Deja YouTube

Sometimes I think my old Samsung phone might be reading my mind. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that it shamelessly monitors my searches and takes note of the things I look at online, but eavesdropping on my thoughts crosses a line. And yes, I’m kidding. Thirty-five years of working with young people hasn’t killed enough of my brain cells to make me that paranoid.  Although it is an interesting “what if” that might just appear in my future writing.

Right now, some of you are thinking that I was questionably sane to begin with, so I’d probably better explain myself. A few weeks ago, I was going through a last round of editing Silver Mirror and Children of Nyx. Both of them contain scenes related to my favorite elementary school memory: pizza day. Then, while I was taking a break, a new video showed up in my YouTube feed.  As fate would have it, it was about school cafeteria pizza.

I’m ashamed to admit that my first thought was of internet conspiracy theories. But ever the linguistic nerd, I thought that maybe I’d stumbled across a concept in need of naming. After all, nothing is ever completely real unless we have words to bind it. My first thought was to create some sort of hybrid with social media and déjà vu. Luckily I looked it up to see if the concept already had a name, because it’s apparently called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.  I’m not going to go into what exactly that entails, but it does sound more plausible than a psychic Samsung.

Anyway, the pizza video was made by Tasting History, one of my favorite YouTube channels.  If you’ve never watched it, the host is both informative and funny. Just listening to him took me back to pizza day, which was the only day of the school week when I didn’t bring my lunch from home. Looking back, I can't really recall what was so special about school pizza. As food went, it wasn't particularly memorable. Yet here I am, decades later, remembering it fondly. When I became a teacher, they still had pizza day, but the stuff they served wasn't anything like what I'd eaten as a kid. It wasn't bad. In fact it probably tasted more like real pizza than what my school gave me as a kid, although this modern version was definitely of the frozen variety.

The recipe that Tasting History shared was one from a cookbook distributed to all public schools back in the 1980s, so I'm hopeful that through cooking it, I might be able to reclaim one of the lost parts of my childhood. The only problem is that since it was designed for a school cafeteria, it makes a lot of pizza. It also uses a pourable crust, which in my own humble opinion, borders on blasphemy. I haven't made it yet though, because even halving the recipe would make enough to leave my family eating leftovers for a week.

But you know what? I’m a little nervous about making it. Right now, it’s a wonderful memory of a time far more simple than today. Even if it does taste the same as it did then, I might not be able to experience it the way I did when I was ten years old. We define the world around us through the lens of our past, and I’ve experienced a lot in the four decades since I last ate it. And even if it does taste the same to me, will my son and daughter see its greatness? Or will they give me the same look of pity as when I showed them Atari games or made them watch Lost Boys?

I’ve included the link to the Tasting History website where you can find both the recipe and the discussion of its history. I hope it brings a smile to some of your faces (probably the ones framed with gray hair and a growing number of wrinkles) as we try not to be insulted by the fact that our childhoods are appearing on history channels…

https://www.tastinghistory.com/recipes/schoollunchcheesepizza