add to the drama pizzas were placed in it with ultra-long-handled peels. I’ve never seen another place quite like Pepe’s. The crusts came out a bit charred; not pretending to be a Naples ripoffs but being happy just being themselves, as they should have been.

Moving north from Connecticut

But I didn’t last long in Connecticut, and further north in Greenfield Massachusetts was a non-imposing but favorite stop on my pizza journey called “Village Pizza”. It was run by a welcoming family who in retrospect seem like they were Greek and the pizzas were traditional style, a bit like Tony’s. Either I had graduated to more sophisticated toppings by then or it was just a fancier place. My friend Stephen, who went on to be a food editor, found the place and for years I’d stop every time I was going by Greenfield. There were seats to sit down, but for me it was more a place to drop in on while driving north on I-91 and get back on the road with the warm smell of a fresh pizza filling the car. Nothing could be better.

The wasteland that was Vermont

But “north”, where I was living, was Vermont and there no one had heard of pizza in the early 70s, unless it came as a dry frozen food relic. In those days you were lucky if you could find green vegetables in stores. I mostly ate food out of a food coop called The Do-It store. It was in 1973 when I tried baking my first home-made pizza. The girlfriend I had then fed me mostly a sludge of something called “Tiger’s Milk” and I was desperate for anything that came from the shores of the Mediterranean. My cooking skills were about as limited as the available ingredients. But to augment our diet along with the Tiger’s Milk we had a cookbook by Frances Moore Lappé called “Diet for a Small Planet”. The cookbook was pushing some theory of complementary grain proteins but more importantly, for me, it had a pizza “recipe”. Unfortunately the ingredient list called for a mostly cornmeal crust. I remember laboring over this inedible monstrosity of a recipe for several months before I concluded that it wasn’t for me, as were a lot of the other recipes in that book. We split up before I died of hunger but it was shortly after that time that I started doing wheat-crust pizzas. By the late 70s I had my own pizza peel and was regularly smoking up the kitchen with my then-messy technique.

Putting pizza into context

My patient and loving wife, Beth, has eaten what we calculate to be between 2 and 3 thousand of those pizzas since the late 70s. Wherever we travel we look for good pizza, from non-presumptuous joints to fancy sit-down restos. I love other people’s pizzas too and have friends who make wonderful renditions. Tia, whose family roots extend into Chicago, makes a fantastic deep-dish that we always laugh wildly over. Her husband, who is Italian, loves pizza too (of course) and he and I have pizza-eaten together as far west as Anaheim CA in our shared journey. Closer to home, Ed makes a wonderful Naples ripoff in his super-charged backyard oven. In New York I was friends with a guy who worked at John’s when it was first starting up, and there the waiters (including him, he was one) used to get up on the tables and dance, so there was never any lack of excitement. So I have really good pizza friends, and at the top among them is Beth.

Pizza as a universal food source

I know that pizza is a topic a lot of people have strong opinions about, so I think it would be fun to do an intermittent series of posts about my journey through pizza. Cooking it, searching for the perfect pizza, and sharing our pizza journeys and the love of the warm smell of a freshly baked pie, along with recipes.