Spied Out: Pizza (L’Authentique)

Pizza doesn't get much better than this...

In a homage to Toad, Mole and Ratty in their canary-coloured cart, this week found The Cambridge Spy traversing the hedgerow-lined lanes and leafy byways of his fenland home, hot on the scent of a hidden culinary treasure in the most unorthodox of locations. No stranger to good pizza (he cut his baby teeth on pizza crusts in his uncle’s pizzeria down in southern Italy) he has long bemoaned the lack of good pizza in Cambridge and the surrounding area. So, bombing along past rolling fields of shining golden rapeseed, on roads transformed into mysterious emerald tunnels by trees bowed and bending to touch each other from either side of the verge, little did he expect to came upon his prey so suddenly. And yet, before him lay Pizza L'Authentique: a pizza van with a wood-burning oven in the back, incongruously perched at the side of the busy road leaving Harwick. (On Thursdays, the van can be found in an equally unexpected side-street in Caldecote; both are about 8 miles outside Cambridge. The rest of the week, there is no sign of it, and the Spy suspects that this mysterious travelling purveyor of pizzas enters some strange parallel universe or fairy realm where it sells pizza to the Fenland goblins, elves and other ghoulish beasties…)

The glory of Pizza L'Authentique at dusk, complete with field backdrop.

Based on the mobile pizzerias from the owner’s home city of Marseilles, France, the scent of the wood-fired brick oven hit the Spy like a smoky wall of deliciousness as he approached the van, and he was suddenly, devastatingly in love. With tremulous step he approached the glorious Frenchman who stood, elevated above him like a Gallic pizza god, an elfin, apple-cheeked goddess at his side with floury hands clutching a sturdy rolling pin. The deity spake thusly unto the Spy: “No Emmental today, my supplier screwed up.”

A sneak-preview of the menu as the next order is taken: word is spreading fast.

How can perfection be described in mere words? The pizza was rolled out before the Spy’s greedy little eyes, sprinkled in bacon and a confit of onions and shunted onto a pizza paddle, as the French God waxed lyrical about the crucial addition of Emmental and the difficulty incorporating his home-cooked gammon into a cooked pizza. As it sizzled in the oven, the God mused on how he planned to introduce a sourdough pizza base with his own ‘mother’ starter from Jack Lang of Midsummer House (who also owns a wood-burning oven of this kind). And as it was folded into the pizza box, so big that its crusts had to be folded over so they rose up the side, he talked of his French supplier down in Kent, whom he trundles down to every week to pick up goodies purloined from the other side of the channel. 

Rolling out the dough...

What more is there to be said? Reader, I gobbled him. Wordlessly. In a grassy airfield up the road. A groan or two may have issued forth from the Spy’s pizza-stained lips. He cannot be sure. A blissful calm had entered his heart, and all was well with the world.

The folded crust of gluttony...

In Cambridge itself, your best pizza bets would be The Cow near the market/Corn Exchange and The Red Bull on Barton Road (the Spy senses a bovine theme developing). For the best of the chains, Italians reliably inform the Spy that La Strada is where it's at. However, quite honestly, nothing even comes close to Pizza L’Authentique. For the sake of keeping this wonderful enterprise in business, the Spy suggests a car-share system for those without vehicles who live outside Caldecote/Hardwick: he is personally willing to ferry out crowds of pizza tourists in his own, rather growth-stunted automobile. At a conservative estimate he could fit seven hungry people in the back if they are all happy to lie stacked on top of each other, but on the return journey their pizza-filled, distended bellies must be factored into the equation, so one member of every party must be nominated to be the sacrificial lamb, left at the side of the road and forced to adopt a feral existence, scraping cheese out of empty pizza boxes and howling wildly at the moon. However, the hungry wolf hunts best, and when the magical pizza van returns, he will be first in the queue for smoky, wood-fired manna from heaven... 

The wood-burning stove, pre-pizza.