Woody’s highly anticipated new book “STRAWBERRIES IN WINTERTIME: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” is NOW available! Order your signed copy HERE!
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Wading in with Theory on Pizza
“Filial imprinting” is the learning process where a young animal becomes attached to its parent and copies what it does. However, as Austrian ethologist and 1973 Nobel Prize-winner Konrad Lorenz famously demonstrated, upon coming out of their eggs, goslings, ducklings and chicks will imprint on the first moving object they encounter and become socially attached to it.
Konrad Lorenz with feathered friends in tow.
Usually, this moving object is the mother goose, duck or hen, but Lozenz showed it can also be a human – or, expressly in his case, the young birds imprinted on his wading boots that were at their eye level.
In one experiment, Lorenz even showed goslings could imprint on a cardboard box. When the box was then placed on a model train the gosling followed it around and around as it circled an oval track.
I bring this up because I have my own theory of imprinting that also involves a box – a pizza box. Specifically, my Theory of Pizza Imprinting is that the very first slice we ever taste becomes our ideal “pie.” Thin crust or deep dish; extra saucy or super cheesy; crispy crust or soft edges; no toppings or many; these specifics are what we will prefer forevermore.
My personal perfect pizza still mimics the first slices I had nearly five decades past from “Leonardo’s,” a mom-and-pop take-out-only pizzeria in my boyhood hometown in Ohio. Leonardo’s pizza had a thin-but-bready dough and the edge crust was nearly-burnt-crispy delicious.
Leonardo’s pies were actually square and cut into 16 pieces, meaning the four middle slices had no crust. These interior pieces were always the last to go because, lacking crust to anchor the cheese, the entire melted slab tended to slide off with your first bite leaving behind only the bready bottom wet with tomato sauce.
Pepperoni was the only topping I remember our family getting on Pizza Nights and even this imprinted: Leonardo’s thin-sliced pepperoni –
like its dough crust – was wonderfully crisp around the curled-up edges.
For pizza like Leonardo’s I continue to search. In fact, I even prefer the rare Italian pies that are square because the challenge of eating a crust-less interior slice without all the cheese coming off and flopping onto my chin on the first bite adds a dash of heartwarming nostalgia to the recipe.
Pizza imprinting is so powerful I have friends whose ideal pie is as rubbery as one of Lorenz’s old wading boots because their virgin slice was delivered in a franchise-logoed flat box.
While the imprinting is not quite as strong, I believe my pizza theory holds with other foods – especially “comfort” foods such as the meatloaf or mashed potatoes like your mom made; or your grandma’s chocolate-chip cookies; even the first hot dog you remember relishing.
I am reminded of this whenever my daughter or son returns home to Ventura and they crave fish-‘n’-chips from Andria’s Seafood at the Harbor. Meanwhile, the hot dogs they still hold as their standard are not Dodger Dogs, but those once served at long-gone Cartwright’s hut on Main Street.
Frankly, I had not thought of berries being on the menu for my imprint theory until a local reader commented about my boyhood experience having strawberries in wintertime from a roadside stand in Saticoy.
“Your column reminds me of Northern New York State and our visits to small stands along the highway where on display, and for sale, were fruit and vegetables grown by the Amish community,” Reva writes in an earthquaky cursive that suggests her sweet recollections are from many decades past.
“California strawberries served in our retirement facility are unusually sour and don’t improve with the addition of sweeteners,” she continues. “You must put Amish strawberries, in person to sample, on your ‘some day’ list.’ It’s well worth the trip. ”
I, for one, cannot imagine our Ventura County strawberries being sour compared to strawberries from upstate New York, or anywhere, anymore than I can imagine a wading boot looking like a mother goose. I think pizza-like imprinting, and perhaps aging taste buds, is the only explanation that holds water.
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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com.
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