Pizza tales

The other day at work a student from Egypt told me that ordering a pizza for a home meal is not a common experience in his country, which started me thinking about pizza and how ingrained it is in our national life style, and that got me thinking about my personal history with it. Kind of a circular history, since I’ve pretty much ended up back where I started.

And where is that? Since you asked, I’ll tell you.

Some of my younger readers (do I have any of those?) might be surprised to know that even someone (ahem) as young as me can remember a time before pizza became our unofficial national food. According to the Ultimate Authority (also known as Wikopedia), pizza started to become a common American food in the mid 1950’s. Not in Springfield, Illinois, though. It must have been around 1954 that my Aunt Dora and her daughter came to visit from St. Louis, Missouri, and were absolutely scandalized to learn that not only did our town not have any place from which to order this pseudo-Italian delicacy, but that my mother had no idea what a pizza was. No, wait, I must be remembering this wrong. Not about my mother, about the pizza availability situation. We had to have at least one pizzeria in town by then, maybe a tiny shop on a dark corner in an otherwise empty part of town where we had never ventured, because somehow Aunt Dora found it and brought pizza into our home for the first time. Our reaction? Yech! We did not like it, not at all.

I felt like the main character in Green Eggs and Ham, even though that book hadn’t yet been published. “I do not like this pizza pie, I do not like it, that’s no lie. I don’t like pizza hot or cold. I don’t like pizza new or old. I do not like it with a pop. I do not like it so please stop. I do not like it, Auntie dear. You can have the rest. Here!”

Eventually my mother decided that since most of the country was becoming pizza crazed, maybe the stuff couldn’t be all bad. She wasn’t about to spend money ordering it ready made, though. Instead she would go to the grocery store and buy do-it-yourself pizza. The ingredients for the dough were in a box, and maybe the tomato sauce, but apparently not the cheese because she used to make it with American cheese. Somehow that didn’t enhance pizza’s taste value for me. “I don’t like pizza from a box, I’d rather have a bagel and lox. I don’t like pizza with this cheese, so you can take my portion, please!”

A few years later, my father hooked up with a man named Bernie who was a chef from Chicago and together they opened a small pizza restaurant in Springfield. They called it Bernie and Betty’s, which I guess they figured would sound somewhat more euphonious than Dave and Molly’s, if not more Italian. Bernie’s pizza is what finally won me over. His pies were topped with giant pieces of green pepper and onion and mushroom, and some kind of really yummy seasoning. The sauce was delicious. The cheese was great. The crust was just right. I loved the stuff! So much that for many years I didn’t like anyone else’s pizza. I’d eat it, of course – Pizza Hut or Shakey’s or whatever if that’s all I could get – but always with wistful remembrance of Bernie’s creations.

I wasn’t alone in my admiration. More than once – meaning at least twice – I overheard strangers discussing the pizza options in Springfield and raving about Bernie and Betty’s. Bernie died long ago but when my dad sold the restaurant he also sold the recipe, so Bernie’s pizza has lived on after him in all its unique glory. (The restaurant is still there, with the same name, much larger now and with a full menu of pasta dishes and such.)

It’s all my dad’s and Bernie’s fault, therefore, that I became a typical American pizza addict, always happy for an excuse to order and, no longer living in Springfield, willing to call or visit just about any restaurant. Except one. Which shall remain nameless. My daughter and I ordered from that place one night when we were living in the Chicago area. I don’t know why I went along with calling them since I already knew I didn’t like their product. And when it came, I took maybe two bites and quit. Me, quit eating? That’s unheard of. Except now you’ve all heard of it, but it’s probably the only time that ever happened. But heck, the stuff tasted like cardboard covered with tomato sauce. It’s a good thing for this particular chain that my opinion was the minority one, because amazingly (to me) it’s still in business,

Now we get to the day in 1999 when I became a delivery driver for Pizza Hut. This was in Galesburg, Illinois where I was finding it very difficult to get a job that provided a livable wage, and having become used to living on tips as a waitress, was willing to try doing the same as a driver. I worked there for 16 months, until I moved to Urbana after the Fast Food Hell accident you read about last week. And that experience was probably the beginning of the end of my love affair with pizza. First because it was way too available. Every time the cooks made a mistake, such as putting the wrong topping on a pizza someone had ordered, they would place the mistake on a table in the delivery area and we were all welcome to it. And the cooks made enough mistakes – inadvertently or (maybe?) on purpose – to provide a continuous selection of pies for employee munching. In that environment I quickly stopped thinking of pizza as a special fun food.

Plus I was dazed and amazed and appalled to learn how much America depends on pizza. Many households would order pizza as their family meal three or four times a week. Ordinary people, as far as I could tell. Where did they get that kind of money? And when were they getting any real nutrition? And why didn’t they tip better?

OK, just kidding about that last one. Actually tipping was pretty good. Some of the drivers would grouse loud and long whenever they got “stiffed,” but I sided with the ones who preferred to take it all in stride. After all, I had basically lived on tips for five years as a waitress, and had learned to accept the bad with the good and be happy as long as it all evened out. Also in that job tips were pretty much everything because waitress minimum hourly wage was legally several dollars below regular minimum wage. As a driver, on the other hand, I got less in tips but earned standard minimum wage as well as gas allowance. And of course all the pizza I could eat. Can’t forget that.

Delivering anything in Galesburg is quite a challenge because whoever laid out the town and assigned street numbers to the houses must not have known how to count. In most towns, at least ones where I’ve lived, the houses are numbered pretty logically. If the first one is 1401, the next one is 1403, then comes 1405, and so on. In Galesburg, it’s more likely to go like this. 1411, 1419, 1427, 1429, 1441, and then on the next corner, 1444. I’m not kidding. Just try finding 1444, where they are expecting hot pizza in a reasonable amount of time, when you can’t use basic math to calculate which house it will be and can’t see the house numbers because they are too small or too dark or hidden behind tree branches, or all three.

Another test of skill for Galesburg delivery drivers are the trains. Galesburg started out as a railroad town and must have more train tracks per capita than any city in the U.S. In order to get your deliveries made in a timely fashion, you had to calculate how to avoid streets crossed by train tracks and instead choose streets that ran under tracked viaducts. But sometimes there were just no good option. One day I literally was unable to get to my customer. Every way I tried to go was blocked by a million-mile long train that either wasn’t moving or was moving very slowly. I was triangulated by three different tracks. Me and a rapidly cooling pizza, destined for a hungry and unhappy and soon to be unhappier diner when he or she bit into a cold pizza.

Then there are the dogs. Dogs are an occupational hazard for delivery people, at least for delivery people like yours truly who doesn’t much like dogs and basically is scared of them. There was a family who lived out in the country, one of the families who ordered about every other day. The first time I drove into their yard (yard, no driveway) my car was immediately surrounded by four or five large and loudly barking canines. No way was I getting out of that car. Since I didn’t have a cell phone at the time, I just sat there and waited for someone in the house to notice all the barking and come out to check. The mom finally did, and of course she said, it’s OK, come on out, the dogs won’t hurt you, they’re very friendly. Yeah. Sure. I wasn’t buying it. If she wanted her pizza order she’d have to come to me. And she did, but not gladly. I delivered there a couple more times but never left my car, and clearly that woman didn’t like me much.

The vindication for my attitude towards dogs came one night about 11:00 p.m. when I knocked on a door and was greeted by some truly fierce barking and growling accompanied by intense scrabbling of sharp-sounding claws against wood. I expected to hear the usual (and totally unreliable) “it’s OK, the dog won’t hurt you, he’s very friendly,” but instead a voice on the other side of the door nervously instructed me to walk across the porch and wait at a different door. “The dog really wants to hurt you,” the owner said when he came out to get his order. And it definitely sounded like if I had stayed much longer at the first door, that animal would have forced his way through it and eaten me, with the pizza for dessert.

I was still shaking and quaking about my close call with canine drivercide when I returned to the restaurant and learned that the cooks had made one of their mistakes and I had delivered a different pizza than the customer wanted. Which meant I had to go back to that house and deliver the correct order and give that dog another chance to devour me. And the worst part? These second trips to correct cooks’ mistakes never meant second tips for the driver, while at the same time they kept her/him from delivering to a potentially tipping customer. Killer canines and no tips. What a job!

After I left Galesburg (remember the Fast Food Hell accident from last week’s blog?), my slow evolution toward eventually becoming mostly vegan began. Vegans are vegetarians who don’t eat any animal products, including dairy, so now I haven’t had even a taste of pizza for over two years and have basically come back full circle to my nine-year-old opinion. If someone here sold a good, healthy vegan pizza, with a palatable vegan cheese substitute, I’d probably love it. But so far I haven’t found a vegan cheese that doesn’t taste like wallpaper paste.

Hmmm, maybe I should suggest to that chain which shall remain nameless that they make a vegan alternative. Wallpaper paste on cardboard. Who knows, I might like it. Stranger things have happened.

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