19 May 2020 - Cadac Pizza Stone
Compared with many, we were well placed to get through lockdown in some comfort. We had a big house where everyone had their own room. We had enough screens and powerful enough broadband for everyone to work, learn or entertain themselves without bandwidth friction. And best of all we had a garden with enough space to stretch out in and look out for the few planes flying overhead in the unblemished blue spring skies.
Most evenings I’d have a beer in the garden, sometimes alone, sometimes with my son, sometimes chatting over the party wall with the next door neighbours. Despite the fact that we all spent all of our time talking to people in Whatsapp chats and zoom calls, these wall-separated conversations felt different - exotic and healthy. Occasionally we had family meals in our gardens at the same time and could smell each other's food and hear each other's music and conversation and jokes. It wasn’t as good as being sat around the same table sharing food and conversation and jokes but it was certainly more sociable than most Covid mealtimes.
We ate outside more and more as the evenings grew lighter and warmer and in May I bought a pizza stone for our gas barbecue, anticipating that family pizza making nights would be a super fun and regular occurrence. Maybe I should have practised on my own before insisting that everyone took turns making their own pizza, because it wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be, especially the act of transferring the pizza from the flat metal tray onto the pizza stone itself. I enjoy cooking, when I am in the kitchen on my own, but can be an overbearing control freak of a backseat chef and on pizza night, things all went a bit sweary Gordon Ramsey.
Toppings were spilt on the pizza stone, pizzas came out wonky, raw inside and burnt on the outside. And just wanting things to be nice and perfect I found myself getting more and more tense, more and more critical, more and more upset as each pizza turned out worse than the previous one. But rather than abandon the exercise and laugh it off, I insisted that everyone else was doing it wrong, making their pizzas too big, too thin, with too much toppings and not enough flour to keep the base dry and manouverable. When my nine-year-old daughter’s oversized and oddly shaped pizza flopped onto the stone, covering it in mozzarella and tomato sauce, I lost it completely. I took a big spatula, scraped the sodden dough off the stone and threw it into a bush while shouting “I told you not to make them so big! It’s all ruined now.” My astonished, appalled family looked at me in horror - this madman raging over a spoilt pizza. My daughter burst into tears. “It was a heart pizza. I made it for you”, she sobbed as I stood there spatula in hand.
There was nothing to say. She cried. I took myself off, also crying, for a walk around the Emirates Stadium and got home to cold shoulders from a subdued house. Pizza night had not been the success I’d hoped for, but at least the neighbours had been eating inside that night.
We’ve used the pizza stone plenty of times since then, more or less stress-free, but never without the memory of The Night of the Broken Hearted Pizza coming to mind. And I can never look at that corner of the garden again without seeing it splattered with dough and tomato sauce, my daughter’s sobbing still echoing in my head after all this time.
