A Slice of Home

Vegetables recently transported by friend to Colorado from her garden in Vermont

I miss great pizza. By that I don’t mean that I miss teaching a lot of beginner ski lessons, although I do. I mean that I miss being able to walk into any one of a number of local pizza joints and just have a slice or share a pie with friends.

Growing up in Upstate New York where Italian food was ubiquitous, our preferred local pizza place was DD’s, just down the road. Friendly, welcoming, busy, loud, all business, with red sauce from Heaven, fresh mozzarella, and crust that was perfect every time. I can see it in my minds’ eye: stacked ovens, Pepsi-branded refrigerators, bright fluorescent lights, faded old framed Italian tourism posters, and enormous ancient wood pizza peels in constant motion. I suppose there was nothing truly exceptional about the place - it was exactly as it should have been, it set the standard for me, the pizza was wonderful, and we loved it and the people there. We were spoiled, and we had no idea how badly.

Now, after decades living in New England happily taking great pizza for granted, I live in a place where people routinely put ranch dressing on their pizza. I cannot write those words without cringing. Ranch; friggin’; dressing.

I recently made a trip back East to see family and to have ready access to sea-level oxygen and it’s gastronomic equivalent, good affordable food. On my connecting flight from DFW to Logan, I sat next to a very nice young woman, maybe 30-ish, on her way for a long weekend in Boston with her mother, what would be her first time there. She was excited for the adventure and eager to show me her well-researched and quite good list of things to do and see there. She asked me for suggestions, and at the top of my list, along with taking the ferry from the airport to downtown, seeing the Public Gardens, and a taking a stroll along The Esplanade, was of course the North End, Boston’s old Italian neighborhood. I explained that while walking along the busy streets there, if she saw a bakery with a very long line out the door, she should get in the line, wait patiently while people watching, and then have a cannoli. Or two. Don’t ask, just go. North End cannolis went on the list.

Then it happened; very innocently. My airplane row-mate told me that a friend of hers in Texas had told her that people in Boston don’t put ranch dressing on their pizza, and she sheepishly, warily, asked me if that’s true. I promise that I did not wince, I did not swear or tease, I did not raise my voice. I merely calmly answered “Yes, that’s true,” and then I offered some advice. I explained that not only do Bostonians never, ever put ranch dressing on their pizza, but that she should under no circumstances ever ask for it. It was quite likely, I explained, that if she were to ask for ranch dressing on her pizza while in Boston she would be refused and even asked to leave, and that there would be expletives involved. Great sauce takes time and care using recipes honed over generations, and ranch dressing would be an insult to the pizzaioli, to their families, their ancestors, to the soil in which the tomatoes were grown and the seas they had to cross. As kindly as I could, I emphasized that I wasn’t kidding; not at all. Feeling a little guilty, I wrapped up by suggesting that maybe the best mindset would be “when in Rome” and that it would be worthwhile to experience great pizza without ranch dressing while in Boston, just so she could appreciate the place, the people, and her time there. I still find the whole episode entertaining and may have told the story on several different occasions while visiting my folks.

A can of San Marzano tomatoes coasts almost ten dollars in my local supermarket here in Colorado. Yes, I will buy “San Marzano style” tomatoes without shame, and they’re not too bad. I can buy good olive oil, fresh mozz, corn meal, reasonable oregano … you get the idea. I can even buy pizza dough made on site in a local pizza parlor (do they even call them ‘pizza parlors’ in Colorado?!) – it’s good enough to remind me of good pizza dough. When I make marinara for pizza, I use roasted red peppers and go heavy on the oregano so the sauce stands up well against the toppings, and I use copious amounts of corn meal on the counter when I roll out the dough so that the pies slide easily in and out of the cookie sheets I use in my not-hot-enough oven.

The taste of the corn meal and the oregano in the sauce is really what triggers my olfactory memory. Breathing in deeply, smelling all of it together with the sound of people chatting away in the house in the background transports me somewhere else. I end up quietly feeling present at dinner parties in faraway places with people I miss terribly, memories that decorate my psyche like those old framed Italian travel posters at DD's, bringing me back to a place, to an environment that warms my heart and feels like home.

Damn, I really need a slice; and I’ll happily eat it while sitting outside on the curb.