Imperative cooking: Pizza and the class war
THE National Consumer Council is upset about pizzas. It has discovered pizzas being sold with a 'topping' consisting of a small amount of cheese mixed with a vegetable oil-based imitation cheese. It wants laws passed to ensure more detailed food label- ling. So does a Mr David Walker, chief trading standards officer for Shropshire. The public, we are told, needs 'clear guidance on pizzas'. I will do my best.
Consumerists' fixation with labels is largely nonsense. If food labels listed all ingredients in scientific language, most consumers, including the three million functional illiterates produced by our coun- cil schools, would not understand them if they could read them. If the labels were in natural language, then that language is always open to rhetorical exploitation. If the public buys these curious pizzas, it is either because it doesn't care, is too stupid or ignorant, or its taste buds are so blunted by the rubbish it cooks itself, to care, or because it actually likes them.
The other day, Mrs Anderson found and pointed out to me a baked bean pizza in a prominent supermarket: obviously `they', enough of 'them' to justify mass sales, like that too. Manufacturers and retailers cater for the demands of consumers and do so directly — unlike consumerist associations funded by government. If odd things are sold in large quantities, it is not because the manufacturers have somehow tricked large numbers of people but because mil- lions of British housewives shop lazily, oddly or incompetently: vices only ex- ceeded by those they actually perpetrate in their kitchens when they do whatever they do do to the baked bean pizzas.
If there is a genuine pizza problem at all, it is to do with the reasons why the more affluent and educated classes do cook their own pizzas — essentially a peasant food and the masses can't or won't. Pizzas are made with bread dough. This dough is just what any properly run household, a house- hold which bakes daily, will have anyway, a dough made of strong flour, salt, water and some of yesterday's dough (or yeast and sugar). The only basic addition is strong olive oil. So, if you have your daily bread dough, you have, the oil apart, ready-made pizza dough. If you don't bake daily, you should. Roll the dough out, put passata, salted anchovies (cheaper, salted sardines), cap- ers, pecorino, mussels or whatever on top and bake it for 20 minutes with a little more olive oil added at the end. Nothing could more deserve the current culinary accolade, 'easy'. It is already a conveni- ence food. Nothing, except shocking in- competence and wilful dereliction of maternal duty, can explain why an able- bodied woman who cares for her family should not make pizza — and bread herself. Working mothers — and fathers can do it. 'Single parents' in 'inner-cities' threatened by the Government's 'wicked' social security reforms have, if their com- plaints are genuine, every reason to do it. Men and women 'under stress' can do it. The elderly homosexuals reeling under Clause 28 or 9, unemployed blacks, gypsies with caravan ovens, any of the categories whose behaviour is normally explained as the fault of oppressive others or hegemonic structures can do it. Not even the most crazed Marxist can blame the mass purch- ase of commercial pizzas on the masses being prevented from baking their own.
I must admit I have never had a pizza, home-made or otherwise, baked bean or otherwise, in a lower-class home in Eng- land, but I have seen such people eating pizzas 'out'. The other curious thing they do is to pretend it's a sausage or a piece of cod. Then they can surround it with baked potatoes, chips, fried mushrooms, coleslaw and, who knows, gravy and more baked beans. This 'encirclement' manouevre is also applied to British dishes such as meat pies and pasties which were also once entire dishes in themselves.
The middle classes have a variation on this. They can't quite believe that bread dough with a little flavouring is good enough or costs enough to serve, so they always overdo what they too call 'the topping' — olives and tomatoes and ancho- vies and Coppa and mussels and. . . . Or they just put too much on top. Pasta gets spoiled in a similar way. If there's one thing worse than peasants spurning good, cheap, 'easy' peasant food, it's the affluent and culinarily able classes refining it.
Imperative cooks will, of course, avoid pizzas altogether. What civilised amuse- ment is there in a dish which takes no time and little effort to cook and results in a one-course meal eaten in five minutes flat?
Digby Anderson
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