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Pizza!

 


My first experience with pizza was not something to celebrate.  I was maybe five years old. I think our family had been out bowling. Not something we did very often. I was terrible at it, but then, I was five. I suspect the rest of my family wasn’t a whole lot better.  Like I said, we didn’t do it very often. But after bowling (I think it was bowling, but I may be confusing it with some other outing. It was a long time ago) we went out for pizza.

This was the early 1960’s and the world was a very different place. Pizza was somewhat rare. I think we had only one pizza parlor in town. We were at that time, the 4th largest city in Oregon, and only one pizza parlor (that’s what we called them back then. Pizza parlors. No, I have no idea why, when the only other thing I remember being called a parlor, was a funeral parlor. That’s not creepy at all). I recall I had some trouble with the word “pizza” as it was not a word I had ever heard before. But I must have been excited at trying something new and different and exotic.

I hated it.

The crust was cracker thin, hard, and bland. The toppings were way too spicy for me. My parents had ordered a “Combination”. I doubt there was a wide selection of different kinds of pizzas to choose from. None of us having a vast experience with pizza, a Combination probably seemed like the safe bet. It probably had sausage and pepperoni and all kinds of things that were a horror to a five year-old pallet. My theory is that taste buds get less acute as you get older. The more you abuse them with spices, the deader they get. So, a five-year-old with brand new taste buds is going to be way more sensitive to spices than an adult. In any event, it was not something I liked and I had no intention of ever trying it again.

Sometime in the next five or six years, my attitude changed about pizza. It had to have involved trying a pizza that did not have pepperoni on it. In fact, I am almost sure that the pizza I fell in love with had Canadian bacon on it. It would have been Canadian bacon with tomatoes, not pineapple. Later I was to discover the controversy of putting pineapple on pizza. I have no strong feelings on the pineapple controversy. It is not my favorite topping, but if somebody hands me a slice with Canadian bacon and pineapple, I will probably eat it.

I wasn’t lying when I said the pizza experience of yesterday is not like the pizza experience of today. Now, even small towns have multiple pizza venues, some still call themselves “parlors” but those are rare. And the choices of the different kinds of pizzas have exploded. It’s like what Baskin-Robbins did for ice cream. There are specialty pizzas and regional pizzas. Like Jazz, New York’s version is different than Chicago’s and they are both probably different than what is produced in Italy, which has its own regional differences.

Pizza has gone from one of my least favorite foods to one of my most favorite. I make no apologies. Deal with it.

Star Liner

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