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With all these posts about pizza, I’ve been trying to remember when I had my first pizzeria pizza. It might have been at Village Inn in early 1960s. Hazelwood, MO, maybe.
I knew what pizza was, because my mother made it! She made the crust from a packaged hot roll mix. She used plain yellow cheese, and hamburger. I do remember that we liked it.
But it wasn’t as if there were pizzerias in every town in suburban St. louis County. Those came later, with a vengeance.
I am going to confess, that I like pizza very well if it isn’t too greasy. But I don’t recall that my tastebuds were awakened by my first piece of commercial pizza. But it is interesting to me that so many posters report their first taste of it as reveletory. What was the young me thinking back in circa 1962 after eating my first slice of commercial pizza. Did it have pepperoni on it? Can’t remember.
Salami. I grew up in a very traditional food home, we ate meat, potatoes & veg every day,no such thing as rice or pasta. Just roast meats or roast chicken & occasionally fish, never any garlic. One day I was working in a department store ( part time job after school,) & the girl I was working with, had a salami sandwich. I asked her what it was & when she found out, I had never tasted salami, she gave me some of her sandwich & I was in heaven
I grew up on similar food. Meat, potatoes, and vegetables. Potatoes were most often mashed, but we had scalloped potatoes and parsley potatoes and baked potatoes, too. We did have rice once a month or so for something different, and while the word "pasta" was not yet in common use in the USA, we occasionally had spaghetti and meatballs near the end of the month when the food budget had to be stretched. It was a revelation to me as an adult how many people made homemade sauce (I remember thinking, WHY? It comes in a jar!") and how many people ate spaghetti/macaroni not because money was low but because they liked it. And actually had it for Sunday dinner.
We would also have egg noodles with gravy with pork chops sometimes.
I love creme brûlée but I hate eggs.... go figure.
There are 3 firsts that stand out for me:
Fried clams in a nondescript clam shack on Cape Cod 1976
Pizza at Luigi's in Boston 1970
Lobster at Norman's Restaurant in Berkeley CA in 1974
I grew up in rural NY and my mother said she was allergic to seafood, so growing up in 1950-60's my food choices were pretty limited. I fell in love the first time I ate seafood/shellfish.
As someone else mentioned, my whole (food) world opened up once I left home and was exposed to different foods and cultures.
Mine opened up when I got a job in New York City. Although I'd grown up only 30 miles from the city, my family didn't go there. I only went if there was a field trip to a museum or something with the school.
Working in the city changed my life forever as far as food went.
When I was a kid, someone opened a store called "Grandma's Bagels". I remember sitting in the car with my father, and my siblings and I asked my father what they sold there. He said it was bread shaped like a doughnut with a hole in the middle. We lost interest. The store closed after about a month. The small town in NJ with one Jewish family wasn't yet ready for bagels.
When I started working in Manhattan, I learned what bagels were. Of course, they soon became popular everywhere, although from what I understand, in some parts of the country they really ARE nothing but bread with a hole in the middle, not the chewy, tasty things you tear apart with your teeth that they are supposed to be.
Now there is a bagel store across the street from where that early failed bagel shop was, and there's a line going out the door every Saturday and Sunday morning.
I LOVE a good Indian buffet. I’ve been to some bad ones but when I find a good one it becomes part of my lunch rotation.
There is an excellent Indian buffet in Plainfield Indiana, which is near Indianapolis. The company I work for has a location there, and whenever I am there I go to the buffet for lunch. It’s all-you-can-eat, but they serve it behind the counter, cafeteria-style. It’s a family owned place, and the servers are always happy to tell you about each food item as they fill your plate. They use school cafeteria style plates that have dividers so your food doesn’t run together, excellent idea! And they make naan fresh to order and bring it to your table, the best naan ever! I would go just for the naan bread.
Growing up in New Jersey surrounded by Indian people and having Indian friends, I somehow made it to college without having tried Indian food. I still don't fully understand how that happened. I suspect I was simply unused to the spice blends, having been exposed mainly to Italian, Greek, Chinese and English-type foods.
Anyways, there were two false starts where I tried some truly awful food at the only Indian restaurant in my tiny college town and then went to one of the local restaurants in my hometown while still recovering from a stomach virus (it had a long-tailed effect - turned out my entire extended family lost something like 10 lbs per person in the wake of it, and we weren't a chunky bunch). FINALLY, my best friend told me I hadn't been introduced to Indian food properly, and it turns out the closest Indian restaurant to my house was, well, EXCELLENT. I have not been able to find a better biryani or masala. Go figure. I eat there every time I visit my hometown.
My mom always made pizza from scratch. She used good quality ingredients and it was tasty. We never had any pizza other than mom’s.
When I was in fourth grade my parents had the babysitter come so they could have an evening out. We very seldom had a sitter as Mom didn’t work outside the home, so my brother and I were excited. We loved the sitter and this was a rare treat.
The sitter brought a big flat box with her. It smelled soooo good. It was a pizza from the local carry out. It was cut into squares, not the pie slice shape like mom’s pizza. It was covered with a flavorful sauce and thick layers of mozzarella. We had never seen anything like it.
first bite of a real tamale . Went out with friends from work and she said here try this and omg it was so good and have loved tamales ever since and there is only one place here that serves real tamales with the corn wrapping . Most places don't know what a real tamale is .
first bite of a real tamale . Went out with friends from work and she said here try this and omg it was so good and have loved tamales ever since and there is only one place here that serves real tamales with the corn wrapping . Most places don't know what a real tamale is .
I have never had a tamale, real or otherwise, and I'm not sure I'd know one if I saw one!
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That's not pizza.
