The first Friday pizza was an accident. It was September 2015, the writer was newly home with a six-month-old, and her husband Connor had brought back a ball of dough from the Italian shop on Munjoy Hill because the woman behind the counter had given him one for free.
He rolled it out on the kitchen counter at 6:10 p.m. and put cheese on it and a few slices of tomato. The baby, then unnamed in any food sense, watched from a bouncer on the floor. The pizza was burnt on one edge and underdone in the middle. It was the best dinner they had eaten in three weeks.
Eleven years later, the Halligans have eaten pizza on a Friday night roughly forty-five weeks of every year. They have missed Fridays for travel and illness and one funeral. They have eaten pizza in three apartments and the current small house off Forest Avenue.
What follows is not a recipe column. It is a record of how a ritual ages.
Year one. The dough came from the shop. The pizza was assembled by two adults working around a baby who had decided that Friday was the night to refuse the swing. By month nine, the baby could sit at the table and was given small pieces of crust.
Connor learned to make the dough himself in the second year, when the shop closed. He uses a recipe from a 1994 Marcella Hazan book that originally produced focaccia. He has modified it three times since.
Year three. The Halligans added a second child, a boy named Theo, in the spring of 2018. The Friday pizza continued, more or less, with the elder child, Maeve, now three, given the job of arranging pepperoni in concentric circles. She was very serious about the circles. She is still, at eleven, very serious about most things.
Maeve refused mushrooms with great clarity from age two onward. The family adopted a half-and-half pizza model: mushroom side for adults, plain cheese for children. This is still the case.
Year five. Theo, at two and a half, threw a piece of pizza across the kitchen during a particularly bad Friday in November 2020. The pizza landed cheese-side-down on a library book. Wren remembers laughing in the way a parent laughs when she has not slept in five days.
The family began using a small mat under Theo's chair. The mat was retired in 2022.
Year seven. Maeve, at seven, was promoted from pepperoni-arranger to dough-shaper. Connor taught her how to use the heels of her palms to push the dough outward from the centre. Her first pizza was an irregular oval that he described, with great seriousness, as rustic.
She has shaped most of the family's Friday dough since. She is faster than her father now. She is not, yet, as good.
Year nine. A change. Wren got a new job and started working Friday evenings until 6:30. The pizza moved to Saturday for about four months. The family did not like it. By February they had moved it back to Friday, and Wren's mother, who lives across town, started coming over on Fridays to make the dough while Wren was still at work.
Connor's father, who lives in Bangor, started driving down once a month for Friday pizza in the spring of 2024. Theo, then six, decided this meant Friday pizza was a family event now. He has insisted on it ever since.
Year eleven. Maeve, now eleven, has begun to want to invite friends. The Friday pizza, for the first time, has occasionally included a third child, sometimes a fourth. Theo, eight, has strong opinions about which friends are acceptable. He prefers Lila, who is quiet, and tolerates Sam, who is loud.
The pizza is now usually two pizzas, sometimes three. The dough recipe has doubled. The toppings have expanded to include, as of last month, kalamata olives, which Maeve has decided are sophisticated.
Connor still makes the dough at 4:30 every Friday afternoon. He covers it with a damp tea towel and leaves it on the counter to rise. Wren can tell what kind of day it has been by looking at the dough when she comes home. A loose, slack dough means a calm afternoon. A tight, over-worked dough means something went wrong at school.
The family eats around the small kitchen table, which seats four comfortably and six uncomfortably. When the grandparents are there, they pull a folding chair from the closet under the stairs. The folding chair has been used so often it has its own dent in the seat.
There are weeks Wren resents the ritual. There are weeks she feels too tired for it. There have been Fridays when she has wanted to order from the place on Congress Street and let someone else deal with the dough.
She has done that twice in eleven years. Both times, the children noticed within ninety seconds, and Theo, in particular, said it was not the same. He was not wrong.
The ritual, she writes now, has been less about the pizza than about the rhythm of it. The dough on the counter at 4:30. The cheese in the fridge. The grandfather in the chair. The same kitchen, the same Friday, the same small thing, repeated.
Next year, Maeve will be twelve. Wren is aware, in the way parents become aware of these things slowly and then all at once, that Maeve may not always want to be home on Friday nights. She has not said so. She still arranges the pepperoni. But the year is coming.
Wren plans to keep making the pizza anyway. Connor will roll out the dough. Theo will set the table. The chair will stay folded in the closet, ready, in case anyone wants to come back.
