Monday, December 19, 2005
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More on pizzas

I guess the BLT pizza. while not showing many signs of actually being the "#1 pizza in USA", is still reasonably well-known at least in certain parts of the USA. For some reason my attention has repeatedly returned to various different and unusual pizzas and pizza toppings. For example, it struck me as very unusual that sweetcorn (just "corn" to US readers) is such a popular pizza topping here in the UK. I was also very confused by one vendor's "Indiana" pizza (primary ingredient: tandoori chicken); as a Hoosier born and raised in Indiana, I couldn't figure out what tandoori chicken has to do with Indiana. As it turns out, my Indiana bias led me to ignore the general properties of pizza name formation in the Italian tradition: "Indian + a" (I leave it to the reader to speculate on a pizza topping that accurately reflects Indiana [sweetcorn, perhaps?]). And some of our recent family holiday conversation turned around my brother's German experience of Pizza mit Polyp. Sounds disgusting indeed until you realize that "Polyp" is simply Tintenfisch aka octopus (Well, I suppose some people may find an octopus pizza just as disgusting as a polyp pizza).

With my perhaps excessive interest in pizzas, my attention naturally turns to northeast England, in particular Stockton-on-Tees, town where the friction match was invented, and home of the least prototypical pizzas that I have personally experienced (i.e., "been in the same room with"; not necessarily "eaten"). I will start with the Tropicana which starts with an ordinary pizza (mozzarella, tomato sauce, mushrooms, ham, and perhaps slices of onion if I recall correctly), and then takes the Hawaiian experience that much further by including not only pineapple but also tender slices of banana. It's sort of like dinner and dessert all in one, and why not -- it's all heading to the same place. I didn't try any, although I guess I could have picked off the ham (and maybe the bananas too).

Next on the menu is the Doner Pizza, of which I also claim personal experience despite not consuming any of it,1 as several pieces were threateningly brandished in my direction. The doner pizza is essentially an attempt to project the three-dimensional doner kebab onto a two-dimensional surface. The typical ingredients of a doner kebab are not all represented in doner pizza. Included are lamb sliced from a massive meat cylinder which one hopes has been kept at a suitably high temperature; spicy chili (or "chilli") sauce, and some variant of tzatziki sauce both of which are poured generously onto the giant heap of meat (by the way, the "heap" ruins the mathematical purity of the doner pizza as a 2-d projection). Which in turn rests on an ordinary pizza crust (taking the place of the traditional pita). Not included on the doner pizza are any members of the vegetable family. The doner pizza is a great improvement upon the ordinary doner kebab as, erm, well, hmmmmm. Let me get back to you on that one.

But next up is the true wonder of the pizza world. The London Pizza is an amazing step toward making the ordinary pizza into a complete meal on its own. How often have you ordered a pizza and a portion of chips (a.k.a. "french fries" or "deep fried potatoes") and wished you could eat them at the same time? Well, the London Pizza allows you to do just that. It starts with an ordinary cheese pizza (mozzarella, tomato sauce) upon which is heaped a giant portion of chips fresh out of the fryer. On top of the chips, if you're lucky, some sauce (either chili/chilli sauce [as above] or creamy garlic sauce). If you're unlucky, just try and choke them down "dry" (not really dry, as they will have retained some portion of the frying oil that has not soaked into the crust, and then into the box, and then into whatever the box is sitting on). I've experienced the London Pizza twice (the first time, doubly-sauced [the pizza, not me]; the second, dry as a bone), and I can say that if you ever face the decision of "sauce or no sauce" on your own London Pizza, please choose whatever sauce is at hand. Oddly, I have not yet been able to find a "London Pizza" in London proper, but I guess they'd just call it "pizza" here.


1Feel free to attempt a less awkward and more grammatically correct syntactic rendering of this ugly modifying clause with its nasty dual co-referential "of"s and their unpleasant pronominal partners "which" and "it".
consume
Monday, December 19, 2005 2:24:01 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [4]  |  Related posts:
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Monday, December 19, 2005 5:56:34 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
I misread "Doner" as "Donner" and could only imagine the savory delicious cannibal pizza...
The Thief
Monday, December 19, 2005 6:32:46 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
well, *I* would say,
"Next on the menu is the Doner Pizza, of which I also claim personal experience despite never having tried it, as several pieces were threateningly brandished in my direction."

Or is the use of "try" as "eat" a particularly American thing to say?

Which reminds me of an annoyance of mine: people's use of "take" to mean "eat" or "drink." E.g. "I take a glass of warm milk at night to help me fall asleep." What's up with that?
otherdave | otherdaveAT NOSPAMdavevision dot com
Tuesday, December 20, 2005 9:43:08 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Thanks otherdave, your version sounds much less clunky than mine (I blame the cough syrup). I don't think "try" is so American, but then again that might be one more linguistic difference I'm still oblivious to.

As for "take", perhaps these people are extending "take" in a medicinal sense. The example you gave is a good example, where warm milk is like a sleeping pill. Or maybe they are "taking" it non-orally?
The Dunce
Tuesday, December 20, 2005 11:39:19 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
yeah, I've heard of people "taking [their] coffee black" in a non-oral manner as well. I think we've figured it out.
Alas, this has become too much of a digression for a Comments section. Maybe I'll blog about it if I ever get back to blogging.
otherdave | otherdaveAT NOSPAMdavevision dot com
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