IntroductionI was seven when my parents divorced. It was the eighties, everyone was getting divorced, but I remember feeling sad anyway, sitting with my older sister on her bed while my mother, gently rubbing our backs, consoled us, teary-eyed and confused. In my memory, her voice sounded like the adults in a Peanuts cartoon, muffled and muted, an incomprehensible babble. But then, piercing through the prattle, came, “When we move, we’ll have pizza every Friday.”
Those three words—
pizza every Friday—washed away every tear, dried up every worry, and provided immediate clarity. Pizza. Every. Friday. Everything would be fine.
And everything was fine. We moved across town from our creaky old house on busy Main Street to one with wall-to-wall carpeting on Clear View Drive. In our new house, my sister and I spent hours choreographing gymnastics routines to Madonna and rollerblading in the basement to Cindy Lauper. This new neighborhood, with rows of houses each just a hair different than the next, felt like Utopia, home to kids of all ages, instant playmates for my siblings and me. We biked, jumped rope, and played hockey in the street.
And, as promised, we had pizza every Friday.
I remember so looking forward to hearing the doorbell ring, to tipping the driver the few dollars my mother had handed me, to opening the box to reveal an enormous, cheesy, pepperoni-topped pie, a dinner followed by “TGIF,” two hours of TV, our allotment for the week. Fridays were a dream.
Like many Americans, my love for pizza began as a child. The local pizza parlor, Louie’s, was where we wrapped up every soccer season, where we drank Fanta with abandon, where we celebrated every birthday, every recital, every milestone. It’s also, incidentally, where my aunt, in town for the weekend, jumped over a booth to perform the Heimlich on a blue-faced customer, dislodging a clam from his throat, which, as I remember, soared across the room.
Clam pizza was popularized by Pepe’s Pizzeria Napoletano in New Haven, Connecticut, twenty minutes from my home. Pepe’s thin-crust pies with charred edges, along with those from Sally’s, just down the street, and Modern, a few blocks away, gave New Haven a national name for pizza.
But this was not the pizza I grew up on. Like most children, I didn’t appreciate blistered edges or burnished undercarriages, and I didn’t mind excess: the cheesier and greasier the better. Back then, I didn’t see the beauty in the less-is-more approach, in a lightly topped, lightly cheesed, lightly sauced pie.
That appreciation would come years later when I moved to New Haven for college. There I did what many did: waited in line at Sally’s, Pepe’s, and Modern, so I could weigh in on the best-pizza debate. In between these research outings, I had my fair share of late-night dollar slices, floppy and foldable on grease-soaked paper plates, showered with pepper flakes and parmesan. Oil dripping down my chin, I loved them all, but it was the pizza at Bar, lesser-known (on a national level, at least) but closer to campus, that stole my heart. It’s also where I fell in love.
I met Ben, now my husband, at the end of my sophomore year. He was a senior and would be gone in three months, but we gave it a go and soon found a common love: eating. I know: At that age, who doesn’t share that love? But still, we liked to eat, and we ate a lot: wings at Archie Moore’s, burgers at The Doodle, falafel at Mamouns, grilled cheese and black bean soup at Atticus, chicken souvlaki at Yorkside, and more burgers at Louie’s Lunch.
But as time went on, and in the years after Ben graduated, we mostly found ourselves at Bar, for their good beer, their one salad, and their pizza, namely their white clam pizza, made in the style of Pepe’s: sauceless and strewn with tender clams, lots of garlic, olive oil, a modest amount of Romano cheese, and a sprinkling of oregano. With a squeeze of lemon, nothing was better. Truly, I don’t think anything is better to this day.
Ben and I married a few years after I graduated. In the years that followed, we moved around a lot, from the East Coast to the West Coast and back again, settling finally in Upstate New York, where we’ve been for over ten years now. During this decade, we had four children, so while my memory of most of it is a blur, I could describe in detail the pizzas we ate along the way.
There was the boxed Margherita pizza from Marra’s that we brought home when Ben withdrew from medical school to join the Marine Corps—a decision that inspired our worried-sick parents to drop in to our South Philadelphia apartment to intervene, hoping to change his decision, the one, they would learn, finally allowing him to fall asleep at night.
There were the many wood-fired Neapolitan pies with their ballooned edges at 2Amy’s in Washington, DC, where Ben and I met every few weeks when he was stationed in Quantico, Virginia. And the decidedly not-Neapolitan pizza we ate beneath surfboards dangling from the ceiling, surrounded by diners sporting flip-flops, trucker hats, and hoodies, at Pizza Port in Carlsbad, California, where we ended our two-week cross-country drive.
There was the speck-topped pie at Pizzeria Mozza in Los Angeles, the last meal we ate before Ben deployed, and the Margherita pizza topped with house-made mozzarella at Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix, where we ate when he returned.
There was the Grimaldi’s pizza lunch under the Brooklyn Bridge, surrounded by friends who were in town for a dear friend’s wedding. And the “bee-sting” pizza at Roberta’s, where we ate before flying out of town for another dear friend’s funeral.
There was the boxed pie we inhaled after hiking Mount Marcy, a trek that left us utterly and completely spent, and the New Haven–style pizzas we ate in my parents’ backyard the night before my brother got married, an event that made me wonder why all weddings weren’t giant pizza parties.
I could go on, but you get the idea—pizza gets you through it: divorce, marriage, death, birth, triumph, defeat. It’s no wonder every culture, or nearly every one anyway, has developed some sort of pizza-ish creation, dough baked with toppings, a mingling of humble ingredients, their union so much more than the sum of their parts.
As I get older, I love pizza more and more. Saying I could live on it would be bold, but I do know this: There is no food I’d wait in line longer for, there is no food I’d go more out of my way for, there is no food I’d travel farther for. Pizza is what I find myself dreaming about before bed, a subject I never tire of reading about, and the one food I plan trips around. Because time has proven, pizza is worth it. It’s the ultimate comfort food. Every Friday. And beyond.
Copyright © 2024 by Alexandra Stafford. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
