Pizza rolls and the meaning of midcentury food

https://www.snackstack.net/p/pizza-rolls-and-the-meaning-of-midcentury

by danso • 3 years ago

141 164 3 years ago

This 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• 3 years ago

Pretty 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.

BuyMyBitcoins2• 3 years ago

I 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• 3 years ago

if 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.

ilyt2• 3 years ago

I now kinda want to buy a roll of pizza dough and just... make hi-end version of them

rgrieselhuber6• 3 years ago

Pizza 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• 3 years ago

Buddy 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.

rgrieselhuber6• 3 years ago

What a scam. That cheese was critical. Agreed on the sauce and the mini pepperonis.

datavirtue• 3 years ago

I had generic wheat flakes, and if I was lucky, 2% milk.

tomrod• 3 years ago

That is my latchkey experience as well.

JackFr• 3 years ago

Mustard sandwiches.

jhbadger3• 3 years ago

Exactly. 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.

rufus_foreman3• 3 years ago

70s was not latchkey kids. I was a kid then. We roamed the streets.

80s? I don't know, wasn't like that for me. I knew some kids maybe where it was like that for them, I felt sorry for them.

From my perspective, obviously a limited perspective based on the time I grew up, the 1970's was the best time to be a kid in the history of kids.

We roamed the streets, 10 years old, running wild in the streets.

booleandilemma• 3 years ago

Lol, for my generation it was hot pockets.

ethbr011• 3 years ago

That jingle will forever be seared into my brain. Well played, marketing.

rolenthedeep• 3 years ago

I grew up in the 90s, and I've never heard of Chef Boyardee pizza. It sounds dire

nullstyle• 3 years ago

You would be totally wrong.

My Mother's pizza is famous amongst my friends and family. It is started from the chef boyardee pizza kit and surprisingly little has changed in her version.

My brothers and our childhood friends are all in our 40's and 50's now, have had pizza all over the world, and momma pizza still ranks.

rufus_foreman3• 3 years ago

Wait until you find about Imos.

jerbearito• 3 years ago

Were they frozen pizzas or kits that you had to prepare?

rgrieselhuber6• 3 years ago

Kits. That was the fun thing about it, you'd mix the dough, and add the cheese and sauce. If you were lucky, there were some leftover scraps in the fridge that you could use to add as toppings. Learned the basics of making pizza that way.

Gordonjcp11• 3 years ago

Why couldn't you just make some food?

rgrieselhuber6• 3 years ago

There were usually never any other ingredients in the house and we'd never learned how to cook. YouTube wasn't a thing yet.

cratermoon5• 3 years ago

Too time consuming. With the microwave, you can have pizza rolls in 5 minutes. Less, if you don't mind the experience of alternating between still almost frozen and mouth-burning hot.

astura• 3 years ago

With what ingredients?

My parents didn't keep non-frozen and non-boxed food in the house.

schwartzworld• 3 years ago

I was a latchkey kid at an age where I wouldn't have been allowed to use the stove or oven, let alone whip up a meal.

I could have made a salad, but not many 8 year olds would choose those over bagel bites.

maxerickson2• 3 years ago

They aren't the same thing because they are quite a bit more costly, but a butcher somewhere in the region makes circular frozen sliced steaks for sandwiches. So much better than Steak-umms.

Similar to what you would get from a butcher for frozen philly cheese steak sandwiches, but not the same.

dauertewigkeit• 3 years ago

They seem similiar to meat pies, empanadas and other savoury pastries, except too small to be convenient.

jrootabega3• 3 years ago

They're more convenient to share with a group, and eat with one hand.

And easier for little kids to eat.

Hippocrates• 3 years ago

You’re supposed to gobble down a large bowl of them, like jellybeans.

JasonFruit• 3 years ago

, burning your mouth on the first few in your haste.

michaelbuckbee2• 3 years ago

The 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• 3 years ago

They 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.

cratermoon5• 3 years ago

Bonus, if you microwave them, you end up with parts of the crust that are still tooth-breakingly frozen.

michaelbuckbee2• 3 years ago

One 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.

rythmshifter• 3 years ago

And the clever novelty of biting off one or two tiny corners to allow that heat to escape to some degree.

qbasic_forever• 3 years ago

Also 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.

realjhol• 3 years ago

In the UK we had Pop Tarts and McDonalds Apple Pies for that.

indymike2• 3 years ago

Add about 200°C to the filling temperature and you capture the difference.

subpixel• 3 years ago

I still burn my mouth on hot pizza more than half the time I eat it! Because it is worth it.

jrootabega3• 3 years ago

Microwave 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)

manachar• 3 years ago

Or:

4. Learn how to use the power setting of the microwave to ensure even heating.

rascul2• 3 years ago

For two burritos in my microwave:

1. Position burritos on plate so the fold is on top and facing out

2. Microwave on high for 1 minute

3. Turn burritos over so fold is on bottom and facing in, so that if the fold busts it stays on the plate

4. Poke three sets of holes in top of each burrito with fork, evenly spaced

5. Microwave on high for 45 seconds

I have fine tuned my microwave burrito skills over the decades to have a perfectly microwaved burrito that is both not cold and doesn't burst. Problem is, there's no 45 second button on the microwave, so I usually press 2 for two minutes (if I give it a few seconds it'll start on it's own) and I try to make it back in time. I don't always get it and the ends might bust just a little bit.

exar0815• 3 years ago

Living near the dutch border, you get "kaassouffle" in a lot of places. Its basically breaded, deep fried gouda cheese. While I love them, I always warn friends tasting them for the first time - they can really ruin your mouth.

twic3• 3 years ago

Kaassouffle is great and i don't know why it hasn't spread to higher-altitude parts of the world. I found the key to eating it safely was to have a glass of cold beer to hand.

pbronez• 3 years ago

This 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• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

Before refrigerators people used iceboxes which accomplished much the same thing.

thaumasiotes• 3 years 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?

nemo44x2• 3 years ago

Pizza 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.

daveslash• 3 years ago

Something I find fascinating is how much "traditional" food in the old-world is influenced by post-Columbian discoveries.

Potatoes, Tomatoes, and Chili Peppers were unknown to Europe and Asia before exploration of the Americas.

robg• 3 years ago

Great 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• 3 years ago

I 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.

sambapa• 3 years ago

I'm part of the Totino's lifestyle, I'll admit it

rektide2• 3 years ago

The brand died to me after they stopped making Buffalo Chicken flavor pizza rolls.

sitzkrieg• 3 years ago

i have to admit the faze ones taste kind of like that (but are still nit very good)

PopAlongKid• 3 years ago

Speaking 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

fortran772• 3 years ago

Well, it's a member of the fruit-filled tart family, I suppose, like the Norman Tart, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_tart

BuyMyBitcoins2• 3 years ago

On 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• 3 years ago

I 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.

johnwalkr3• 3 years ago

They used to really burn your mouth sometimes. Well that problem is solved because they are probably technically crackers now, there is so little filling.

kraussvonespy2• 3 years ago

Maybe just another derivative of the turnover or pocket pie? Empanadas, pasties, calzones, bierocks/Runzas, samosas all fall into the turnover category. Alton Brown's Good Eats had at least one show on turnovers and some of the different ethnic variations.

maxerickson2• 3 years ago

I would guess from pie iron sandwiches more than from an oven baked pastry.

yareally• 3 years ago

Strudel?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strudel

KAMSPioneer• 3 years ago

Ahh, this reminds me of Toaster Strudel, of which I ate more as a child than I did Pop Tarts.

hamstercat• 3 years ago

Hindbærsnitter? It's a danish dessert with raspberry filling and icing on top. It's very much a better pop tarts.

girafffe_i• 3 years ago

It 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• 3 years ago

Pizza rolls were my introduction to Ranch addiction.

sublinear2• 3 years ago

Cold 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• 3 years ago

How do you use sensor modes to cook pizza rolls?

kentonv• 3 years 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.

indymike2• 3 years ago

I 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• 3 years ago

Oh 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• 3 years ago

I 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.

sacnoradhq3• 3 years ago

Oh 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/pul...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Alger

https://ideas.time.com/2012/09/07/the-myth-of-bootstrapping/

https://www.democracynow.org/2023/3/29/alissa_quart_bootstra...

mypornaccount2• 3 years ago

I mean it sounds like this guy kind of is? People do actually win the lottery.

sacnoradhq3• 3 years ago

That'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-lo...

https://themillionairenextdoor.com/2011/09/any-economically-...

twic3• 3 years ago

I'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

They stopped making them decades ago.

azinman2• 3 years ago

Pizza 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• 3 years ago

Interesting 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• 3 years ago

Wow, "pizza roll" refers to something very different here in Australia (a bread roll with cheese and bacon on top).

johnwalkr3• 3 years ago

Made 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.

johnwalkr3• 3 years ago

I 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.

Pizza rolls and the meaning of midcentury food

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