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:

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.