Cheese Pizza, Extra Cheese Please!

Most of us are, if not pizza connoisseurs in our own right, pizza lovers.  It is, at least in US, one of the top ten foods of choice. While it will do you no good for me to recommend the best, doughiest, richest, cheesiest, or other superlative pizza made in family-owned independent pizzerias locally, here in the SF Bay Area, and since there are already zillions of cheese pizza recipes and reviews online, I thought, if I can do this without bringing on even deeper cravings or making myself prematurely hungry, I thought I would give us a look at the cheese pizza trivia thus far (as of 2006, anyway).

In one year (presumably in the 2000s), 4 BILLION pizzas were purchased. While you and I might favor the straight-up cheese pizza (extra cheese, please!), the number one American topping is pepperoni. 350 million tons of frozen pizza are consumed each year. Only 4% of pizza-eaters never go out for it, or buy pizza out.

The first pizzas were made and eaten only by peasants, but the first official cheese pizza was that created for royalty, in Italy, by a man who was a baker and who was called upon to cook for the visiting King Umberto and the Queen Margherita.  Designing the cheese pizza around the Italian flag, Raffaele Esposito used, simply, mozzarella cheese, tomatoes, and basil, making a white, red, and green cuisine that got instant rave reviews and that has endured for over 111 years.

And with that last tidbit, here is one superlative cheese pizza tale, however, that I feel compelled to close with:  Some of the best cheese pizza I have ever had is that my Gram used to make for us when we stayed over on Saturday nights.  It came in a uniquely shaped (at that time) box, had a cheese packet, a dough mix, and a cylinder of sauce.  You might remember it: Chef Boyardee pizza in a box.  It came out thin and yeasty, with sweet sauce and salty parmesan crumbs of melted cheese.  It was nothing like any cheese pizza in the restaurants or by delivery, but it was also before we kids had ever had a cheese pizza pie of any kind, so it was to us gourmet.  And it is to me today still the best I have ever had…for obvious reasons.  Now if you will excuse me, I am either going to Bravo’s, on Geneva and Mission in San Francisco, Manor Room, in Pacifica, or am going to try to find the classic Chef Boyardee cheese pizza box I was first introduced to in the sixties and still crave today.