Pizza

 Ok, something a bit lighter. And very rambling.

As a Gen X type dude from the UK, I span a culinary age that went from a lawless wasteland of horrors, to a sophisticated international smorgasbord of wonders.

For a while there as a kid, things like garlic were treated with at best suspicion and at worst outright disgust. Things like tacos and sushi were entirely unknown, and even things a bit more closer to home like goulash or pierogi were practically unheard of.

My mom, bless her heart, would always for instance make a curry exactly the same way everytime. And that everytime was always with a healthy dose of sultanas added in. For many years I thought I wasn't a big fan of curry. I disliked the sweet sultanas spoiling the whole thing ( to my palette ). It would be many years later before I found out that there were many curries, and none of them were anything like my mom made, and that I loved curries. This turned out to be a running theme for me. Dishes I thought I hated as a child were just in the end, with all due respect, shit cooking of its time.

In my moms defence, she was probably following those lawless 1970's cookbooks that floated the idea of Aspic Jelly being the perfect holding device for "salads". These were strange and questionable times. And the cooking was shit. At least in the UK anyway. Unless you wanted a roast. Then you were sorted.

Also growing up in that kind of era, pre internet, pre international, it was normal not to have any exposure to anything outside of your country. Or even, come to that, outside of your neighbourhood. The number of "foreigners" I met growing up could probably be counted on one hand, and thus, exposure to their culture was an even more scarce affair. Unless it was on TV. Typically as an American TV show. But even then. What you got from those TV shows was culturally insipid.

That being said, for the time, my mom was actually more forward thinking than most. And I think my dad got a kick out of it too. We would on occasion, venture into the murky corners of the kind of shop that catered for a diaspora living in the UK - usually Chinese. And filled with all sorts of bottles and ingredients direct from Hong Kong. It was not the place your typical English family went to. It smelled funny, and nothing was in English. So. We did have a few oddities kicking around. I grew up with absolutely genuine, high class, soy sauce for instance. You couldn't read a lick of the writing on the bottle. It wasn't really meant for the English speaking market. But it was great. This is also from a time when there wasn't a great deal - or even any - kind of rules or safeguarding about what an imported foodstuff was. Or even a particular care that you might be bringing in a trunk full of say, unusual Chinese ingredients from Hong Kong. But one of the side effects of this were that we ate some pretty high class soy sauce, and of all things, noodles imported from China. Bonkers.

Even then, it took my fiercely Hungarian aunt to really start shaking the stuffy english cooking out of my family. She was adamant that garlic was Godly. And things like goulash with plenty of paprika were the way to go. She had a broad grasp of all sorts of European cooking, and, by demonstration converted my parents to at least the stage of understanding that Garlic Was Good. For the record it was Garlic Bread that really blew the doors off. My dad loved it. Would eat as much as my aunt could make. She also introduced my dad to face meltingly hot piri piri chicken, before the word piri had darkened the shores of the UK. Personally. I hated it. Too stupid hot.

This would have been sometime in the dark days of the late 1970s.

A few years later, I can remember my dad ordering his first ever pizza. Which is by todays standards unthinkable. He must have been something around early 40's at this point. Never eaten a pizza. Never bought a pizza. Amazing. I went with him. And we had pizza for dinner. A small one. With some garlic bread. Which was expensive, and not enough. I mean. Whatcha gonna do. The dude had never had pizza and had no clue about portion sizes.

So I grew up like that. For sure my culinary understanding grew in the 80's through a bit of a sudden interest in learning how to cook many things ( my favourite being devilled beef with tarragon noodles, oh so fancy ), but, still pre internet days, and still close enough to the horrors of the 70s that things weren't amazing. I had a smattering of French cooking. A smattering of Italian cooking. A little from here and there. But I still had no idea at that point what sushi was. Or a burrito. Very sad. I love both.

As a young guy, I got to experience the birth of the internet first hand. I was there before the web was a thing. I saw the web start as a handful of stupid pages. Before Google. Before Youtube and Amazon. Way before latecomers like Twitter or TikTok. Before stuff like Yahoo. But. There was a time there where you could talk to people all around the world. Assuming they had a modem. And a computer. And knew what the hell either of those was ( uncommon ! ). And also assuming that when you said "world" what you were really talking about was the developed world. And of that. A subset of it. Some European places. The US. The UK. That's your lot.

But this was huge.

You went from a culture that had been that way for centuries - rarely meeting people from around the world - to a place where you routinely chatted to people in real time from all over the planet.

The cultural impact of the internet today is taken for granted. A global village mish mash of all sorts of influences and cultures and points of view. Back then this was new. And unexplored.

And after a deal of this, and a story we wont get into here, I ended up in a long distance relationship with an American.

This was practically taboo.

Secretive.

Any whiff of mentioning this to "normal people" invited mockery. Laughter. Ridicule.

This was before any of this was mainstream and everyone and their mom suddenly descended on the internet en masse and hypocritically realised this was a great thing in general, and holy crap, you can internet date. Pflah.

Anyway. 

As such things go, I then ended up spending time in the States with the long distance American.

Where she introduced me - amongst other things - to Chicago Deep Dish pizza.

What. The hell. Was Chicago Deep Dish Pizza.

To a Chicagoan, this is a no brainer.

To a UK lad grown in the vacuum of aspic jelly 1970's horrors, Chicago Deep Dish pizza was one of those Entirely Unheard Unknown Things.

I can remember playing it cool as it was set out.

What. On earth. The Pizza is upside down ?

Cheese on the bottom ? What ?

It was gorgeous. Chicago Pizza. From Chicago. In a Chicago establishment.

For all the culinary snobbery of Pizza being just Pizza, this was pretty damn close to the origin source of that particular dish.

We ended up having many Chicago Pizzas for dinner. Pretty much always the same. A simple spinach deep dish.

Time scrolled on, the relationship went away, but my love of Chicago Deep Dish pizza did not.

But of all the things that the now bright and varied UK cuisine scene has, it still does not have goddamn genuine Chicago Deep Dish pizza.

Hilariously there are pizzas marketed as Chicago deep dish pizzas in the supermarkets but they are anything but. They're normal bloody pizzas, or perhaps, if you're being nice, they're tavern style Chicago pizzas ( except this too, they're not either, but, they're closer ).

Shockingly. Shit.

And interestingly, over the years, something that I have struggled to properly explain - even in the era of the internet - to UK friends who have never seen one, let alone had one. Because we just don't do them over here. Or if you have heard of them. You think of the supermarket kind. Which is not an actual goddamn Chicago deep dish. You can tell. Because it doesn't look like an upside down tomato pie.

Pizza in the UK always means something like a New York style pizza. Or if you're being fancy, a Napoli style simple pizza. What it doesn't mean is an upside down bucket of dough containing a sea of sauce over the top of a deep layer of hidden cheese.

Boo.

This week, whilst in Detroit, Hazel has at last sampled a "Detroit" ( read Chicago copy ) pizza. And sent me a pic.

Boo.

This has caused me to consider my history of food exploration, relationship with the US and my quest for Chicago pizza in the UK.

To this end a few years ago I did actually go and buy myself two, twelve inch proper chicago pizza dishes. They're distinct from your usual pizza cooking malarkey. They look like a pie dish. I got these from a proper culinary supplies kinda place, because, of course, you can't buy a goddamn proper Chicago pizza type dish in regular UK establishments, because no one knows what a goddamn Chicago pizza is. Pizzas. Are flat pieces of dough that you slide into a wood fired oven on top of a stone.

Boo.

Anywho. It's lodged in my brain again. So I think I need to make an effort in the coming weeks to try my hand at making a genuine Chicago Deep Dish pizza. The sauce is going to need to be on point. And of course, I'm going to need to make my own pizza dough. Because the UK doesn't know what a .. yada yada blah blah. Everything by hand ! The hard way.

Uh huh.

I think I'll start with my classic experience. The spinach deep dish. And see how I do. There's also something of a worry that it's too late for me. I am too old. And too at risk of blowing out on an appalling diet to be able to properly enjoy the excess that is a Chicago pizza. I probably need compatriots to help me eat it.

Uh huh.

Why Chicago Pizza isn't a thing over here boggles my mind. Maybe because they're not easy to eat. Definitely not portable. And a bit of an experience. Eh. Ho well.

In a different life. I would have started a Chicago Pizza restaurant in Blighty.