Last Sunday was Pizzageddon. This doesn’t mean that cheese and tomato sauce fell from the sky in dollops to crush government buildings and places of worship and all-you-can-eat Pizza Hut buffets, signaling the displeasure of some vengeful Neapolitan god — there is nothing religious about Pizzageddon, or at least not theistic. Rather, Pizzageddon is the ultimate pizza cook-off, at which different teams try to assemble the most delicious pie, and a winner is chosen by secret ballot. It takes place in my kitchen, and the rule this time around — for there have been many Pizzageddons — was that my wife (an ace baker) would supply the homemade dough, but the teams were responsible for all toppings, including sauce.
Pizzageddon is part of a larger custom in my family, which we have given the more modest name of Pizza Sundays, and which simply involves us making pizza, from scratch, every Sunday evening. We often make the immodest joke that Pizza Sundays is the greatest tradition in the history of the universe, and although that may be pushing it a little, it gives our friends and us something to look forward to every week, a good excuse to gather, talk about food, and share a reliably delicious meal.
The Slow Food movement has emphasized the value of taking time to appreciate your food, and to learn what its proponents call “taste education,” which aims “to retrain the senses and sharpen perception” in order to better understand the role food plays in society. The focus is on acknowledging the links between food, place, and culture, with a balance between pleasure and knowledge — of local cuisines, biodiversity, and food’s connection to the environment — and on reintroducing an idea of eating that provides a counterpoint to the mass production, instant gratification, and fat-and-sodium obsession that fuels the fast food industry. One key ingredient in the recipe for conscious eating, however, is much simpler and more intuitive than drawing a flow chart to assess the impact your Thai beef salad has on global ecosystems. It has to do with cooking, and eating, as a ritual.
Ritual is a funny word; people will say, with something like zeal, “I absolutely have to have my coffee before I leave the house in the morning.” But rituals differ from habits in that they include some element of the sacred, or at least the symbolic. Incorporating a meal into a personal tradition is a way of heightening the amount of attention and, ultimately, care that you put into making it. It not only gives you practice, which will necessarily increase your familiarity with the ingredients and make you want to strive for the best possible version of a given dish, but it also encourages food to be shared in a way that hearkens back to times when communities were smaller. Then, meals were often a collective affair, the main social event of the day. (This is one point in favour, by the way, of certain restaurants that follow culinary rituals with a particular rigidity.)
Many religions have prohibitive food rituals that are widely observed — the ban on pork in the Jewish and Hindu traditions, for example — but there are also still many non-religious food rituals that we maintain without even recognizing them as such. They tend to come on special occasions. In this paper on food and anthropology for the Social Issues Research Center, Dr. Robin Fox of Rutgers University points out that food rituals dominate the holidays:
Because these things are usually eaten in a certain context that we associate with togetherness and tradition, they are all the more enjoyable when we have them. They are inevitably associated with “event” meals that require careful preparation, and invite a kind of collective dining experience that is inherently more than just the prosaic consumption of food for sustenance.
Not every meal can be a Christmas feast. But, as food and food production continues to present itself as a major issue facing our various societies, with huge impacts on everything from nutrition to climate change to global disease pandemics, there is an increasing need to consider the sacred element of every meal (or, if that word is too religious for you, the elemental nature of eating). Building personal traditions or rituals into your eating habits is a way of intensifying your focus on food, which usually results in higher quality fare. (Another plus of ritual eating is that it makes food as much about the people you’re eating it with as the dishes being served, and the best complement to a fine meal, after a good glass of wine, is sparkling conversation.)
Take, for example, the winning pie at Pizzageddon. My friend Maja spent thirteen hours roasting tomatoes, then arranged them over a layer of pesto and fresh mozzarella. Finally, she sprinkled the top with arugula and pine nuts. The result was a pizza that was unanimously chosen as a culinary masterwork. Maja took a long time to think about her food, a long time to prepare it, and a great deal of care in assembling it. If Pizzageddon was instead just a Sunday On Which Pizza Happens To Be What We’re Eating, my guess is, the pie wouldn’t have been as tasty — she might have settled for canned tomatoes, say, and that would have been a travesty.
Stupid names are optional for these kinds of things. But ritual is a way to give meaning to a meal, and a meal with personal significance will always win over one cooked under a heat lamp and served in a styrofoam box, or scooped from a tin and zapped until petrified. Pizzageddon is as good a place as any to start, so, in the interest of spreading the love, here’s the recipe for Maja’s winner:
Ingredients:
Pizza dough
Olive oil
6 Roma tomatoes
2 tbsp mixed dried herbs (thyme, rosemary, basil, oregano, and sage)
1 vidalia onion (red also works)
4 cloves of garlic
3 tbsp pesto
1 chunk fresh mozzarella or bocconcini, sliced
3 tbsp grated Parmigiano-Reggiano
1 cup arugula
6–8 fresh basil leaves
Balsamic glaze
Kosher salt
Fresh ground pepper
Preparation:
(1) Film a baking sheet with about one tablespoon of olive oil. Sprinkle one tablespoon of the herbs, salt, and pepper over the oil, cut the tomatoes in half, and place them, cut side down, on the sheet. Set your oven to 175 °F and roast the tomatoes for twelve–thirteen hours. When they’re done, remove them from the oven, let them cool, and peel the skins off. Cut them into quarters.
(2) Coarsely chop the onion and smash the garlic cloves. Combine in a bowl with the rest of the dried herbs, salt and pepper and a touch of olive oil. Roast on a baking sheet in a 325 °F oven for about thirty minutes.
(3) Preheat oven to 450 °F. Stretch your dough (homemade is best; see this recipe for a basic version) on a baking sheet, or, if you’re using a pizza stone, a pizza peel. Spread the pesto over the dough in a thin layer, then top with onions and garlic (these should go under the cheese, so they don’t burn), sliced mozzarella, chunks of roasted tomato, and grated Parmesan.
(4) Bake for ten minutes or until crust turns golden.
(5) Remove pizza from the oven. Tear basil and arugula leaves and arrange over the hot pie so they wilt a bit. Toss pine nuts on top and drizzle the whole thing with balsamic glaze before serving.
(6) Ascend to the heights of pizza ecstasy!
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