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Pizza rolls and the meaning of midcentury food
- politelemon 4y agoThis was a nice focused read. I've never had pizza rolls and just checking, my local supermarkets don't have these either. They'll likely forever stay as a stereotype-point of US culture from a distance, much like the red party cups.
- saiya-jin 4y agoPretty unhealthy... check. Easy to overeat and long term screw up your body without intention, especially with kids who have no defenses... check. Pales dramatically in taste when compared with real food (TM), aka cheap junkfood category... check. Yes, confirming stereotypes.
- BuyMyBitcoins 4y agoI opened Pandora’s caloric box as a teenager when I learned that I could deep fry pizza rolls. Fortunately they’ve changed the recipe lately, to make them better for air-fryers, and now I don’t feel the same urge to deep fry them.
- konfusinomicon 4y agoif you do cross paths with them, go for the pepperoni flavor. they are hands down the best one. and definitely don't cook them in a microwave, arrange on a circular pan in the shape of a smiley face in a not preheated oven at 420 for 12 minutes or you see one start to explode. if you don't have enough to make the full face, your doing it wrong.
- ilyt 4y agoI now kinda want to buy a roll of pizza dough and just... make hi-end version of them
- rgrieselhuber 4y agoPizza rolls, Steak-umms, and Chef Boyardee pizzas were basically survival food in the 80s as many of us were left to fend for ourselves for days at a time during the school week.
- leetrout 4y agoBuddy the chef boyardee pizzas are a sham today. I _loved_ them. Today they do not even include cheese in the box. I wish they would sell the sauce with the mini pepperonis in a jar by itself.
- rgrieselhuber 4y agoWhat a scam. That cheese was critical. Agreed on the sauce and the mini pepperonis.
- datavirtue 4y agoI had generic wheat flakes, and if I was lucky, 2% milk.
- tomrod 4y agoThat is my latchkey experience as well.
- JackFr 4y agoMustard sandwiches.
- bandyaboot 4y agoNow that’s austere. I usually at least had some bologna I could slap in there.
- jhbadger 4y agoExactly. These were foods for US "latchkey kids" in the 1970s and 1980s, not "midcentury" (think Mad Men early 1960s) foods. During this time the rise of having two working parents (or because of rising divorce rates, a single working parent) combined with inflexibility of employers to allow "flex time" as they often do today, meant that many children often had to prepare their own meals. So simple frozen foods were common as even a grade school child could prepare them.
- dauertewigkeit 4y agoThey seem similiar to meat pies, empanadas and other savoury pastries, except too small to be convenient.
- jrootabega 4y agoThey're more convenient to share with a group, and eat with one hand. And easier for little kids to eat.
- Hippocrates 4y agoYou’re supposed to gobble down a large bowl of them, like jellybeans.
- JasonFruit 4y ago, burning your mouth on the first few in your haste.
- michaelbuckbee 4y agoThe small size makes them easier and quicker to cook (less likely to burn the outside and leave a frozen center). As they're pretty strictly meant to be eaten at home the need for a plate of them isn't a big deal.
- wil421 4y agoThey have a big brother called a hot pocket that’s like a nasty meat pie. Both will get nuclear meltdown hot and will burn your mouth.
- cratermoon 4y agoBonus, if you microwave them, you end up with parts of the crust that are still tooth-breakingly frozen.
- michaelbuckbee 4y agoOne unremarked aspect of pizza rolls that I suspect is a universal "kid growing up in the US" experience is burning the ever loving hell out of your mouth with one as the the outside cools pretty quickly while the inside is molten for much too long.
- realjhol 4y agoIn the UK we had Pop Tarts and McDonalds Apple Pies for that.
- indymike 4y agoAdd about 200°C to the filling temperature and you capture the difference.
- rythmshifter 4y agoAnd the clever novelty of biting off one or two tiny corners to allow that heat to escape to some degree.
- qbasic_forever 4y agoAlso if you thought you were clever and cut one in half to let it cool, then you would only find a sad shell of a pizza roll with all its guts leaking out into a congealed mess of cheese and pizza goo.
- subpixel 4y agoI still burn my mouth on hot pizza more than half the time I eat it! Because it is worth it.
- jrootabega 4y agoMicrowave burritos iterated on that tradition by ensuring that you could pick exactly one of: 1. contents erupt from the corner like a volcano in the microwave 2. burrito unrolls itself during heating 3. mostly ice cold inside (although some ice cold spots will still happen in #1 and #2)
- robg 4y agoGreat read, love the story of entrepreneurship meets American culinary cross overs. Are there other examples of this phenomenon around the world, where street food is commoditized and makes literal billionaires?
- ricardobeat 4y agoI think you’ll find hundreds of examples all around the word, it’s a common story in Japan, Brazil, Europe, India, probably every country has at least one. What sets the US examples apart is the “entrepreneurial” aspect of creating an entirely made-up food category, resulting from the availability of industrial machinery and marketing trends. There is little connection to to street food or concerns about authenticity.
- pbronez 4y agoThis article is an interesting complement to the “age of average” article that was trending here a few days ago. In the late 60s folks wanted to be a bit different, pushing against the conformity of the 50s. And they did that in part by… buying novel frozen food? Fast forward and this is essentially Trader Joe’s whole thing. The rise in pizza popularity post WWII was a harbinger of cultural globalization that has now started to feel like homogenization. I’m fascinated by the interplay between individuals, societies and consumerism. Be unique like everyone else! Still that feels like a weak take. Where’s the line between lemmings and spreading best practices?
- SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago> In the late 60s folks wanted to be a bit different, pushing against the conformity of the 50s. And they did that in part by… buying novel frozen food? Home refrigerators were still fairly new. A quick google indicates that "a refrigerator in the home" became a standard thing in the US in the 1940s. 1960s seems a bit slow (maybe the war got in the way?), but not every innovation is instant, and in this case the "innovation" is not the refrigerator itself, but the "frozen pizza rolls", second-order effects, the structuring of new products around the common availability of the home refrigerator. The platform precedes it, just like you don't have a mass-market app store before the iPhone.
- User23 4y agoBefore refrigerators people used iceboxes which accomplished much the same thing.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago> and in this case the "innovation" is not the refrigerator itself, but the "frozen pizza rolls", second-order effects, the structuring of new products around the common availability of the home refrigerator. Are the pizza rolls structured around the availability of a freezer, or of a microwave?
- nemo44x 4y agoPizza is an interesting thing. What they had in southern Italy before the war was very different and didn’t have tomato sauce, etc on it. It was a street food for peasants. There are accounts of Italian-American GIs working their way through Italy and surprised that the pizza they were used to back in America did not exist in Italy. A lot of food we think of as being from a small place and then globalized is sort of marketing. A lot of stuff was created after WW2, associated with a country, and globalized. Not to pick Italy but carbonara is an example of this. Invented by Italian Americans. The first accounts of it existing are in cook books published in America. Old Italians have no recollection of it pre-war. But it was characterized as “authentic Italian” and it soon became the national dish of Rome, and modified to its current state today. Before recent times people were not killing enough pigs to make pork jowl universally accepted as the “authentic” protein in the dish.
- sambapa 4y agoI'm part of the Totino's lifestyle, I'll admit it
- PopAlongKid 4y agoSpeaking of mid-century food, I don't recall pizza rolls in my house growing up, but Pop-Tarts (toaster pastries) were a new thing that I had a goodly share of. Very handy to eat on a cold morning before going out to deliver newspapers door to door. Pop tarts are also a bastardization of some other more traditional food but I don't know which right now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop-Tarts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop-Tarts
- fortran77 4y agoWell, it's a member of the fruit-filled tart family, I suppose, like the Norman Tart, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_tart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_tart
- BuyMyBitcoins 4y agoOn a nostalgic whim I bought some Pop Tarts recently. The amount of filling and icing has dropped dramatically and they tasted awful as a result. If you look at how they apply the icing you can clearly see how they started putting less and less on each pop tart. I don’t buy these things because I want to eat the crust!
- gizmo686 4y agoI had a similar experience a few years back. Then, on a more recent whim, I bought some store branded toaster pastries from my local grocery store, and they were exactly the Pop Tarts I remembered.
- kraussvonespy 4y agoI'm finding the same with other products too. There are a bunch of Aldi generic foods (like Mac & Cheese, tortillas, salsa, corn chips) that I like the taste of better than the more expensive name brand. Does this mean that the brand name has been reducing quality over time where the generics have been sticking more to their original recipe?
- 4y ago
- girafffe_i 4y agoIt took me until a couple years ago to notice Chef "Boy-ar-dee" was a phonetization of an Italian surname like "Boiardi"
- leroy-is-here 4y agoPizza rolls were my introduction to Ranch addiction.
- sublinear 4y agoCold ranch dressing from the fridge was the solution to the boiling lava hot pizza roll problem apart from biting the corners to let the steam out. Most microwaves have "sensor" modes these days though and you don't need to suffer that experience anymore if you're willing to wait a couple more minutes.
- memalign 4y agoHow do you use sensor modes to cook pizza rolls?
- sublinear 4y agoThere's a pizza mode. It works. I dunno it's basically magic. Also sensor modes on microwaves tend to work better when the food isn't frozen. To quickly defrost I will usually stick a bag of pizza rolls in some hot water in the kitchen sink for a minute and if I want them crispy I will finish them in a toaster oven or air fryer. Anyway my point was just that as an adult capable of basic food prep it seems silly I ever burned my mouth on pizza rolls even though the microwaves were dumber back then.
- kentonv 4y ago> The VP, in turn, assigned the task to Beatrice (Luoma) Ojakangas, by coincidence, the older sister of the engineer who had developed the egg roll machine for Chun King. Beatrice is my aunt! (And the inventor of said egg roll machine, Eugene Luoma, is my uncle. He also invented the zip-it drain cleaner and all sorts of other clever things.) Beatrice kind of hates talking about Pizza Rolls. She'd rather be known for her many cookbooks and other culinary work, not that trash. Jeno merely paid her an hourly wage to come up with different egg roll fillings and pizza was one of the ones she tried. No royalties or anything. I love pizza rolls, though.
- indymike 4y agoI think my kids, if left to their own devices, would survive on a diet of cup-o-noodles, air-fryer cooked pizza rolls, pop-tarts and wash it down with Monster. This also reminds me of the diet of many junior developers.
- raydev 4y agoOh wow, this hits me hard. I legit have very fond memories of meticulously arranging pizza rolls on a plate to minimize gaps (pizza rolls packing problem), and eating them with a giant glass of Quik chocolate milk. I then moved to Canada where Totino's does not exist and mourned my loss for years, because that specific type of "tiny calzone with egg roll container" didn't seem to exist up here. Only in the last few years have I seen an equivalent Canadian pizza roll from Pillsbury (Pizza Bites) and they happen to be decent. And if Canadians are reading and confused, I am not referring to those gross "pizza pops", they are not the same. In response to the article, I'm shocked to learn Totino's didn't invent the idea and they existed all the way back in the 60s. At least from the 90s, I don't recall any other brands being available besides Totino's except Great Value?
- jbmny 4y agoI never knew pizza rolls had such history. I assumed they were just an obscure and unremarkable snack before their breakout role in Mr. Plinkett's Star Wars prequel reviews.
- sacnoradhq 4y agoOh lord, there's no such thing as a "self-made man" or "pulling oneself up by their bootstraps". It takes one or more rich investors or already having money, customers, employees, partners, vendors, and distributors taking chances on them. To deny this is to give oxygen to the mythologies of hyperindividualism is "good" and success is "achievable" in a vacuum of solitude. It's a lie that denies the credit to those who assisted in the amassing of wealth. https://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/pull_yourself_up_by_your_bootstraps/ https://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/pul... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Alger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Alger https://ideas.time.com/2012/09/07/the-myth-of-bootstrapping/ https://ideas.time.com/2012/09/07/the-myth-of-bootstrapping/ https://www.democracynow.org/2023/3/29/alissa_quart_bootstrapped_book_american_dream https://www.democracynow.org/2023/3/29/alissa_quart_bootstra...
- mypornaccount 4y agoI mean it sounds like this guy kind of is? People do actually win the lottery.
- sacnoradhq 4y agoThat's a dumb argument with survivor's bias. The lottery is external to them and present vanishingly-small winnings to people at random without affirmative agency. People who participate in lotteries are statistically poorer. https://journalistsresource.org/economics/research-review-lotteries-demographics/ https://journalistsresource.org/economics/research-review-lo... https://themillionairenextdoor.com/2011/09/any-economically-successful-man-doesnt-gamble/ https://themillionairenextdoor.com/2011/09/any-economically-...
- mypornaccount 4y agoAre you an AI who can’t understand metaphors?
- sacnoradhq 4y ago
- twic 4y agoI'm in the UK, never had a pizza roll, still not entirely clear on what one is, but when i was a teenager i did eat a lot of McCain pizza-rollas, which were a sort of soft bread roll filled with pizza topping which you warmed up in the microwave. They were pretty good, probably packed with E-numbers, and a welcome addition at a time before my dad had learned how to cook. Seen here as part of the broader family of snack-rollas, which had other fillings that weren't as good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBW1HQmxgIo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBW1HQmxgIo They stopped making them decades ago.
- azinman2 4y agoPizza rolls are like a fried dumpling with pizza filling (meat, sauce, cheese) on the inside. Better if you bake in oven, but almost everyone will microwave. As sad as that turns out, they’re actually very good in a high artificial kind of way. I’m surprised they didn’t make it to the UK; it has UK written all over it.
- naet 4y agoInteresting article but please stop disabling default behavior like mobile pinch to zoom! One of the image captions says "if you squint you can make out the list of flavors"... squint is too accurate when I can't zoom in.
- AussieWog93 4y agoWow, "pizza roll" refers to something very different here in Australia (a bread roll with cheese and bacon on top).
- johnwalkr 4y agoMade me think of pizza pockets, which are little calzones maybe 6x the size of pizza pops, and only available in Canada. I think they are better than pizza pockets, pizza pops and bagel bites.
- johnwalkr 4y agoI really messed this comment up: I was thinking of pizza pops, which are little calzones maybe 6x the size of pizza rolls, and only available in Canada. I think they are better than pizza pockets, pizza rolls and bagel bites.