Tupper Lake, November 6, 2012 by Jeff Boucher

Saturday, May 8, 2010

When the moon hits your eye.....

Like a big pizza pie, that's amore'.......

Pizza. 

I love pizza.

Why?  

Hard to say without some serious psychoanalysis and if I got on a couch right now, I'd probably nap. So a visit to the shrink, although advisable for a lot of reasons, is out of the question at the moment.

So I'll guess.  When I was a kid, I was a fussy eater (just ask my mother, she'll tell ya). Being an only child, and probably a loud whiny one when not given what I wanted  I suspect that early on, I decided I liked pizza.  I also suspect my parents decided early on to keep me quiet. 
If the brat wants pizza and he'll shut up, let's give him pizza. 

There is a scientific basis to this discussion. It's called The Pizza Cognition Theory
Click on that link for the whole explanation, but basically it states that ...
The first slice of pizza a child sees and tastes ... becomes, for him, pizza.





I must have had a hell of a first slice of pizza. Thanks Mom & Dad. 
I may have had pizza in Germany or Italy as an infant (Dad was stationed in Germany)-I'll have to check with Mom on that, but my earliest memories, and lord they're good ones are having pizza at the Dew Drop Inn in Saranac Lake. 

The Dew Drop Inn was run by Forrest "Dew Drop" Morgan. 
Here's a pic I grabbed from Bunk's Place.

Suffice it to say Dew Drop's was a happening place when I was a kid in the '60s.
Dew is legendary.

They had celeb waitresses before they were celebs, like Faye Dunaway.
Faye was and is hot.

So back to pizza. My parents would bring me there on occasion. If you were lucky, you'd get a table on the  enclosed porch, which was literally a foot or two above the Saranac River.  As a kid, it was a treat to go there. You'd get these little packaged breadsticks and crackers and butter and watch the ducks on the river while waiting for the pie to come. 

Then there was Rosie.  She was a waitress, and if you lucky you got Rosie to serve you. She was a character. Sweet, funny and she always wore these giant earrings. Giant hoops and many others that made an imprint in my memory along with the pizza.  The pizza was neopolitan-thin crust. I can still see the char on the bubbles of cheese that popped while the pie was in the oven.  
Good stuff.

On the ride home which was about 20 minutes, sometimes I'd fall asleep, other times I'd chew on the leftover crust in the back seat of the Chevy Impala.

If I was lucky, there's be a piece to munch on the next day, and therein lies my affliction for leftover pizza.

I'm a firm believer in The Pizza Cognition Theory.

How about you?

4 comments:

  1. Omg all that talk about pizza makes me so hungry. I always remember it was my Mom making our pizza, with lots of cheese and toppings.

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  2. Definitely - and I LOVE to make it at home!

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  3. OK Tup - you're a good enough guy and all that, but a scientist -or an analyst- you're not! I think you're letting your love of pizza cloud your intellect - A totally dumb theory. And I back up my assertion with three facts:

    * I'm old enough to have been around when pizza was a relatively unknown entity in America! One day my older brother came home with a tale of this fantastic and delicious stuff he had last night in Trenton (I lived on a farm in central Jersey!) it was called "Tomato Pie". From his description, my mother made some - even then I remember thinking, "Damn, this is pretty bad stuff!" Even my brother said, "No Mom, this is not it!" If the theory held true, I would never have had another slice of pizza - ever! So, strike one, Tup.

    * Your link is from Serious Eats, a well respected and usually trustworthy source of food info, and even the author of this piece ends by qualifying everything that goes before by essentially admitting that the theory has its problems. Strike two.

    * And finally, but perhaps strongest, your link is quoting Serious Eats, a blog that gets what, maybe 50,000 hits a day? And each and every article on Serious Eats pulls 20, 30, maybe 50 comments - and in the web world of so many "me too" commentors, how many comments did this article pull? Zero, zilch, nada - my god Tup, this is just the kind of article that should have -if it had any credence- pulled a few hundred comments - am I right here? Yeah, OK - I rest my case.

    Ha! Good post, my friend. I too love pizza - and in all modesty, I can tell you that there is no place within 20 miles that comes close to the quality of my homemade stuff. Not that my old mother -rest her soul- would have recognized it as pizza, or tomato pie, for that matter.

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  4. Letting my love of pizza cloud my intellect? You're assuming intellect exists in the cavernous space between my ears! The theory may have a hole or two in it, but who's counting?

    As far as tomato pie goes, we get it in Utica when we visit the in-laws
    ( it's called tomato pie) - comes as a rectangular, foccocia style crust, with red sauce and parmesan cheese-good stuff.

    As for your pie, in lieu of you sending me one,I want to see a pic the next time you make it!

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