Earliest photographic evidence of my pizza making, around 2000. Look how dark that beard is! Already in the very first season of Breaking Bread with Father Dominic, I had an episode on pizza. Our Fr. Ronald, who came from a very Italian family and studied in Rome for several years, had been the community pizza maker, but wasn't always comfortable making the dough. He asked me to collaborate once and I was hooked. It wasn't long before I was trying new variations of dough and toppings, and developing my own recipes. To this day Fr. Ronald still tears pizza recipes out of magazines and leaves them in my mailbox for inspiration.
A portion of last year's pizza sauce harvest. That's garlic chives from the abbey herb garden in the front. Pizza making inspired me to create a sausage recipe, and led to pizza sauce making and eventually, canning. At one time I was canning about 24 quarts of sauce every August, which was enough to get me through a year of pizza parties. Now I do somewhat less, in part because our community is fewer in number. But my fellow monks and my students continue to love pizza as much as I love making it. I used to use nothing more than a paring knife and a Foley food mill to make my pizza sauce, but I've since graduated to a Victorio Tomato Mill which makes short work of the normally arduous process of separating seeds and skin from the pulp. I usually enlist the help of some students, who are happy to contribute their labors to any project that will produce food!
As much as I enjoy eating pizza, what I really love is throwing pizza parties. I've hosted or catered dozens of them over the years, each of them unique according to the circumstances and the company, some more successful than others, but all of them memorable. Some were more upscale affairs, with guests seated in a formal dining room (fine china and a full set of cutlery) of a large mansion-like home (fountain in front and a big pool in the back). Others were much more casual, with everyone on bar stools around the kitchen island, taking pizza straight off the pan and eating it out of hand, not a plate in sight. I've invited three of our students for a modest pizza night and had eleven hungry kids show up, and on another night invited five of them and had no one show up. Some of my favorite pizza parties were reunions of my high school classmates (still crazy after all these years!) or of former students. One family won a pizza party at an auction and enjoyed it so much they built a wood fired pizza oven on their patio which they say is mine to use whenever I want! I've had a lot of fun with families who are my dear friends, and at a Knight of Columbus fundraiser with 150 people who were mostly strangers--at which I actually tossed a crust in front of the whole crowd and dropped it on the floor! You can enjoy the pictures of some of these events below, and click HERE to see some of my bread blogs about pizza.
And in all these circumstances, there was one constant: the warmth of fellowship that comes from breaking bread together. There's no question that I enjoy introducing people to new flavors and unusual ingredients---at one party I served a carbonara pizza made with real guanciale and imported pecorino romano cheese that was so delicious it made an ex-Marine cry. But even when all I have is Kraft mozzarella and some leftover bacon from breakfast, bringing people together to share food and fellowship is a glimpse, a foretaste as it were, of the joy of the Eternal Wedding Feast, the Supper of the Lamb, the banquet hall of the new and eternal Jerusalem. Robert Capon in his book The Supper of the Lamb puts it best:
“For all its greatness (trust me—I am the last man on earth to sell it short), the created order cries out for further greatness still. The most splendid dinner, the most exquisite food, the most gratifying company, arouse more appetites than they satisfy. They do not slake man’s thirst for being; they whet it beyond all bounds. Dogs eat to give their bodies rest; man dines and sets his heart in motion. All tastes fade, of course, but not the taste for greatness they inspire; each love escapes us, but not the longing it provokes for a better convivium, a higher session. We embrace the world in all its glorious solidity, yet it struggles in our very arms, declares itself a pilgrim world, and, through the lattices and windows of its nature, discloses cities more desirable still.
After all that, and the photo gallery, you may be wondering, "How do I get invited to one of these parties?" (You might also be wondering, "Why does he have that apron on inside out?") The answer to the first question is pretty simple: people ask me to help them throw a pizza party---at their home, as a fundraiser, maybe as a family celebration---and if I can work it into my schedule and they can afford the mileage, I do. (Incidentally, I generally have to schedule events about nine months in advance.) I don't have a specific fee for doing it and I freely admit to having a bias in favor of Catholic charitable organizations, although I've been known to consort with Lutherans and Methodists, too. Sometimes it's just that people come to the abbey on retreat and they get invited into the kitchen, or the stage crew gets done working a little early and I happen to have some crusts in the fridge. As one of our alumni put it: "You hang out with Fr. Dom long enough, he'll feed you---and the Dom can cook."
It never hurts to ask.
It never hurts to ask.
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