Evil Incarnate

Seems to me that regular folks only started getting culinary boners over Spanish cuisine in the past couple of years. You know, suddenly everyone (myself included) starts tossing around the smoked paprika and cooking with tons of chorizo (extra pretentious douchebag points are earned if you pronounce it with a Catalan-ish accent, as in “chori-tho”!).

So you can imagine my surprise when I ran across the “Spanish Pizza for the Gang” card in the Entertaining on a Shoestring section of my vintage Betty Crocker Recipe Card Library, which hails from 1971. Surprise turned to bewilderment, then revulsion, then to a dark curiosity. You know, the kind generally reserved for poking dead stuff with sticks.

Spanish Pizza for the Gang. This is an odd bit of fusion, especially given era. So there’s that. The name would lead one to believe that this recipe will turn out an actual pizza, and that it will have some sort of Spanish ingredients involved. LIES! In fact, the ingredients and method listed in this recipe have absolutely nothing to do with anything Spanish at all. Frankly, they barely have anything to do with food.

Here’s a scan of the back of the card so that you can see it for yourselves. I provide this evidence as NO ONE IN THEIR RIGHT FUCKING MIND would ever believe it otherwise. There is an enormous amount of processed, wet, tomato-ness going on: 2 ½ oz spaghetti sauce mix, 28 oz of canned tomatoes, 8 oz of tomato sauce (seriously, I’m bad at math, but isn’t that like a quart or so of crap?).

A package of brown & serve sausage links are to be included as a topping (as a joke? I hope?). The only “seasoning” - and I use that term extremely loosely - is a mere ½ cup of chopped green peppers, and 1 teaspoon of red pepper sauce. Salt and pepper don’t even make an appearance on the list.

And perhaps most blasphemous (and baffling) of all: one full fucking pound of cream cheese. CREAM CHEESE, PEOPLE! This is not a Spanish ingredient. This has no place on a pizza. A pound of cream cheese? And it’s not even spread over the bottom crust - which doesn’t make sense, but somehow seems more logical than the instruction to “cut cream cheese into lengthwise strips; arrange strips in lattice-fashion”.

Imagine biting into the wet, bland sea of tomato, topped with wee rounds of breakfast sausage and slabs of pale, thick cream cheese.  There are tears in my eyes, and my chin is quivering. The world no longer makes sense. The sky has turned dark - suddenly, Ferran Adria wakes from a nightmare, heart racing, his ashen soul swearing vengeance upon the forces that created this Spanish Pizza for the Gang.

Listen closely, and you can hear the sound of the Evil That Is Sandra Lee quietly laughing.