(Secret) Pizza Recipe #5 — STEVEN HARDESTY

The best pizza in this or any other universe is the pizza I made in Vietnam. In the bottom of a foxhole. Cooked over a piece of blue-burning C-4 plastique explosive.

I’ll give you the recipe. You can dig your own foxhole and give it a try. Tastes even better if people are shooting at you, though that may be hard to arrange in your backyard.

Start with a box of U.S. Army C-rations. Choose the soup-can size tin of Beef Spiced with Sauce (yum!). Scissor it open with your P-38 (a can opener old-fashioned before your grandmother’s old-fashioned manual can opener). Dump the beef and sauce into your metal canteen cup. Set aside.

Open the little tin labelled B-2 for the Hardtack Biscuits and the pimento Cheese Spread. That’s All-American cheese spread from contented cows. You will be as content when you’ve eaten this pizza, I guarantee.

Have all your ingredients handy? Yes.

In the bottom of your foxhole crouching over a small lump of plastic explosive ready to ignite it with a match (don’t worry, it won’t explode without a blasting cap)? Yes!

Are you ready for me to reveal to you the secret Army Pizza Recipe passed down from soldier to soldier and lost only when C-rats went out of fashion and soldiers began to get their combat rations in silly plastic bags? Oh, yes! you cry out of your pizza-hunger.

Grip the can from which you poured into your canteen cup the Sauced Beef. Use the C-rat plastic spoon to spoon a few lumps of Beef and Sauce into the bottom of the tin.

Lay over the beef one Hardtack Biscuit. Smear some Cheese Spread on the Biscuit.

Put more lumps of Beef and Sauce on the cheesed biscuit. Continue making layers of beef, biscuit and cheese until you fill the entire can.

Light the plastic explosive. Stick the can full of pizza ingredients over the blue flame. Watch for the sauce and cheese and beef to bubble.

If you lumped the C-4 properly, the dying of the blue flame and the bubbling of the can will happen at the same moment.

Grab the can (how you hold the hot can is your problem) and drive your Army-issue plastic spoon into the steaming goo in the can. Savor the first hot mouthful. Mama mia!

C-ration pizza and a slug of canteen water flavored with germ-killing iodine makes the grandest meal in the universe. When you’re in a foxhole.

When you’ve lapped up the last pizza, you can settle back with the Fudge Disc dessert from the B-2 can, even if the fudge has gone waxy white in the jungle heat.

And that, dear friends, is a meal to beat the finest restaurants in the world. Go dig a foxhole and give it a try and you will agree, I know you will.