Before my grandfather came to the US he was a mechanic in the Midlands. He fancied himself fashionable, and ran around with the local motorcycle club. Road tripping and camping around the country and generally scandalizing nuns. Which was easy cause he lived across the street from a convent.
Sometime in the late 30’s or early 40’s the Irish press got very excited about the first restaurant in Dublin to serve spaghetti. And my grandfather decided he needed to be the first man from Tullamore to eat pasta.
So he and a couple buddies put on their Sunday best and lit off towards Dublin on the bikes. The restaurant was apparently quite schmancy, called the Green Rooster. So they get a table and order the spaghetti without even looking at the menu.
What they were served was four over cooked spaghetti noodles laid over a piece of toast. No sauce. No accompaniment.
A friend from China was exposed to pizza in parties at lab, but had never ordered it for herself. She decided to order her own to take home. She went to a pizza place, and they handed it to her in a box, and she promptly put it under her arm like a book to take home, pizza box perpendicular to the ground. She figured out when she got home why they had given her odd looks when she did that.
That accurately described the abomination that I was fed in primary school (without the anchovies). I thought I hated pizza for six years until I found out that it was something completely different.
My grandmother was surprised by how classy the old Pizza Huts were in the early 80s when they were still hut-shaped - international cuisine and a salad bar was pretty exotic in early 80s suburban Perth. At the time the only international fast food was Chinese takeout, tho American Burger chains we becoming increasingly more common.
One thing about the U.S. is that the most delicious (not always, but if you look hard enough) easy shit-food is available, The idea of a world devoid of saucy, mushroomed, meat-balled pasta is unthinkable to me (add a load of spinach and goat cheese to the sauce, you’ll thank me). And a vague, alien idea of pizza? Uhhhh, horrors!
Incidentally, I’ve made a fetish of homemade pizzas. Peter Reinhart’s book is really helpful with the dough. Still, in New England, there is a very acceptable frozen pizza newly available: https://americanflatbreadproducts.com/pizzas/?pizza=12-pizza
Not a shill, just surprised that there is an acceptable frozen pizza in this world, so I’d like that world to know so that they aren’t discontinued, like everything else I’ve ever liked…'cept Guinness.
Thanks for the book recommendation. I’m a terrible baker and haven’t quite figured out home made. Despite having worked for a very good commercial baker and pizzaiolo from Brooklyn. He likes to talk shop and I learned a surprising amount about different flours and general pizza theory. But never got around to getting proper pizza lessons.
Ah, I know where Angell is - nearly transferred Kidd Jr. there when I started working downtown.
I’ll have to quiz some townies about a third theater - the Michigan snd State are it for downtown. Was it on S. University? Maybe it was replaced by the abomination that housed Tower Records back in the day. (Look at street view of South U today, you won’t recognize it.)
oh my, finally something I can actually comment on with personal experience.
I lived in Limerick back in 2008, just a street away from a chain pizza store called 4star Pizza or something like that.
It had the single most expensive and horrid pizza I have ever had the displeasure to pay money for. If I remember well an order there went up to 25 Euros for nothing but a small pizza and a coke.
come to think of it, no wonder my home made pizza got so many fans, people were just starved for something that actually tasted like pizza.
Pizza was not the only thing that was desperate about food there, Limerick was actually a rather pleasant experience, but restaurant food was horribly overpriced and often just not very good. Even the cantina food in my college was pretty bad, and I think it says something that they considered a burger with fries to be the healthy option of the day (I wish I had made a picture of that sign back then)
Pizza in most of (northern?) Europe is almost exclusively an American import.
If you go into an Italian restaurant in the UK you can get an Italian style pizza, but thirty years ago it probably wouldn’t have made the menu, because it just wasn’t a well known dish until it was imported from the US.
I remember my mum making them at home in the 1980’s (probably from a recipe out of a magazine), and however she made the base, it was probably quite close to a scone mix. Quite hard and brittle, except where it had absorbed the tomato juice where it would get soggy and fall apart. We never had food delivered because we lived too far out of town. At one point my little brother came down to visit me at university, and insisted we order pizzas, because he had never had food delivered. This was around 2000-2001.
In the last thirty years though it’s become something of a staple food (us Brits are quite good at stealing other country’s foods, just look at Tikka Masala). My local chain even does stuffed-crust pizza, where the stuffing is a hotdog.
I grew up in New Haven but I’ve lived in Boston for about half my life now. It was a difficult pizza transition. Regina’s is fine, and there are some good gourmet pizza places where you’ll pay $25 for a fancy 14" pie, but it’s not the same. (I haven’t been to the new Chain Pepe’s Spinoff in the Chestnut Hill Mall yet)
IIRC, before Pizza Hut was bought by Pepsi in 1977, they had a rolling oven delivery van (think one of those big bakery/SWAT vans but with the red, peaked roof) that patrolled some Wichita neighborhoods during the dinner hour. If you called in simple orders, like pepperoni, they’d radio the van, which brought a piping hot pizza within minutes.
I was in a sort of trendy eatery recently that offered something like a pizza, but on a Croissant pastry base. I don’t know if this is a common dish among the youth of today; but it certainly looked appetizing.
