A Legacy Project

I knew I was supposed to like it. I wanted to like it. But the whole experience left me wondering–What’s the big fuss? Is this all there is?

No, not first sex. I’m talking about first pizza.

It seems unthinkable that I could have reached the age of 12 or 13 and never had pizza. But there was no pizzeria in the small town where I was raised. This was pre-Dominoes, pre-Little Caesars, pre-Piazza Hut, before any of those popular chains. Even if they had existed, I would have still been a newbie. Our family didn’t carry out or order in. We didn’t go to out eat much. When we did, we didn’t experiment. We didn’t eat ethnic, except for Sweden House, and nothing there looked or seemed even vaguely Swedish. It looked like what we ate at home. 

So the night I was at the Schillings house and Susan, 3-4 years older, announced she was going to make a pizza, I was excited. Pizza ingredients came out of a Chef Boyardee box. Inside there was a 4-ounce can of tomato sauce, a little bag of grated cheese, and a slightly larger bag of dough mix. Just add water and stir. It was easy as pie. The dough Susan produced, following Chef’ Boy R’s instructions, was a pale sticky paste she smeared on a baking sheet. The sauce was seasoned with tiny bits of green stuff floating in it, which must have been oregano. Spread over the dough, in a certain slant of light this sauce had a distinct chemical sheen. When Susan ripped open the bag of cheese, its pungent bouquet filled the small kitchen. She smiled and said, Mmmm, parmezon. Fifteen minutes later, what came out of an oven heated to 350 had the consistency of a thick cracker. She cut it, we dug in. I scorched the roof of my mouth with boiling hot cheese goo. There were five of us. We all got a taste and agreed it was delicious. 

No It wasn’t.

A few years later I would go to Tony’s Pizzeria down in Saginaw. It was next to an Italian market called Provenzano’s. There must have been authentic Italian-American fare at Tony’s. If there was, I never noticed. When 3-4 of us guys went with whoever had a driver’s license, I followed the crowd and ordered the steak sandwich. It came with a thin slice of chewy beef slathered with red sauce, on slices of thick white bread. I’m sure they must have had pizza, and spaghetti, and maybe even lasagna, but I don’t recall ever seeing anything like that. By the time I graduated from high school, at the edge of Saginaw Township was a carry-out place called Luigi’s. No one ever said, “Hey, let’s get some Luigi’s!” It might have been good. It might have been Domino’s quality (which today some would regard as a contradiction in terms), but pizza was not on my culinary radar screen. I was more of less a pizza virgin until I went away to college.