Here is a tasty Pastime back where there was no gas station pizza, no convenience store pizza, no take home ready to bake pizza.
And the nearest pizza parlor would be at least four years in the future in that county seat just to the east of the Saline River, east of Warren.
It was the pizza in a box – the one, the only Chef-Boy-AR-Dee.
By Maylon Rice
Saline River Chronicle Feature Contributor
One of the first pizzas I ever saw, I made.
And man did I learn over the next 36 months of my time in Bradley County that I finesse the intricate process of making dough, stretching it across a perfect sized 10-inch steel pizza pan and piling on the box’s toppings like a pro.
I wish I had that old pizza pan, tempered with age, now instead of a shiny aluminum a dull brown from too many baking sessions inside a Cash & Sons propane fired oven to shine even after a good hot water scrubbing.
As any good cook knows, once you get a pan “seasoned” things just cook better upon it.
And the stock of Chef-Boy-AR-Dee Complete Sausage (or its fanciful cousin the Pepperoni) Pizza boxes in local grocery stores ranging from the two main stores Kroger and the Mad Butcher, down to the smaller neighborhood stores like Reynolds Grocery, Bob Neel & Sons Grocery, the Paint Pot, Wheeler Grocery and even those far-flung outposts such as Farrell’s out in Highway 15 North and Poole’s Grocery out along the old Camden Road, could be found on the shelves.
Inside each box was a thin paper/plastic sack (that always needed the kitchen scissor to open) containing the flour, mixed with a yeast powder to make the crust rise and stretch; a tall thin can with the pizza sauce and the what was supposedly hamburger meat for the sauce a smaller can with some dried grated cheese. Both these metal cans had to be opened with a sharp blade can opener.
I could mix up the dough with clear, cool water, but not too hot or too cold, or the dough would not “set” correctly. After allowing the dough to rise for the estimated time, the greasing of the pizza pan and the stretching of the dough began.
Only once did I try that artistic “flip” of the dough up in the air as seen on TV.
That did not, I can attest, work with the Chef Boy-AR-Dee Complete Pizza concoction.
After the dough was stretched to the outer limits of the pan – with no holes in the dough – the sauce was layered out with the back of the table spoon serving as the spreader/equalizer for the pie.
I never put the cheese on the pizza until it was time to “turn” the pan in the old ancient, propane fired stove.
Failing to turn the pizza, a pie, or a cake, or even a roast, was known to cause uneven cooking, no matter the temperature.
So, after the “turn” of the pan the tiny can of dried, shredded cheese was added.
Another 10-15 minutes baking time and out of the oven came the perfectly crusty, thin crusted assemblage of the Madison Avenue collection of foodstuffs to be called pizza.
And man was it good.
After more TV watching of how stars such as Ralph Kamden, Lucy, Jack Benny, and others devoured pizza on the tiny entertainment screen, I learned not to slice the pizza into 8 pieces for my brother and I.
We sliced it into 4 pieces and just like on TV, folded those bigger slices to eat them.
Yum yum.
The cost of the Chef-Boy-AR-Dee pizza kit, $1.05. What a bargain.
The first time a childhood friend and I attended the new pizza joint in the adjoining city to the east, we two starving 16-year-olds ordered a 14-inch medium pizza.
That was the biggest pie I’ve ever seen up until that time.
We ate two of them and could have eaten more, but alas, we had gasoline and other things to spend our hard-earned money on.
The record of pizzas consumed at the tiny Pizza place that was across from Ray’s Drive In, was 6 or was it 8.
My running buddy was home from military school, headed to one of our national military academies, this next fall. He needed to gain some weight for the enrollment.
Me, I just loved pizza.
A Pastime I won’t soon forget. And for the record, even that travel giant Buc-ee’s, or the multitude of Casey’s, and even Fayetteville’s hometown Eureka Pizza and even the prized Tiny Tim’s Pizza outlets near the campus and downtown Fayetteville Square, and even that long forgotten Pizza Hut franchise, can’t make one as delicious as me and the Chef – straight out of a box.