If there’s one day of the year when pizza might be forbidden, it’s Thanksgiving.  It makes no sense to have pizza for lunch before the epic meal of the year. How do you get from pizza pie to apple pie in a few hours? But what about breakfast?   Pizza for breakfast is rare, and fresh pizza for breakfast happened only once in my life, on Thanksgiving, 1976.

We have few legends in my utterly predictable family, but one might be the legend of the Thanksgiving pizza. That year we celebrated at my aunt and uncle’s rented home in Leonia, NJ. We went over the night before, and our acquaintances, the Downey family (six in all) joined Glenn and Margaret for Thanksgiving breakfast. We were preparing to seat thirteen for Thanksgiving dinner.

On Wednesday night in his usual way of invoking adventures,  my uncle said, “Let’s have Jerry’s pizza for breakfast tomorrow.”  My mother and father were incredulous. Nothing like this had happened in decades of Thanksgivings between the Tuckers and the Hardings.

But Jerry’s pizza had become a favorite ritual for me and my aunt and uncle in the days they lived in Fort Lee. When I visited them, and we went to a concert or the theater, it was very common for us to enjoy an 11 p.m. pizza apres performance.  My uncle loved pizza as much as I did. He did not require conventional mealtimes for pizza, so although breakfast was an innovative time to order, it was not that surprising.

Glenn (my uncle) looked up the opening hours for Jerry’s (it had to be Jerry’s) and called them right at 9 a.m. the next morning. My father was dumbfounded that Glenn was making good on his boast, but good-naturedly offered to pick up the order.

Fort Lee was about a five-minute drive from Leonia.  We arrived at Jerry’s to pick up our order of eight pizzas at 10 a.m. Jerry himself came out from the kitchen to see what manner of gourmands had ordered pizza for Thanksgiving breakfast. My father smiled sheepishly, admitting it was my uncle, rather than he, himself, that had violated all conventions of Thanksgiving breakfast.

Eight pizzas exuded Jerry’s unrivaled cheesey smell on the dining room table at 10:30 breakfast. My uncle presided, passing out slices of pepperoni, pepper and onion, ham and pineapple, sausage, and extra cheese on the whim of thirteen diners. We enjoyed my uncle’s sense of the outrageous.  I enjoyed the highly-cheesed pepperoni and sausage until I was past saving for turkey. It did not matter what else we ate that day; I had stuffed myself with the offerings of the gods.  I am quite sure I by-passed the apple pie for the pizza pie that day.

Jerry’s continues to be the best of all pizzas. Jerry’s has a suggestion of tomato sauce overcome by baked-on cheese, a strong mozzarella. It does not ooze, it layers the sauce below, so a bite conveys the warm tanginess of cheese and the cool fruitiness of tomato sauce. You have to love cheese to love Jerry’s.

I am hardly a gourmet, but I have preferences for pizza.  In the NY Metropolitan area, it’s Jerry’s and in St.  Louis it’s Dewey’s. My watershed events: when Victoria (then fiancee) took me to Dewey’s in Ellisville, and the morning when we gorged ourselves on Jerry’s pizza in Leonia, Thanksgiving, 1976.  My last meal on earth should be at one of those establishments.