Making School Cafeteria Pizza from the 1980s & '90s

If you grew up in the 80s and 90s here in the U.S. then you probably remember pizza day at school. For me it was always on Fridays, and it wasn't just any pizza but the iconic rectangular pizza that I'll be making today using the original recipe from 1988. So thank you to my Patreon patrons for keeping me flush with ideas for this channel as we go back to middle school for pizza day, this time on Tasting History. So I don't usually cover history from the 80s and 90s or anything that recent here on the channel but when somebody posted on the Tasting History Reddit page the original recipe for this pizza that I so loved in elementary and middle school I decided that I just had to make it. So this is an episode of Tasting My History. So the recipe comes from a 1988 booklet which was distributed to schools all over the U.S. called Quantity Recipes for School Food Service from the United States Department of Agriculture, and it has recipes for all of your late 20th century school favorites like Instant Mashed Potatoes, Sloppy Joes, or Salisbury Steak Children. It's Salisbury Steak Day! But my favorite was the square pizza or really rectangular pizza, and there are a few variations when it comes to how they made this pizza. The first being the crust. For pizza dough use pizza crust recipe CB14 or pourable pizza crust recipe CB15. Pourable pizza crust you say? Well I am intrigued. Now I don't know if my lunch lady used this recipe or if she did the regular pizza crust but I want to make pourable pizza crust so that's what I'm going to do. Now the recipe calls for 100 servings. I don't need 100 servings of pizza so I'm going to reduce it to 10 servings of pizza for which you will need two and a half teaspoons or seven grams of active dry yeast, one and two thirds cup or 375 milliliters of warm water 110 degrees Fahrenheit, two and a half cups or 320 grams of all-purpose or bread flour, three quarters of a cup or 55 grams of instant non-fat dry milk, two tablespoons or 25 grams of sugar, a quarter teaspoon of salt, one and a half teaspoons of vegetable oil plus more for greasing the pan, and one and a half tablespoons or 15 grams of cornmeal. So first dissolve the dry yeast into the water and let it sit for five minutes. While it sits add the flour, dry milk, sugar, and salt in a stand mixer and mix using the whisk attachment on low for four minutes. I'm not sure exactly why it has you whisk it for so long at this point since there is no liquid in it yet but that's what the recipe says so that's what I'm doing. After four minutes add the yeast which should be nice and frothy and the vegetable oil to the dough or actually it calls it a batter and continue to mix on a medium speed for 10 minutes, and while it mixes you can get your pan ready. Now the recipe actually calls for five sheet pans but sheet pans are actually massive. They are not going to fit in a home oven so the ones that we use at home even the large ones are half sheet pans so that's what I'm going to use and I'm only going to use one of them which will be for 10 servings. So coat the half sheet pan in a little more oil and then sprinkle the top with cornmeal trying to get it evenly distributed. Once the batter is ready pour it into the pan and spread it out to cover the base. Now I really thought I screwed up here because there is no way that this amount of dough was going to cover the bottom of the pan but I left it for a couple of minutes and it sort of relaxed and I eventually had a nice thin layer of dough all over. That's probably why the recipe says to let the dough sit for 20 minutes while you preheat your oven to 475 degrees Fahrenheit or 425 if you are using a convection oven. That's 245 degrees or 218 degrees Celsius for those of you not living in the U.S. or in the other handful of countries that still uses Fahrenheit. I see you my friends in the federated states of Micronesia. So once the dough is sat for 20 minutes set it in the oven and bake for 10 minutes or seven minutes if you are using convection. Now at this point the dough should be pre-baked. It's not fully baked through but it's going to have some more time in the oven once we've added our toppings and when it comes to toppings we have a couple of options. There is the pizza with cheese topping and one for pizza with ground beef topping. Now maybe my school never had the ground beef topping or maybe I just never got it. I can't honestly remember but I do only remember eating this as a cheese pizza so that's the one that I'm going to make. So for that what you'll need is 1 tablespoon and 2 teaspoons or 12 grams of dried onions, a half teaspoon of garlic powder, a quarter teaspoon of black pepper, a half cup plus two tablespoons or 160 grams of tomato paste, one and a third cups or 330 milliliters of water, two teaspoons dried basil, two teaspoons dried oregano, one and a half teaspoons dried marjoram, a half teaspoon dried thyme, and five and a quarter cups or 565 grams of mozzarella cheese shredded. If you do want to make the ground beef version then just cut the amount of cheese in half and replace it with just under a pound of ground beef that you cook before putting it onto the pizza but for the cheese version you start by mixing the onions, garlic powder, pepper, tomato paste, water, and the seasonings in a saucepan and then bring it to a simmer on the stove and let it simmer for about 10 minutes. While it simmers spread one and a half cups of the cheese over the pizza crust and then once the sauce has simmered for 10 minutes pour that over the cheese smoothing it out evenly. Again it didn't really seem that there was going to be enough sauce but there was though as I spread it I sort of messed up the cheese and it seems that this was actually a problem even back in 1988 because in later recipes from the 90s they just have you add that cup and a half of cheese to the sauce before putting it on. It probably makes it a lot easier. Once the tomato sauce is spread to the edges of the pan sprinkle the remaining cheese evenly over the top. Now if you recall these pizzas did not have a crust around the edge like a round pizza so you want to get the cheese all the way to the edge of the pan. Then pop that in the oven at 475 degrees Fahrenheit, 450 if you're using convection and let it bake until it is lightly browned on top. The original recipe says it should bake for 15 to 18 minutes but for me that was going to be way too long. It only took about 11 minutes to get brown on top and I think that's just because I'm making a tenth of the original quantity so just keep an eye on it. Now there are two other interesting things in this booklet that I wanted to share. First are the garnishes. It gives instructions on how to make carrot ribbons or curls, celery fans, radish roses, onion mums, radish tulips, or a tomato rose. And personally I don't ever remember my lunch lady making us any radish roses and frankly I think it's kind of unfair to expect an already very busy lunch lady or lunch man to make radish roses for a bunch of six-year-olds. Kind of a waste of time but if they did that at your school let me know. The other interesting bit is that after each recipe it tells you how much each serving of the dish equals servings of meat, vegetable, and bread. Like when it comes to our cheese pizza, not the meat pizza but the cheese pizza, one piece provides the equivalent of two ounces of cooked lean meat, a quarter cup of vegetable, and two servings of bread. And that's really what school lunch was all about. It was making sure that the kids got enough servings of meat, vegetable, and bread or nutrients in general. Or at least that was the goal though it didn't always happen as can be seen by the lunches of the late 20th century. Last year I did a video on the history of school lunch and it focused mostly on the history pre-1960. So I decided that this would be a good chance to fill in some of the gaps post-1960. And the first thing that I found actually came from a comment left on that video about how the Black Panther Party influenced the school breakfast program. See in the late 1960s a study came out showing that kids who didn't have breakfast didn't do as well in school. They were tired, they would fall asleep, they couldn't concentrate. Kind of makes perfect sense enough that you wouldn't even think you'd need a study to show you that but they did. And it also showed that most of these kids were in poorer neighborhoods where they didn't have breakfast in the morning usually because they couldn't afford it. So in 1969 the Black Panther Party started a program at a church in Oakland, California that provided free breakfasts to children who needed them. That first day there were only 11 kids that showed up but by the end of that first week 135 kids were participating every day. The success of the program was so great that the party decided that they would have all of their chapters repeated. So this breakfast program that the Black Panthers were doing was happening all over the country and it got really, really big. So big that it grabbed the attention of the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover who hated the Black Panthers. He hated pretty much everything. And this program that gave children free breakfast was so successful that Hoover decided it needed to be stopped. The program represents the best and most influential activity going for the BPP and as such is potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for. Nice guy that J. Edgar. He began a campaign that spread rumors that the Black Panthers were poisoning the breakfasts and that didn't work so instead he just had police go in and bust the places up, destroying all of the food before it could be served to the kids. Unfortunately it was effective and it led to the program being discontinued and breaking up but it had already become so popular that it couldn't go away. That program went away but the kids' desire for breakfasts did not. So it gave a big boost to another program that had already been in effect since 1966 but hadn't really taken off and that was a government-run program called the School Breakfast Program which Congress permanently authorized in 1975. Though it also came under fire only six years later when big budget cuts hit the government and it did stick around and is still around today but even today it remains a political football but it was during these budget cuts early on in the Reagan administration that led to another rather infamous lunch claim that the government was going to consider ketchup a vegetable. Now how this came about was that during discussions at the USDA about how they could keep kids fed in light of these budget cuts to the school lunch program, they had a meeting where ideas could be freely tossed around. Anything goes. It was kind of one of those meetings where it's like just say what you're thinking. There are no bad ideas. Well one person had the idea to change the nutrition standards a little bit which would allow relish and ketchup to be considered a vegetable. Now that was a bad idea and unfortunately somebody wrote it down and it didn't get removed. Now it never actually became policy but the whole ketchup is a vegetable thing did get out into the public and there was severe blowback, rightly so. As one senator criticized, this is one of the most ridiculous regulations I ever heard of and I suppose I need not add that I do know something about ketchup and relish or did at one time. And the reason he says that he knows something about ketchup and relish is that that senator was Henry J Heinz III of the Heinz ketchup family but officially the government never actually considered ketchup to be a vegetable. That is not to say that there were not other dubious claims made to the school lunch program. Going back all the way to 1975, there was a pilot program started first in Las Vegas and then that spread to New York, Milwaukee, and several other cities where schools began changing their lunch menus to more mimic the fast food that was becoming popular with the students. This led to menus with beef and cheese tacos, cheese pizzas, a meat and bean filled burrito, a corn dog, fried chicken, and all beef hamburger. Hard-boiled eggs, cottage cheese, and a chef's salad are also available. They also had a new alternative to milk which the USDA signed off on as an approved alternative to milk and it was called the super shake which was essentially a milkshake but they didn't use ice cream but it did use emulsifiers and stabilizers that impart the creamy texture. The finished shakes are 96.75% fat-free which would not be possible if they were made with ice cream. To meet the requirement of kids needing to have a vegetable on their plate they gave the children two options a salad or french fries and not shocking to anyone the number of students choosing salad over fries has to be considered negligible. The thing is these were actually the healthy meals. These were the meals that hit all the standards that would allow them to be reimbursed by the U.S. government but there were other meals being offered that did not meet these standards and so many students were seen taking lunches such as two cinnamon buns and a coke, four sugar cookies, and Sprite. Two bags of french fries and a milkshake were simply a glass of soda and yet even with these criticisms the Las Vegas high school lunch was superior to most of the 135 sampled around the country several years ago but neither the fast foodification of the 1970s nor the budget cuts of the 1980s would compare to what happened to school lunches in the 1990s when I was eating them. See in the 1970s they tried to mimic the fast food of the time but in the 1990s new regulations were put in that let the fast food companies just come right on into the schools. There were branded products from McDonald's, Chick-fil-a, Pizza Hut, you name it, it was there. Now not every school had this, my school never did and at the time we kids did not like that but in hindsight probably a good thing but by the year 2000 one out of five schools in the U.S. had some of these branded products. Now it does seem that the late 90s and early 2000s were kind of the worst period nutritionally for American school lunches with about 35% of the calories coming from fat but eventually schools began to fight back. Even when I was in high school there was a push to get rid of the vending machines and they either got rid of them while I was there or just after, I can't really remember. Anyway in the last couple of decades there has been an effort to make school lunches here in the U.S. more nutritious and in some places they certainly have but it is still definitely a point of contention and political debate. But that is food present and I am all about food history So let us travel back in time to 1988 when a five-year-old Max walked into Madison Heights Elementary to try his first slice of square pizza. So once your pizza has baked take it out of the oven and cut it into slices. I planned on doing 10 slices but it turns out cutting that into 10 was going to be kind of wonky so I cut them into 9. And here we are school lunch from 1988. So it smells just like it did 30 some odd years ago. Let's see if it tastes that way too. Memories from the corners of my mind. That's my best Barbra Streisand. Tastes just like it. All of those herbs are exactly the same as they were. I think maybe it tastes a little fresher than I remember. Like the flavors are a little heightened but that's them. This is the pizza. And that's the dough. That pourable dough. That must be what they were using at my school because that is the dough. I also love that today I would never think of drinking chocolate milk with pizza but in middle school I always had chocolate milk with pizza. They were smaller. I searched for a carton that was smaller and I couldn't find it. I was told by my sister who recently stopped teaching elementary school that her school still has the little cartons and that I should just go to an elementary school and ask for a carton but I thought that might be weird so I got a big one. It's good. Still goes with pizza. I should have made all 100 slices. So if you are nostalgic for this pizza might I suggest you make it. It's pretty cool to taste this flavor because I don't think they make it anymore. At least not like this at schools. Kudos to all the lunch ladies and lunch men out there today and from my past. They do the good work. Oh also something that my sister reminded me of about the chocolate milk. Does anyone else remember there was a period of like one or two years in many schools where they switched from the cartons to these bags of milk? Either regular or chocolate milk. It was like a clear bag. It was like a bladder of milk. It was kind of gross. You just stuck the straw in like a Capri Sun but on its side. Does anyone remember that? Because I remember it. She remembers it but none of our friends seem to so we were thinking maybe we were crazy. Anyway let me know in the comments and I will see you next time on Tasting History.