pizza

Few words elicit more mealtime cheers than:

“LET’S HAVE PIZZA!”

It doesn’t matter how old you are. Just hearing the word ‘pizza’ you’re suddenly starving for peppers, mushrooms, onions, and olives (okay, pepperoni and sausage) enmeshed in a savory tomato sauce and ooey gooey melty cheese, happily resting atop a thin and crispy or thick and chewy crust. Oh yes!

There’s just something about rolling your pizza cutter over the outer edge of crust and hearing that little ‘crack’ as you free that first hot slice. Then you blow on it just a little before taking your first bite of savory goodness, pulling a long string of mozzarella and gobbling it up quickly so you get it all in your mouth.

If you’re a pizza lover, you’ve come to the right place. Brooklyn-based author/illustrator Melissa Iwai is here to tell us all about her brand new, freshly baked picture book, Pizza Day (Henry Holt, 2017) , which officially hits shelves today. Yum!

Pizza Day is especially geared for hungry preschool munchkins, and is a tasty companion book to Melissa’s wildly popular Soup Day (Henry Holt, 2010). While his mother is away at work, an eager young boy and his father pick fresh veggies and herbs from their garden to make a pizza from scratch.

Accompanied by an adorable puppy named Caesar, they gather juicy red tomatoes, basil sprigs, carrots, onions and a green pepper, all grown from seeds they planted in the Spring.

Father and son wash the vegetables, then make the pizza dough, measuring and stirring ingredients, kneading the dough, then letting it rest and rise. Vegetables are chopped and added to the sauce, which is left to simmer on the stove while they enjoy playing together outside.

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Buon Giorno!

You’re just in time to enjoy a soul-warming slice of Susan Fillion’s homemade pizza. There’s nothing like a perfect chewy-crisp crust topped with a little crushed tomato, melty mozzarella, black olives and fresh basil, just begging you to take a bite. Delizioso!

Also delicious is Susan’s charming new bilingual picture book, Pizza in Pienza (David R. Godine, 2013), which is about two of her favorite things — pizza, of course, and Pienza, a small town in Tuscany where Pope Pius II was born (he rebuilt Pienza to be an “ideal Renaissance town”).

Susan’s story features a young Italian girl, a resident of Pienza, who is crazy about pizza — so much so, that she decides to find out everything she can about it. She asks her grandmother to teach her how to make it, she scopes out Giovanni, the local pizzaiolo, and she also reads all about the history of pizza at the library. Did you know pizza (as we know it today) most likely originated in Naples, Italy?

An artist and museum educator at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Susan has filled this book with beautiful rustic, folkloric paintings rendered in warm Tuscan browns, crimsons, golds, olives, and blues. I love how her humorous touches (Mona Lisa holding a slice of pizza) gives us a fresh taste of antiquity, blending past and present on a timeless canvas of Italian village life.

Hungry readers will appreciate the added layer of flavor afforded by the Italian translations on every page — two savory bites for the price of one! End matter includes an Author’s Note, Pronunciation Guide, and Susan’s recipe for Pizza Margherita. And did I mention the cool pizza sauce endpapers? Squisito!

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