CHRIS DEATON, DISSENTING
“When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore,” Dean Martin crooned. Pizza pie. Humans have baked pies since ancient times, and regardless of their contents, they have some general properties: crust and filling, be it sweet or savory, and thickness. Sliced apples atop a flat sheet of pastry is a waste of fruit. A shepherd’s pie that lacks enclosure is a mound of ground beef and spice that’s indiscernible from a scoop of Alpo, and pie is not food for the dogs. Pie is food for us. Pie is deep, man — about 2 to 3 inches, if you’re counting Encyclopedia Britannica as a credible source for culinary matters.
This is why, contrary to the typically sharp-worded opinion of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Chicago-style pizza pie is, indeed, pizza. “It’s very tasty, but it’s not pizza,” he said of deep-dish Friday night, the Chicago Sun-Times reported. The Washington Times added that “he said … while he enjoyed the deep-dish, most people, at least outside Chicago, see the deep-dish as a fake and inferior option to the New York-style pizza that has a thin crust.”
Sure, the Italian flatbread created in the 19th century and named for Princess Margherita is the basis for modern, east-coast pizza, as well as the frisbees sold in the frozen-food aisle. But Chicago-style pizza is not “fake” — it is an expansion, an interpretation, and it honors the “pie” group with which it’s associated. It is not “inferior,” no more than a V-8 engine is inferior to a four-cylinder — and that goes both ways. The engines accomplish different tasks. The preference is a matter of subjectivity.
Kansas City and North Carolina have different takes on barbecue, but both still qualify. So it is here. Put the lettuce, tomato and onion on the bottom of the sandwich, and it’s still a sandwich; put the cheese and fillings below the tomato sauce, and it’s still a pizza. A White Castle hamburger with its paper-thin patty and a Fuddruckers burger with its two-thirds of a cow are part of the same family; so are the Brooklyn pizza discs and the Chicago pizza pies.
