> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
> 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?
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.
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?
Readit News
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.
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)
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.
4. Learn how to use the power setting of the microwave to ensure even heating.
Deleted Comment
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.
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.
Deleted Comment
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.
Similar to what you would get from a butcher for frozen philly cheese steak sandwiches, but not the same.
I could have made a salad, but not many 8 year olds would choose those over bagel bites.
My parents didn't keep non-frozen and non-boxed food in the house.
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
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!
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strudel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_tart
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.
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?
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.
Are the pizza rolls structured around the availability of a freezer, or of a microwave?
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.
Potatoes, Tomatoes, and Chili Peppers were unknown to Europe and Asia before exploration of the Americas.
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?
As they're pretty strictly meant to be eaten at home the need for a plate of them isn't a big deal.
And easier for little kids to eat.