“You can’t go home again.”
That phrase comes from a famous 1940 novel You Can’t Go Home Again, by Thomas Wolfe. It basically means that you can never fully relive your childhood and recapture old feelings and memories.
But does that keep us from trying?
No.
When I visit my local grocery store, there’s a seemingly endless number of items on its shelves that beckon me to revisit my youth, and probably none of them has the pull of the Kraft pizza kit. Remarkably, the packaging remains as I remember it from the 1970s, when this handy little kit served as the local pizza shop for countless local homes. Only the price has changed!
So, this week I finally relented and bought one, just to see if I could relive a time when Pizza Night meant fumbling with gooey dough and holding your nose while spreading the shelf-stable parmesan cheese contained in the kit. (Thankfully, I’ve learned that fresh parmesan doesn’t share that same repugnant odour!)
If you wanted pizza growing up in Mabou in the 1970s, Kraft provided the only game in town. In fact, we had no concept of what a pizza should even look like. When we went to PEI for a family vacation in the summer of 1976, my older brother, who had just graduated from high school, suggested capping off a night at the Brackley Drive-In Theatre (which, like the Kraft pizza kit, is still in business) with a pizza.
So, we found a shop, ordered our pizza, and took it back to our road-side motel in Cavendish. I recall our collective apprehension as the pizza was placed on the little table in our room. Complete novices when it came to ordering pizza, we didn’t opt for something basic like pepperoni. No, we had to go for the works, and the result was a concoction so foreign to us kids that we sat there for several minutes staring at the extra-large pizza.
This wasn’t like any pizza I’d ever seen. Our little grocery store in Mabou at the time had onions, for sure, but just about every other item on this pizza was unavailable when it came to making our own pizza. Since it was his idea, my brother was compelled to at least attempt eating a piece, so once he had discarded the olives, green peppers, the mushrooms and most of the mozzarella, he was able to choke down what ostensibly at that point was the pepperoni pizza that probably would have been the correct choice for our virgin palates.
Today, my friend Eli is my go-to when I have a hankering for pizza. Of course, this time of year he closes up shop for five weeks as he takes his family on their annual vacation to Lebanon, but it’s BBQ season, so my appetite is otherwise occupied.
So, on Sunday afternoon, I purchased my first Kraft pizza kit in a half a century – a double kit, luckily, so that I was able to make the pizza I grew up with, and a second one to actually eat in case the first proved visually unappealing, if not completely inedible.
For those readers who didn’t grow up with the Kraft pizza kit, it includes a can of sauce, a package of flour, some parmesan cheese, and an herb packet that artificial intelligence tells me contains “dried parsley and dried onions, alongside general unspecified ‘spices.’” That’s it. If you want anything else on there, you have to buy it separately
Since I was a few years younger than my older brother and sister, I only ever got to sprinkle the herb packet. Today, I’ve got total control, as I chop up mushroom, peppers and onions for my alternate pizza, which sits on the counter beside my rather spartan Kraft creation.
“You guys didn’t think to put anything else on your Kraft pizza?” my wife asked as she watched me fumble my way through my pizza prep. “We always chopped up wieners and put them on there.”
So, I grabbed a couple of wieners from the fridge and added them to one side of my Kraft pizza, leaving the other side for our vegetarian daughter.
As the two pizzas cooked, I recalled the last time I tried to revisit another staple of our diet growing up – Holiday Canned Luncheon Meat. There was always a can of that in our pantry, and the Luncheon Meat sandwich was a staple at wakes, weddings and in my packed school lunch.
It had been at least 40 years since I had tasted it and, as it turned out, I should have left it alone for another 40. The thrill of nostalgia began and ended with pulling the little “key” from the top of the container and using it to open the can. A half-eaten sandwich was quickly green-binned, and I even thought better about feeding the remainder to the cat!
My Kraft pizza experiment, predictably, was only a little more successful than my Luncheon Meat escapade. I dutifully polished off my half of the Kraft creation and had just enough room for a small piece of the second pizza. My daughter’s half of the pizza, minus the wieners, still sits untouched in the fridge a day later and will probably meet the same fate as most of my Luncheon Meat.
Eli’s back from Lebanon Sept. 2, so I won’t have to wait long to reacquaint myself with the real thing.