This Pizza Recipe Helped Her Survive the Great Depression

Clara Cannucciari (8/18/1914 – 11/29/2013) was well known for not only her delicious recipes, but her stories and accounts of cooking during the Great Depression. She has over 92,000 subscribers on her Great Depression Cooking YouTube channel and a wildly popular book titled Clara’s Kitchen.

Throughout her book and in her recipe videos, Clara uses the same ingredients that she and her family relied on for survival during the Great Depression.

In this video, she shares her recipe for everyone’s favorite dish, pizza! As the video description explains, “94 year old cook, author, and great grandmother, Clara, recounts her childhood during the Great Depression as she prepares meals from the era. Learn how to make simple yet delicious dishes while listening to stories from the Great Depression.”

For her pizza recipe, she uses pizza dough (flour, extra virgin olive oil), tomato sauce, anchovies, Romano cheese, basil and small pieces of mozzarella. She pops it in the oven until it’s nice and golden brown. Who needs a pizza cutter? Clara just uses scissors to cut it up.

She also tells stories about when she was young, like how her family used an oil lamp when they had no electricity and how bright they thought their first 20-watt bulb was.