SO YOU THOUGHT pizzas were introduced to America by Italian immigrants? Not so. The Dutch did it.
The misunderstanding is understandable. Americans eat a hundred acres of pizza every (!) day. No wonder, the nation counts some 75,000 pizzerias, with resounding names from Sammy’s and Domino’s to Ledo and Snappy Tomato. You would think that families of Italian descent are living just about everywhere. But that’s not the case. Italian immigrants by and large did not come to America until the second half of the 19th century, relatively late, and that flow stopped abruptly with the outbreak of World War I.
They were at first slow to integrate, much like most Irish immigrants who arrived around the same time, therefore they remained an easily identifiable population group, concentrated in particular around cities such as New York and Chicago. This was helped by the fact that most immigrants hailed from rural Italy, a first wave from the north, the second from Calabria and Sicily. Countrysiders were more likely to stick together and maintain their traditions together.
ON ARRIVAL they found the pizza was already there. It had by then been an American staple for over two hundred years. The New Netherland Institute in Albany is in possession of a Dutch document from 1667, written in New York. It discusses the pros and cons of round or square pizzas, with explanatory illustrations at the bottom. The Dutch were sailing the seven seas, they knew the difference between pizzas from Naples or Sicily, and they introduced both to America. Just as they did with pancakes, apple pie, waffles and oliebollen, which later became America’s donuts.
Americans are today the world’s number one pasta snarfers, munching down 7 billion lbs of spaghetti and macaroni annually, 20 lbs per person. And they have enthusiastically adopted the pizza. That said, Domino’s was started by an Irish American, Godfather’s Pizza is a product of a Luxemburg immigrant, Little Caesar’s is the brainchild of a Macedonian, and Pizza Ranch is thoroughly, totally Dutch.
Adrie Groeneweg and Laurens van der Esch in Iowa were its founders, but Lau no longer works there. Pizza Ranch is head and shoulders the largest pizza chain in the Midwest, with stores in thirteen states. Adrie was the driving force, together with his dad who noticed how often people from his town drove to the big city to buy a slice of pizza from Adrie’s boss there. You can do that too, right here in our own town, father told his son, and Adrie immediately went to work on it, with his friend Lawrence. Pizza Ranch was an instant success, especially after someone from the city asked to open a franchise. The chain was born, with over 200 other stores since then.
THE GROENEWEG family and the Dekkers, Adrie’s mom, came from solid Dutch neighborhoods, Strijen, Heinenoord, Barendrecht, and grandmother Van Maanen came from Ede. People who emigrated to Iowa at the time often had religious motives for coming to America, and their descendants have generally held on to those. Pizza Ranch follows Christian principles in order “to glorify God by positively impacting the world we live in. Slice by slice.”
More than two decades ago, Laurens abused that motto. He told four pizza delivery boys that the University of Iowa sperm bank was short on stock. Their positive impact, he said, was one that they could drop in a jam jar, and he would deliver it to the bank. He told each to do it right there and then, in that dark room behind the kitchen, with he himself more than happy to lend a hand in the act. But there was no such sperm bank, the boys pulled an early #MeToo, and Lau went to jail for ten years.
Co-owner Groeneweg promptly kicked him off the Ranch.
