An obscene number of Americans asked me before I left for Falmouth what I was going to do about food in England, as if the whole country was starving itself, as if there wasn’t a crumb from the Queen’s scone to spare. My canned response was to rattle off a list of the restaurants I’d loved in London as a student there. The Americans don’t know that Cornwall isn’t London, anyway.
In Cornwall, I starve. I did not make a friend in Falmouth for nine days. For the first nine days I ate on my own or I didn’t eat at all. There is something less depressing about falling asleep to the sound of your stomach groaning than to sit at table across from an empty chair while chewing on some bread. Maybe it’s because when I sit across from empty chairs I hear Eddie Redmayne singing ‘Empty Chairs at Empty Tables’ in my head and the thought of all of my friends being dead is enough to put me off food. In Falmouth at first I didn’t have friends to imagine dead, but I still didn’t eat often. I grew up outside of Chicago and then lived in New York for five years, so pizza is my lifeblood. Not many weeks of my life have passed where a hot slice hasn’t been munched on, hasn’t warmed my stomach and cured all my problems. In Brooklyn, one of the checkout girls at Duane Reade became so used to seeing my crying face in line with a Jack’s frozen pizza under my arm that she didn’t even give me the ‘you-okay-girl?’ face after the third or fourth time. Pizza was my sadness antidote. When I got to England, it became my sadness. One of those first nine days a roommate showed up and we ate at Pizza Express. I wanted a pepperoni pizza; to order one I’d have to say I wanted ‘the American’ which was almost enough to make me order a salad instead. But I really wanted pizza. It was awful; I ate the whole thing out of pity for the poor restaurant with the word ‘pizza’ in its name that wasn’t serving anything close to pizza. At home I started plotting the next pizza I’d eat, how there was no way it could be worse. I bought a frozen one from Asda; it was somehow worse. I bought a frozen pizza from practically every grocery store in the Penryn - Falmouth - Truro tri-town area. Not one of them was something I’d ever eat again. After three weeks I’d made a couple of friends. One night I sat and watched them eat Dominos out of cardboard boxes. A pizza each. I couldn’t bare the thought of taking even a single a bite. The smell reminded me of the time I threw up for fifteen hours before a school dance after eating Dominos. It hadn’t been Dominos fault. I had an allergic reaction to the fish smell at school when the science teachers did their annual fish fry. But the Dominos exited my body with such force that the smell of the garlicy dough gives me PTSD. Never again. Especially not when trying to make new friends in Falmouth. I daydream a lot about the best pizzas I’ve ever eaten. Those cheesy $2.50 slices from Brickhouse on Bedford Avenue that got me and my bank account through senior year at NYU. The salt of the tomatoes on a Lou Malnati’s butter crust deep dish. The simplicity of a frozen Red Baron supreme and how Dad used to keep them in the oven too long so the crust crunched on every bite. How could there not be edible pizza available here? How did I get to a point in my life where pizza defined home for me? How thin was I going to get without the grease of a dollar slice coating my stomach? I complained to essentially every person I met. No one convinced me I’d find what I was looking for so I gave up all hope. No one’s eyes lit up with the excitement of a child seeing Disney-on-Ice when I asked for recommendations. I looked at my calendar and put a little star on December 18th when I’d fly home for Christmas and make sure my mom had a hot Lou’s cheese waiting for me in the car. I’d resigned myself to a pizza-less life. ‘I’ll make you a pizza,’ is probably the one thing that could be said to me that would identify a friend-for-life. Even if it was going to be shit pizza, the effort is enough to raise someone to best friend status. I made one of those friends a month after arriving in the UK. The pizza dry spell had been consuming me. Desperation was on my face like a dribble of red sauce in the corner of your mouth left behind after a slice of Hawaiian from California Pizza Kitchen. I needed a real fucking pizza. I kept expectations low for this homemade one; I couldn’t let a friendship dissolve because of soggy crust. We bought our ingredients at Marks and Spencer - pizza bases, tomato paste, pasta sauce because we couldn’t find any pizza sauce, pepperoni, olives, mozzarella and shredded cheddar. I sat in front of the oven and watched the cheese melt over the side. It was pornographic. We cut into it and I let my slice cool; burnt taste buds would not aid the situation. After feigning patience for thirty seconds, I blew on it and took a bite. It was a damn good pizza. It wasn’t a New York uber cheesy, thin-crust slice and it wasn’t a Chicago mammoth pie, but it tasted enough like pizza that I felt a little better. I knew if I got sad and needed a hot slice to solve all my problems I could make it again and it would do the job just fine.
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