Pizza

My brother and father would kill me if they knew that this was my excuse for pizza: a few years ago, my father built a pizza oven in our backyard, and it and the breadmaker are the only items in the kitchen that my mother doesn’t dare touch, for fear of facing the wrath of “the men.”

My brother and father, like most men of Southern Italian descent, take pizza very seriously. While sometimes we pick up a few balls of pizza dough from our local pizzeria, my brother likes to make his own, complete with semolina flour and a cornmeal crusted bottom, in the breadmaker. We head to Sonny’s, our favourite Italian pork store, or sometimes even to Mike’s Deli in the Bronx, and my brother carefully selects the best prosciutto di parma, arugula, pecorino romano, and of course, “fior di latte:” mozzarella.

Back at home, my mother contributes her famous San Marzano tomato marinara sauce, thickened with extra tomato paste, and the girls begin our job of assembling the pizzas, which my brother and father bake in the backyard, in the oven that has been heating all day.

As compared with my father’s signature pizza, with prosciutto, mozzarella, and an egg lightly fried, topped with fresh, raw arugula that just barely wilts on top, my pizza is a bit of a sad excuse. With a store-bought whole wheat tortilla as a crust, tomato paste and my own tomato sauce, tasting faintly of tin because of the inexpensive tomatoes I used from the local Rabba, melted mozzarella and cheddar mix that is the all-purpose cheese for quesadillas and grilled cheese in my house, and a few leaves of basil on top, I feel like a bit of a failure as far as pizza making is concerned.

But if I close my eyes, the oregano I add to the sauce somehow makes it taste a little bit closer to home. The tortilla lacks the flavour of my brother’s semolina crust, but none of the texture. And fresh basil is very hard to screw up. I may never match the men in my family: I have no room in my house for a pizza oven, and neither the patience nor the time to make a pizza dough every time I want a light supper for myself, but pizza is good in any form, and I have the memories of those summer days eating hot pizza barefoot in the grass, mozzarella stringing with every bite, the dog hovering for scraps, and the burst of a barely cooked egg yolk, soaked up with my brother’s homemade crust.