Too Strong, Too Small

We used to like my mother’s pizza. Although the occasional foray into molecular experimentation was always on the cards, she was conservative with her pizza topping as a rule: it consisted of a tomato sauce, a lot of onions, some anchovy fillets and a few black olives. These tasty ingredients sat on top of an almost inch-thick layer of bread dough that absorbed some of the flavours, and the whole was baked on a big rectangular tray and cut into squares that even my father – no great lover of foreign food – ate with relish.