The early 1990s were a pivotal period in human history: the Soviet Union collapsed ending the Cold War, the United States became, for a while, the world’s unchallenged “hyperpower,” Bill Clinton was elected President of the United States, and Susan and I discovered Bobolis.

The late 1980s were the black hole in my pizza universe. The years between January 1985 and June 1989 were a wormhole of studying, drinking, and bad fast food . . . and drinking. After I separated from my first husband, I made it my personal goal to 1) get a Ph.D. in military history, and 2) drink all the beer in central Ohio. I eventually accomplished #1 and fell just short of #2. My two roommates and I were each living on the princely sum of $385/month, which paid for rent, utilities, books, beer and food, pretty much in that order. We lived on chicken wings (on BW3 nickel wing days), beer, White Castle burgers, beer, Mickey D’s Happy Meals (cheeseburger and strawberry shake for me), beer, and lots and lots of bad pizza and beer. Notice a pattern here?

Historical note: BW3 — Buffalo Wild Wings and Weck — eventually dropped its third W and became the national chain, Buffalo Wild Wings. We ate at the very first one. Now they have a NCAA Bowl Game. I wish I’d bought stock.

The original BW3, including the satellite dish that beamed in MTV and enabled my lifelong adoration of Billy Idol.

The measure of a good pizza was size (the bigger the better) and price (the cheaper the better). Since I lived with two (male) roommates, fellow military history grad students, in a crappy apartment without a workable kitchen, making my own wasn’t an option. There was one excellent pizzeria, Panzera’s in Grandview, Ohio, a few miles outside of Columbus, but it was neither cheap nor close to campus (which meant driving, which meant gas) so it was definitely a special occasion thing. It was family run and had the best pizza I’d eaten since the sad demise of The Capri. Their vegetarian pizza (with green peppers (capsicum), onions, mushrooms, hot peppers, and black olives) opened my eyes to the possibilities of pizza without sausage or pepperoni. They also cut their pizzas into squares, which I thought was very cutting edge and sophisticated. Their crusts weren’t as good as The Capri’s, but they were pretty close: not to thick, not too thin, not overloaded, just right.

Panzera’s pizza: note the avant garde slicing style. I liked the ones on the “corners” with a low crust-to-topping ratio, the sign of how good the crust was.

Unlike Capri, Panzera’s is still in business. If you find yourself in Central Ohio, go there. Eat Pizza.

Eventually, I plodded through to the end of my eye-wateringly boring dissertation and headed to Washington DC with my shiny new Ph.D. to light up the policy analytical world with my brilliance. I landed at the Institute for Defense Analyses, where I finally met the sister I never had. Susan, our third chosen sister, Elizabeth, and I bonded over dogs. Specifically, over Peanut – my beautiful, blonde, but not too s-m-a-r-t rescue mutt – and (a bit later) Crackerjack – a pesky, willful, and smart-when-it-suited-him cockapoo with a highly-developed taste for shoes, blueberry muffins, and pizza crust.

Peanut and Crackerjack, circa 1993. Peanut was a beauty, but as our friend Elizabeth put it, not very “S-M-A-R-T.”

When I took off, in 1993, on a mission trip to Palestine, Peanut and Crackerjack (who was less than four months old at the time) stayed with Susan, who, amazingly, was still speaking to me when I returned three weeks later. Over the coming decades, we Three Musketeers — Susan, Elizabeth, and I — shared many adventures in travel, food, wine, and butterflies.

And Susan and I bonded over Bobolis. Specifically, Bobolis topped with fresh summer tomatoes, roasted sweet corn, basil, and fresh mozzarella. Sometimes we played around with the formula – goat cheese instead of mozzarella; frozen corn and canned tomatoes, or grape tomatoes, in winter; a little chicken here, a black olive there (but only on my side: Susan hates olives). But for the most part, about once a week, we would share Bobolis and a bottle (or two) of wine. It was a friendship made in heaven.

The Three Musketeers at the Virginia Wine Festival in 1994-ish.

Now, Boboli pizza crusts – with their high sugar content, additives, and alarmingly long shelf life – are not the kind of food I generally advocate. I haven’t had one since I started making my own pizza crusts 20 or so years ago. But at the time, when I was still teaching myself to cook and intimidated by yeast, they seemed just the ticket. Way cheaper than a restaurant pie, they also provided control – at least – over toppings. I’m sure if I ate one now, I’d find it pretty revolting – sort of the way I feel about the other great junk foods of my past, like Twinkies and Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. But in 1993, they provided the most convenient and user-friendly canvas available for me to begin my homemade pizza journey.

And my journey moved steadily forward. After Boboli came the bread machine era. My Dad was a bread machine early-adaptor. Mom made awesome fresh bread, but she rarely went to the trouble of making it once I left home and it was only the two of them. The bread machine was their perfect solution – the loaves weren’t too big and the whole process was pretty easy. Over the years, Mom developed some plausible bread machine adaptations of classics. Eventually, I got one for Christmas, too. Sadly, the thermostat (or maybe it was the timer) on mine went fluey early on, resulting in whole-wheat hockey pucks. But I kept the lumbering beast around because it made some pretty awesome pizza dough. It was just the thing when I was living alone, becoming increasingly adventurous in the kitchen, and wanted to make the occasional pizza-for-one.

What I never seemed to be able to accomplish, though, was that crispy, blistery, slightly tangy crust that is – for me, at least – the pizza crust ideal. I tried switching out flours – bread flour made the crust too springy and hard to roll out. I tried special pizza crust flours – the best one is from King Arthur Flour, but you have to be organized enough to remember to order it.

I got a pizza stone, which improved my homemade pies dramatically. But then there was the problem of getting the pizza crust onto the stone. I bought a pizza peel, which looked impressive hanging in my kitchen, but which usually resulted in disaster. I tried cooking the pizza part of the way on a cookie sheet, then sliding it off directly onto the hot stone. That worked pretty well, but the crust still didn’t have that magical, blistery crispness.

Two developments sapped my motivation: Trader Joe’s came to Northern Virginia and a new pizzeria, Valentino’s, opened in Alexandria. Trader Joe’s sells a pretty darned good pre-made pizza dough. You can buy a package or two to have in the fridge for those spur-of-the-moment pizza cravings. Valentino’s is a New York-style pizzeria, and the pizza was awesome. It had the added benefit of being on my way home from work. And they had plenty of vegetarian options, so Simon and I didn’t end up eating the same pizza combo week after week. That, plus the fact that Simon and I had work schedules that meant that we usually only ate dinner together a couple of nights a week, put a pin in my pizza baking.

Moving to New Zealand reawakened my pizza mojo. There is an excellent local pizza chain, Hell Pizza. We are partial to “Purgatory” (feta, spinach, sun-dried tomato, garlic, mushrooms, onion and kalamata olives) and “Limbo” (blue cheese, mushrooms, caramelized onions, tomatoes, and kalamata olives). Hell now advertises that all their pizzas are free range, so we can take comfort that all the little pizzas run free before they are popped in the oven. But Hell pizza doesn’t have that perfect pizza crust that my pizza soul craves. It did, however, have one very awesome ad campaign:

http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKlYenm2-74

So, once we settled into our little lifestyle block in the Western Hills of the Hutt Valley, I made it my mission to learn to play the accordion and master the perfect pizza crust. Not necessarily in that order. And with a little research and a lot of practice, I’ve got pretty damn close to the perfect pizza crust. The accordion will take a bit longer.

Here’s the bottom line: it turns out that all these years I’ve been trying too hard. Homemade pizza dough is easy. It’s not as easy as falling off a bike, but it is so easy that there is no excuse not to make your own.

This man was a pumpkin scrooge:

Yes, he generously shared martini olives with sweet little boys, and he was a one man Father Christmas, but when it came to Jack o’ Lanterns, he was all “Bah, Humbug!” Starting in early October, he would plan all car journeys carefully to avoid passing by the pumpkin patches that popped up around town. Most years, he would eventually, grudgingly give in but only late enough that I always ended up with the lopsided, practically un-carvable pumpkins from which to choose. The Charlie Brown Christmas Trees of pumpkins. One year, we waited so late that there weren’t even any sad, misshapen ones, and I had to make my Jack o’ Lantern out of a shoebox.

Are you crying yet?

But, really, how hard does your heart have to be to hate this:

As a child, I didn’t understand Dad’s aversion to Halloween pumpkins. He had nothing against Trick or Treating, but he was death on pumpkins. It might have had something to do with how they looked on the day after Halloween: cooked from the inside out by the candles, and sort of stove in, like creepy shrunken heads. It could also have been the scary black fungus that grew in them after a few days. (He hated mushrooms, too. Coincidence? I think not!)  As I got older — and gave in and bought a reusable, plastic Jack o’ Lantern — the whole Pumpkin Scrooge shtick became just another family joke. At bottom, though, I think there was something deeper at work. This lovely, otherwise holiday-loving Dad was — on the issue of Jack o’ Lanterns — shaped by his upbringing during the Great Depression.  He just couldn’t wrap his brain around the idea of paying good money (and Halloween pumpkins are not cheap) for a oversized vegetable, only to cut holes in it, leave it on the stoop to rot, and not even eat it.

I have, from time to time, detected some bemusement on the part of New Zealanders concerning the American relationship with the pumpkin. While — as I have already noted with some chagrin — the pumpkin is a much beloved vegetable in New Zealand, on a trip to any farmers’ market here, one would not find a single “pumpkin” that an American would regard as worthy of the name.  To kiwis, and most of the rest of the world, “pumpkin” is completely interchangeable with “squash”. So, if you look for pumpkin at the market here, you will find huge, green lumpy ones, smaller, cream-colored ones, and hard-shelled dark green ones with bright yellow flesh. What you won’t find is a bright orange, perfectly round, Halloween pumpkin. I’d be hard pressed to find anything suitable for carving, especially as October 31st falls right smack in the middle of spring — more asparagus than pumpkin season.

American-style Halloween traditions have gradually spread to other parts of the world.  I’ve seen children headed out for Halloween parties, complete with witch costumes and plastic pumpkin buckets, in Hong Kong. One year, in Goa, I saw Indians move seamlessly from Halloween to the Hindu festival of Diwali. There are hip Halloween parties and Trick or Treaters in Paris.  I’ve attended Halloween-themed nights in bars in Bali, Indonesia and Darwin, Australia. And New Zealand is no exception. While it is still, for the most part, an urban phenomenon, Trick or Treating has come to Aotearoa. While it is still overshadowed by the more traditional Guy Fawkes’ Night bonfires and fireworks a week or so later, Halloween has (thanks largely to the influence of U.S. marketing) earned its place on New Zealand’s celebratory calendar.

But these international Halloweens feel, somehow, as empty as a Jack o’ Lantern and as superficial as a plastic Hillary Clinton mask. While some cynics suggest that, even in the U.S., Halloween — with its pumpkins, candy, and costumes — is the stuff of canny marketing (Americans will spend almost $7 billion on Halloween this year), the real meaning of Halloween for Americans goes much deeper.

For American kids, Halloween is a sort of right of passage. American kids (and their parents) start planning their Halloween costumes right after school starts in September. Choosing a Halloween costume is one of the earliest opportunities American kids have to define themselves. My Mom made me some memorable Halloween costumes: I was a ghost, a bunny, a court jester, and Maid Marion (see the historian emerging?). In my fifth year, she made me a black cat costume that I wore every single day for most of the rest of the year (including the day I wandered through a graveside funeral at the cemetery behind our house). Sadly, one of the few photos I have of my later Halloween costumes comes from the one year my mother gave in to my (ill-considered) pleading for a store-bought costume because they seemed cooler than homemade. My plastic Mr. Ed mask made my face sweat, and I’m reasonably certain that if I had passed within range of a pumpkin candle my costume would have turned me into a Guy Fawkes bonfire of my own.

I suspect that for American parents, the year when a kid declares him or herself “too old for Trick or Treating” is, I as bittersweet for parents as when their kids start questioning Santa Claus.

You can track the demographic shifts in neighbourhoods by the trends in consumption of Trick or Treat candy. When we first moved to our house on Brookwood Drive, in 1967, my Mum bought many bags of candy. In my parents’ last years, there were Halloween nights that saw no Trick or Treaters at all. Kids grow up, trick or treating dies out, then parents downsize and a new generation of young couples with their young kids move in and Trick or Treating is born again. It’s the circle of life.

And Trick or Treating is truly multicultural. Over the years, I greeted Trick or Treaters of every shape, colour, and creed. Some were accompanied by parents from Korea, Vietnam, or El Salvador who barely spoke English but who embraced this strange custom of their new home. Others arrived in beautiful, multicoloured bouquets of Asian, Caucasian, Hispanic, and African faces. A few girls wore their costumes over their hijab. More than a few mothers wore puffy down jackets over their thin sarees and salwar kameez.

Halloween is also about neighbourhood and community. As a flaming introvert, I’m not a party goer. I am slow to meet people. What I love about Halloween is greeting the Trick or Treaters — and their parents — at the door. It made me — a shy single woman with dogs but no kids — feel part of a decidedly family-oriented neighbourhood. Halloween started, in my old neighbourhood, at about 6 pm when the wee ones came, dressed in their very first costumes and shyly holding out their plastic pumpkins with no idea what the whole thing is about. Then, about 7 pm, the big groups of older kids would come — five or six at a time, age appropriate and usually segregated by gender (because boys are icky and girls have cooties). Some brought their dogs, and I always kept treats for them, too. Finally, by 8 pm, you’d get the too-old-to-Trick or Treat crowd, the slightly surly teens who couldn’t be bothered to come up with a costume, are a little embarrassed, but still expect you to help them fill up their pillowcases. That’s when I’d blow out (or turn off) the pumpkin and retire to the basement.

For the record: my UK/Kiwi husband never got the charm of Trick or Treat and spent the entire evening in the basement with the dogs in those years when I was experiencing Halloween in Hong Kong, Bali, Goa, and Darwin.

So what is it about Halloween and pumpkins that works in the States but lacks soul anywhere else?  On my recent trip back to the States, Kojo Nnamde (the noon – 2pm host of WAMU 88.5 in Washington DC and fount of all wisdom) hosted a segment on America’s seasonal crush on the pumpkin.

http://thekojonnamdishow.org/audio/#/shows/2015-10-14/behind-americas-seasonal-crush-on-pumpkin/90035/@00:00

The star of the segment was Cindy Ott, author of Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon. I was intrigued. I bought the e-book and found myself surprisingly enchanted with the history of the pumpkin in America. What Ott explained, and what most Americans probably instinctively understand is that for us, the pumpkin symbolises and romanticises the America’s agrarian past and taming of the wilderness. Early Jack o’ Lanterns had arms and legs and were depicted as frightening tricksters.

By the post-World War II era, Jack had lost his legs and became just a head, incapable, however ferocious, of causing mayhem. Pumpkin, even the mass produced pumpkin that goes into the Libby’s can, is not an industrial fruit. It is grown by small farmers and picked by hand. This pumpkin, repository of powerful American myth, bears precious little resemblance to any squash that occurs in nature. It has been engineered and hybridised into a (more or less) perfectly-round, evenly segmented, bright orange fruit with a flat bottom (for sitting on stoops), thick stem for easy carrying, a hard shell, and relatively thin pulp that lends itself more to carving than to eating.

Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups are the perfect candy. You don’t mess with perfection. Fie on the white chocolate, pumpkin-shaped, and dark chocolate versions. And don’t even talk to me about Reese’s Oreo cookies. Heresy!

For Americans, Halloween is about community and identity as much as it is about costumes and candy.  So, in a sense, Trick or Treating  in New Zealand makes about as much sense as a Guy Fawkes bonfire would in Peoria. While I miss the ritual of carving a pumpkin and passing out candy (not to mention the excuse to lay in a supply of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Heath Bars), I wouldn’t want to reenact it here, in my new home.  We will make new traditions here. And they probably won’t involve pumpkins because, when it comes down to it, I’m also a bit of a pumpkin scrooge.

St. Joan of the Mashed Potatoes

There are two major food groups: mashed potatoes, and everything else.

On Bethel Road in the 1960s, Sunday was all about mashed potatoes. Actually, to my mind, life is about mashed potatoes. Mashed potatoes are my perfect food. Mashed potatoes are my desert island food. I never get tired of them. When I’m celebrating, I eat mashed potatoes. When I’m sad, I eat mashed potatoes. Mashed potatoes are my stress food, my happiness food, and my just-regular-old-day food. I probably bleed mashed potatoes. I like them plain, with butter, with gravy, with olive oil, under creamed vegetables, stroganoff, or chili (weird, I know). In short, any day is better with mashed potatoes.

What are the roots of this mashed potato fixation? Well, the answer lies with St. Joan, the patron saint of mashed potatoes. While she has not yet been officially canonized, I’m working on her nomination. You see, St. Joan’s mashed potatoes cured all ills and performed miracles. And every time I make mashed potatoes, she is sitting on my shoulder whispering “remember the lumps.” If I had to name one person who most shaped my lifelong food preferences, it would be St. Joan of the mashed potatoes.

Lisa, the Kale Whisperer, and Jeannie, with Sharon Chapel in the background during one of our late ice-age blizzards

I passed the first nine years of my life on Bethel Road, a gravel dead end street in Northern Virginia. It was an ideal place to be a kid. There was an excellent climbing tree at the bottom of our driveway, and my friends and I spent hours building villages and making up stories with the stones on the street. The houses (all three of them) were at the tops of the hills, so rolling down hills was a major activity. So was jumping off front stoops. In those days, it snowed a fair amount in the DC area (it was just at the end of the last ice age), and we sledded and built enormous snow forts. My bestie, Jeannie, and I would swing on my swing set, as high as we could go, and sing the Beatles” “Help” at the tops of our lungs. I still remember all the words, and when I sing them, I’m back on that swing.

One of our neighbors was All Saints’ Sharon Chapel Episcopal church, which was – for the first few years we lived there – a charming, wood, Civil War era chapel with a wonderful stained glass window of the Good Shepherd. My father played the organ there, and my mother was on the altar guild. Jeannie and her family went there, too. And every Sunday, I went to her family’s house for Sunday dinner. Her Mom, Joan, made a traditional Sunday dinner – roast beast, various vegetables, and . . . wait for it . . . MASHED POTATOES. The absolutely most extraordinary mashed potatoes in the entire mashed potato universe. She always – at least in those early years – mashed them by hand, so they were the ideal combination of creamy and lumpy. Rules 1-10 of mashed potatoes: MASHED POTATOES HAVE LUMPS. On the rare Sunday when there were no mashed potatoes, my little world collapsed.

I was born with wonky tonsils, and I spent an inordinate amount of my childhood housebound with tonsillitis. On those Sundays when I was too sick to go to Jeannie’s for Sunday dinner, Saint Joan would appear at the door with a bowl of mashed potatoes. When my parents finally gave in to the inevitable and had my tonsils taken out, I was unimpressed with promises of ice cream. But when St. Joan promised as many mashed potatoes as I could eat, I was there! Where’s the operating room? Bring on the ether!

At the age of six – just a few weeks before I was to be the flower girl at my Auntie J’s wedding – I rode my bike down a steep hill into a ditch (I knew how to go, I didn’t know how to stop), slashed open my chin (six stitches), and knocked out my two front teeth. When I got home from the Emergency Room, who was there waiting? Saint Joan of the mashed potatoes! Oh, joy! Manna from heaven.

The Kale Whisperer and Jeannie in our backyard. I’d love to post a photo of St. Joan’s mashed potatoes, but they hadn’t invented digital cameras or foodies yet.

Who needs Lourdes when you have St. Joan’s mashed potatoes. They cured whatever ailed you.

When my family moved to Georgia in 1967, it seemed my mashed potato universe would implode. My Mom made nice smooth mashed potatoes with the mixer. I kept trying to explain that mashed potatoes have lumps. But she just couldn’t do lumpy mashed potatoes like St. Joan. It’s a gift. A calling. Happily, for years after we moved, I would take the Southern Crescent train from Georgia back to Alexandria: ostensibly to visit Jeannie, but really? It was a mashed potato pigrimmage.

Eventually, I grew up and Jeannie left home and the mashed potato pilgrimages ended. I still visited St. Joan from time to time, and she would look at me, and smile, and say “Awwww, little CARE – oh – line” in her distinctive West Virginia drawl and make me feel very loved. But the mashed potato days were over. The last time I saw St. Joan, she came to dinner with my folks at my townhouse in Annandale where I served, you guessed it, mashed potatoes. Were they up to snuff? Probably not, but St. Joan never criticized. She just smiled and said: “Awww! Little CARE-oh-line!”

There is a great deal of debate about mashed potatoes. Some experts insist they must be made with Russet (or, in the Southern Hemisphere, Agria) potatoes. Others advocate using waxy (Red Rose or Moonshine), or even new potatoes. I actually like a combination of floury and waxy: the waxy potatoes go all creamy and you can count on the floury potatoes (provided they aren’t over cooked) for some decent lumps.

St. Joan, as far as I remember, always peeled her potatoes, but I like to leave at least some unpeeled. This adds flavor, vitamins and all-important lumps.

As for mashing liquid, I’m agnostic regarding the relative merits of skim versus whole milk or cream. Just potato-cooking water will do in a pinch, or if you are vegan, but I never do it. The real key is to cook them just enough and not one bit more. And please, please, please, don’t let them sit in the cooking water. It won’t keep them warm, it will just make them watery. Better to go ahead and mash and then reheat in the oven. Mashed potatoes are very forgiving.

It’s all about the potatoes.

Mashed potatoes need fat. I’m a butter girl. I add butter before I mash, and more after I mash. Under certain circumstances, olive oil works. Margarine? You can if you want. I never touch the stuff.

I must confess to St. Joan that I never mastered hand mashing. I always watched her. She had this magical sort of round-and-round, full-body mashing technique. I’ve tried numerous types of potato mashers, and I just can’t get the right rhythm or that perfect cream / lump balance. I’ve used potato ricers and food mills. They make super fluffy, creamy, but, sadly, lump-free mashed potatoes. [They are good for mashing potatoes for other uses, like gnocchi.] A handheld electric mixer is the next-best thing to hand mashing, they aren’t powerful enough to over-mash and eliminate all the lumps. I had to re-home my hand mixer when I moved to New Zealand. I’ve tried the masher attachment on my immersion blender, but that didn’t work at all. So, I’ve had to resort to using my big, standing mixer. When I had a Kitchen Aide mixer, even with the paddle attachment, it was too efficient and eliminated the lumps. The one I have in New Zealand does pretty well, leaving a good amount of lumps. That is excellent for mashed potatoes, less wonderful for cake batter.

Never, ever, ever . . . really NEVER mash your lovely potatoes in the food processor. They will immediately turn into horrible gluey glop fit only for hanging wallpaper.

In the end, the perfect mashed potato is a very personal matter. My perfect mashed potato isn’t necessarily your perfect mashed potato. So experiment. And remember, St. Joan of the Mashed Potatoes is always smiling down on us!

Sunday night was pizza night in our family. We started, in the early 1960s, with Chef Boyardee Pizza kits. The picture on the box showed a generous pizza with a cracker-thin crust, just the right amount of tomato sauce, and plenty of stretchy cheese. The reality was less inspiring – especially the powdery cheese-like-food product that came out of a can and tasted like vomit. But if you used only half of the overly salty sauce and added your own cheese, they weren’t too bad. We didn’t know you could put exotic things like sausage and olives on pizza. Mushrooms were a no go. Dad didn’t eat fungus. I think we did, sometimes, go wild and add hamburger. I vaguely remember slices of hot dogs, but I’m hoping that was just a nightmare.

So, my first visit to the Capri Pizzeria in Athens Georgia was the Big Bang of my pizza universe. The pies came on huge, battered old pizza pans – the size of trash can lids. And the crusts were life changing. They were crisp but chewy; and under the toppings, you’d find a lunar landscape of bubbles and craters.

Capri made their Italian sausage. It was a revelation. It had fennel seeds in it! FENNEL SEEDS! And the pizza was topped with real mozzarella and slightly smoky Provolone that made those long, stretchy strings that you see in the movies. We didn’t dine out much, and I can’t say my Dad was a great pizza fan. Fortunately, my mother and her best friend, Denise, loved the Capri’s roast beef sandwiches and went there often for lunch. Sometimes, if I was out of school, I tagged along. I cannot vouch for the quality of the sandwiches because: Why would you go to the Capri and NOT EAT PIZZA???!!! I don’t remember that the Capri sold pizza by the slice. But it must have, because I always had pizza. And I couldn’t possibly have eaten one of those massive pies by my scrawny lonesome. Then, again. . . .

Sadly, the Capri closed around 1980 or so. This catastrophe ushered in what I now know were to be my years of pizza exodus – wandering the pizza desert in search of manna (which, I’m pretty sure, the Old Testament describes as “as delicious as the perfect pizza crust). A Food Truck owner, Bob Petrillose, had invented the Poor Man’s (later French bread) Pizza in Ithica, New York in the 1960s. He licensed the idea to Stouffer’s, which introduced its frozen French Bread pizza to the American market in 1974. I don’t know precisely when Mom cottoned on to French bread pizza, but she was definitely an early adopter. But they weren’t cheap – and Mom was – so she explored various other options for putting tomato sauce and melted cheese on bread: frozen bagels (which qualify neither as bagels, nor as pizza crust), English muffins (Thomas’s are passable, if you are trapped on a desert island; otherwise, don’t bother), Bisquick and Pillsbury crescent roll dough (no comment).

My first exposure to Tombstone frozen pizza came during my trips to visit my family in Eagle River, Wisconsin, where Sunday night is also pizza night. My Auntie Anita has always been a culinary trailblazer in our family. My mother got her very first pizza recipe in, like, 1958, from Anita. Tombstone pizza was invented in Wisconsin, you see, so it was a patriotic duty. And because it was invented in Wisconsin, it was all about the cheese. Before it was mass-marketed across the US (after the original family company sold out to Kraft), it was only available in Wisconsin. If you ordered a pizza at a tavern or bar pretty much anywhere in Northern Wisconsin, what you got was a Tombstone. It was marketed as the next best thing to homemade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEFVp6zRiM8. And in the pre-Kraft days, it sort of was.

Auntie always kept a dozen or so Tombstones in her freezer, ready for an impromptu “pizza doctoring” party. A proper pizza doctoring party – and, yes, you can do this at home – involves some key ingredients:

• Coolers loaded with several suitcases of beer, preferably Old Style and Miller Light (or your local equivalent, cheap, quaffing beer), Diet Pepsi and A&W Root Beer for the kids. In later years, family beer preferences shifted to Icehouse and Budweiser Light (which, as far as I’m concerned, isn’t beer, but one humours ones relatives). Now that we are all grown-ups, we have also ventured into craft brews, such as Leinenkugel’s. And WINE!!
  

  This is a suitcase of beer. Not Old Style, but at least a Milwaukee beer.

• Gin, vermouth (sweet and dry), brandy, Spanish olives (unless Auntie had some of her dilled green beans), and maraschino cherries so the grown-ups can make martinis and manhattans.
• Several pounds of grated pizza cheese (Did I say Tombstones were all about the cheese? Well, not enough cheese for us!)
• Peperoni, sliced mushrooms, ripe black olives, crumbled pre-cooked hamburger or sausage meat (because even had the Tombstones had enough cheese, they never had enough other stuff; and everyone wanted different other stuff.)
• Dill pickle spears
• Potato chips
• Lots of Aunties, Uncles, Cousins, Cousins-in-law, and other assorted hangers-on
• An oven
• Scissors (to cut the pizza; we never had anything as flash as a pizza wheel)
• Oh, and lots and lots of Tombstones.

I cannot swear that this was actually a pizza doctoring party. The vintage (1980s) is right, however, as is the general vibe.

Do I really need to tell you what to do next? OK:

1. Open a beer, or
2. If you were born before 1945, wait for Earl and Chuck to mix the martinis and brandy manhattans
3. Open a Tombstone, add additional toppings as desired, but at the bare minimum lots and lots of extra cheese,
4. Open another beer,
5. Bake the Tombstone according to package directions, or until your toppings are nice an bubbly
6. Listen while Cousin Randy tells hysterical bear hunting stories
7. Let the Tombstone cool briefly, then cut into slices with the sewing shears,
8. Grab another beer
9. Eat with pickle spears and chippies until you can’t move.

Dill pickles? Potato chips? Yes. Tombstones need dill pickles and potato chips. There is debate in our family as to who established this rule. The smart money is on my Mom. Maybe the Eagle River clan has been goofing me all these years, and when I’m not around, they leave out the pickles.

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This week’s slice: Dill Pickle and Potato Chip Pizza

The inspiration for this pizza is two-fold. First, a few years ago, my Auntie J gave me a raclette grill for Christmas. Simon and I enjoyed raclette, which is an excellent excuse to eat potatoes, pickles, sweet onions, and lots and lots of melted cheese. I had to rehome the raclette grill when we moved because, as I did all my other electric appliances. So I felt a pang of homesickness when I discovered that the Stinky Cheese Man at the farmers’ market had raclette cheese. Why not, I asked myself, put the raclette ingredients on a pizza? Genius!

Second, genuinely sour, dilly, kosher dill pickles (the only pickles really worth eating) are rarer than hens’ teeth in New Zealand. The closest approximation to the flavor of dilly pickles is French cornichon, or gherkins, which are available here. But they are tiny, difficult to pick up, and generally ill-suited to the role of side dish pickles. They do, however, look pretty adorable on a pizza, and complement sweet onions (or in this case, leeks) and new potatoes that all cuddle up under a layer of nutty raclette cheese. And with the potatoes, there is no need for chips on the side!

Raclette Pizza

500g (1 lb.) smallish new potatoes(about the size of a chicken egg), red or gold

1 large or two small leeks,

12 or so sour gherkins or cornichons

120g (1/4 lb.) raclette cheese (or any mild swiss cheese)

225g (1/2 lb.) grated mozzarella

olive oil, salt, and pepper

Crust for a 30cm (12 inch) pizza

Preheat your oven to 220C or 425F

1. Thinly slice the potatoes and soak them for 30 minutes or so in ice water. If you slice them very thin (3mm or 1/8 in.), they will be potato-chippier; if you slice them a little thicker, (4.5mm or 3/16 in.) they are more like the boiled potatoes common in raclatte spreads. I like them both ways, depending on my mood.
   

   I slice the potatoes and leeks on my mandolin. If you do that, try not to do this!

2. Drain the spuds and dry them as best you can (I give mine a ride in the salad spinner), drizzle a little olive oil on a foil-lined baking sheet, and spread the slices out in a single layer (or as close as you can manage, they’ll shrink a bit) and smoosh them around in the oil a bit, and sprinkle them with salt.

3. Roast the potatoes for about 20 minutes. Turn them over (or just stir them around) about halfway through. When you take the potatoes out of the oven, nicely brown and crispy, turn the oven up to 260C or 500F.

4. Slice the leeks, white and light green parts, crosswise, very thin. Alternatively, you can cut them lengthwise into thin shreds. Sauté them in a Tbs. of olive oil, sprinked with a bit of salt, until they are tender but not browned.

5. Top your pizza (I always start with a slightly prebaked crust):

• start with the grated mozzarella (I use mozzarella for the base because raclette cheese is pretty $$$, and your run of the mill mozzarella won’t compete – try not to use “pizza cheese”, which usually includes some provolone, fontina, and parmesan, which might distract from the nutty, Swiss cheesy flavor of the raclette).
• Then add the sautéed leeks in an even layer
• Then arrange your roasted potato chips artistically on top of the leeks.
• Dot the pizza with gherkins. If they are very tiny, you can use them whole. I cut the bigger ones in half.
• Finally, spread the raclette cheese over the whole thing, because it is the star.
• If your crust is prebaked, bake the pizza for about 8 minutes. If you are starting with a raw crust, then you’ll want to leave the gherkins and raclette off for the first few minutes, and add them when you have about 7 or 8 minutes to go.