Free Comic Book Day (2019)
Written by Saladin Ahmed & Tom Taylor
Artwork by Cory Smith
Inks by Jay Leisten, Colors by David Curiel
. . .
Chef’s Note: Pizza was a constant for me growing up.
First off, my hometown featured an amazing pizza joint called, appropriately enough, “Town Pizza” – my family visited this establishment frequently and often and regularly. Which might not seem that unusual until you read ahead a bit.
Suffice to say: my family was a pizza family.
Because here’s the thing: my Dad made pizza every single Sunday night when I was growing up.
And I mean every single Sunday night. I have a hard time remembering a Sunday night in my childhood that did not feature pizza.
We didn’t always go to church but we always had pizza.
Also, he never used measuring cups or spoons, so the crust came out different every time: thick and buttery, thin and crispy, puffy and toasty – the variations were endless.
Same for the sauce: some Bell’s Seasoning and then maybe some garlic salt or onion flakes or black pepper – these were all applied either via a pinch or a shake or two – just until it tasted “good”.
So, as both Peter and Miles realize here, there’s not so much a particular flavor that I associate with cheese, pepperoni, and home so much as the environment, the context – my family all together, having pizza together every Sunday night, feeding tidbits to Black Jack, watching the Bruins and then Wild Kingdom…
Good times.
It should come as no real surprise to realize that the tastes of childhood are both intense and indelible, especially since children tend to eat so many of the same foods day after day, year after year. That flavor is embedded in the memory forever, as much as the aroma of a mother’s perfume or the color of a doll’s dress. But there is an even deeper reason that children develop the tastes they do, and it is largely biological. Both children and adults have about the same number of taste buds—50,000—and since adults’ degenerate over time, children get to know flavors early on for reasons of natural development.