When I was about ten, I bought a packet of corn seed, scratched a few rows of holes in the poor soil of our city row house’s side yard, tossed them in and covered them. In time, short scrawny corn stalks grew up, but my vision of amber waves of grain, predictably, failed to materialize.
Yet, it was a start toward an approach to life that placed value on an attitude of self-sufficiency, a connection with nature and a rejection of the sterility of modern culture. There, in an era that glorified the synthetic, disposable culture that is at the root of many of our modern woes and crises, began my quest for authenticity.
Over the intervening 15 years or so that followed my meagre foray into farming, the demands of growing up took priority over my quest for creating a life from scratch. At least in the material sense. During those years, we are all looking for something that defines us and gives us an identity that is unique. As time went on, for me that included learning how to do things, the “old-fashioned way “.
Sandy’s and my ongoing efforts at creating a “scratch” life, when feasible, has been our personal protest against an increasingly phony, impersonal world. As a skilled artisan, this was the hallmark of her professional life, and I, well, I “crafted” people into wholeness after they came to me in a state of emotional fragmentation.
Readers know that one of my efforts to create a handmade life involved learning how to cook from scratch. Early in my marriage I became fascinated with bread baking and started to bake wholesome, whole-grain breads that replaced Carnation instant breakfast and pop tarts as our breakfasts. A natural offshoot of this was a growing awareness of what constituted, healthy eating and efforts to incorporate whole foods more and more into our daily fare. Following naturally upon this came our efforts to master the fundamental elements of cooking and to incorporate them into the creation of international cuisine. It gave us a sense of uniqueness to partake of our Chinese dishes, that we’d cooked in a wok, with chopsticks or to incorporate wine into our French and Italian recipes. Of course, we had to learn to appreciate fine wine through the study and sampling of that glorious human creation. A purely academic exercise, of course.
As time and space afforded us the opportunity to plant our own vegetable gardens, through reading and experimentation, I developed into a reasonably competent organic gardener. We also planted some fruit trees and berries on our property. We took a lot of pleasure in putting up the products of our toil for the winter. It wasn’t that we couldn’t afford to buy our food in the supermarket, but it was just so satisfying to emulate our ancestors who were required by circumstances to sustain themselves by such means.
Our quest to create the “perfect pizza “ was part of this endeavor. It had its start when we were visiting my wife’s brother. His wife was raised in an Italian home. One Friday night she treated us to her homemade pizza. Well, it was pretty much homemade. She started with store bought frozen bread dough that she had defrosted and formed into a crust on a pizza pan. She spread canned tomato purée on top of the dough and worked in, with her fingers, slivered garlic. She then added salt, pepper and seasonings, grated Parmesan cheese, and mozzarella cheese, baked it and, voilà, homemade pizza almost from scratch. No need to say it was delicious.
Pizza became our go to TGIF meal. The simple, easy method we learned from our sister-in-law served us well for sometime. But as we immersed ourselves more deeply in the art of bread making it seemed silly to use frozen dough. By this time, our travels had taken us to Europe, where we learned how delicious a good French or Italian loaf could be. With the help of Julia Child’s cookbook, I launched on a quest to create a genuine French style baguette.
Composed of a few simple ingredients, flour, salt, water, and yeast, it would seem that making French bread would be an easy task. Nothing could be further from the truth. If one is to achieve the proper consistency and flavor, the mixing, timing and handling of the ingredients requires a lot of practice and expertise. This is also the case with its close cousin, pizza dough. Over the years, we experimented with different proportions of the ingredients and with rising time and conditions. For the sake of health, we often used whole-grain flours. This was especially the case when we made pizzas without tomato sauce and with various types of cheeses and other toppings. But when it comes to the classic Neapolitan, simplicity is the rule. There’s something about plain white crust that goes best with tomato sauce and cheese. And, what the hell, a little white flour wouldn’t hurt once in a while. After years of experimentation and innovation, we arrived at the point I described in the recent satirical blog about Sandy’s ordeal preparing the last supper of Pizza-ism. That pizza was really, truly delicious, by the way..
Our likening of pizza making to a religion, you see, is really about the process of striving toward “perfection,” (or let’s be more humble, more competence) in life. It is about not taking the easy way out, but challenging oneself to create, not just good pizza, but also the good life it symbolizes. To me a good life is one in which we build character and derive satisfaction from continually learning and striving towards doing our best in all life’s aspects, maximizing our use of the limited resources with which we are endowed.
Our tongue-in-cheek exaltation of pizza making is symbolic of this ideal. Its spiritual value lies in the premise that Pizza-ism can serve as a reminder that, though from ashes we come and to dust we go, yet we should rejoice. For in that sacred tiny space between these two eternities, there is… Pizza.
An Author's Inner Mind 