Right and Wrong

One of my favourite food writers was, is, Elizabeth David. This in spite of her undoubted snobbishness, and her highly prescriptive thoughts on certain foods. She, though not with 100 per cent consistency, believed in authenticity. Pizza was one such food she tended to see as to be done in a particular way or not at all. It was right (her way) or wrong (any other way).

I can agree that the dumping ground pizza - anything and everything added to one - is horrible. Again my kindergarten kids mixing paint analogy, you add too many colours and you just get muddy brown. But as the pizza base is such a great carrier of toppings I don't see it should be limited to tomato, mozarella and maybe an olive or three.

The smell of pizza dough is drifting through the study door even now, ready to form four bases. Just 500g of flour, 325ml of water, a sachet of dried yeast, 13g of salt and two tbsps of olive oil so the cost is well under 50p. A Sainsbury's basic mozarella (I've tried others, and only the pizza mozarella from Waitrose makes any real difference, and that's a trek across town) is I think 45p, to be used on two of the four, along with to be spread as taste fits: five or six cloves of garlic, a small red chilli, an onion, and a basic red pepper, another 45p the lot, and a tin of chopped toms 32p.

We have a small amount of turkey-breast leftover from Sunday's crown, that with some defrosted sweetcorn will add a few more pennies. A £1 taster-pack of peperone will make the basis of another topping, with three or four mushrooms, and an 80p tin of anchovies plus a few leftover olives a third. A few leaves from a £1 bag of baby spinach leaves will find a home on one of them, probably the turkey jobbie, the balance to make a small salad to assuage the guilt. So three pizzas, a garlic bread, and a small salad will set us back under £5.

None of those is going to be authentic, in Elizabeth David's terms, except maybe the garlic bread. But my son when we go out for pizza often goes for chicken and sweetcorn; and spinach with cheese of any sort is great. Plus an Italian peasant of yore would have done the same thing - it is pan y companatico, bread and something that goes with bread - when we had the whole Serrano ham slivers of that went perfectly.

Authenticity be buggered, this is just the best thing to eat on our one night where we slob out and dine in front of the TV.