Food I'll miss the most: PIZZA

Thinking about the food I'll miss the more once back to France, only Pizza (and maybe icecream) come to my mind. I already talked about my pasta experience, but I never talked about my 2 years long relationship with pizza…

In France, I may eat pizza once a month, and most of the time, it’s because I do it by my own. In Italy, it happened I ate pizza twice a day: I KNOW, this is crazy.  

In France, pizzas are expensive and even if I live in a town where you can find probably more than 30 pizzerias just along the river, it’s almost impossible to find one cooking them properly. Most of the time, the crust looks like crepe, they put industrial tomato sauce, and greasy emmental. When you eat pizza in France, you feel like getting bread with it because they put too many stuff on it…

In Italy, you can find pizza everywhere and all style. Never go in a bakery at lunch time if you're starving or you will feel like buying  5 different types of slices. In Italy, the dough is awesome. The tomato sauce as well, and the mozzarella, gives an amazing taste to the pizza. It does not feel greasy, it’s tasty. Most of the time, I was prefering eating pizza cause I was considering it healthier than meat and veggies that were drowning in olive oil…  Mozzarella with pepperoncino flakes and rucola was my favourite.  Simple but good. I would have loved finding goat cheese pizza but there, it was not really possible. In brief,  I had so many pizzas in Italy that it probably became the bottom of my food pyramid… 

I remember one of my last days, I brought an Italian friend to a napolitan place, she told me it was probably the best pizza she ever had, I was so proud, I had become a pizza expert,  I knew the places where we could get litteraly pizzas orgasms.

And if ever it was not about napolitan style, I could always impress with quantity. Once, I went to a place where you can get meters of pizzas… Another concept, called giropizza, was to pay a fixed price and then you get all you can eat pizza until you can’t, the rule being: the table had to finish all the pizzas brought... aweful... I remember as well bringing a friend to a place where the pizza were more than 40cm diameter, the guy sitting next to us said to my friend: “here, they do the biggest pizza in the world !” my friend, thinking “why Italians have to think they always have the best/biggest…” well for pizza, I actually don’t care :-)

Before leaving, I went one last time to a pizzeria I was coming often when I was a student. It was a while I haven’t been there so the guy was really happy to see me. Once again, like everywhere in Italy, it was not about take away pizza, it was about getting an augmented product/service. The guy was nice, they made me a heart shape pizza as they used to do for me in the past. Such tiny positive things that contribute to make your day… And all this for 4euros with a coke… I know this is crazy (again). 

Pizza was my favorite food in Italy and for sure I’ll have to come back to get some. 

Evening metro

The other day I took the metro in Paris: only sad depressive faces, no hope. I had forgot that each time I take the metro there, people look like "about to commit suicide". I then remembered how kind of funny it was to take transportation in Milan, there was always someone that would speak too loud so you could have fun while listening. One of my favourite topic, was around 7.30pm when the mums were at the phone telling their children/husband to be patient or they could always find food in the fridge. It was like if the mum was the god of the food, the only one able to feed her family and that if ever she was late back from work, a catastrophe would happen and the family would have to quest for ready made food... Mums were: “there is this ... from yesterday or you can get some salame or there are eggs and pancetta, you can prepare some pasta”. You could feel the guilt in their voice. Most of the time, they were always with another girl friend, trying to help (or not) by giving ideas of quick recipes. I was finding this incredible, how women are still considered as the one that has to cook for all. Why do they still feel this guilt? So far, guys have hands and should be able to cook as well. Is it at church on Sundays that we teach them to be a good wife and supply good home made meals to their family otherwise they stand for failure/shame of their home ?!!! 

Anyway, even if Italy is not a feminist country for sure, in 2 years in Milan I never experimented such sadness in public transportation than in Paris. Each time I go there, I have the feeling of being in death row, and for sure, this is a failure of our french (parisian) society...