Prep 6 hours before baking. This isn't Grandpa Giuseppe's Sicilian pizza This is Detroit style. It has a bubbly crispy crust that's been frying in a pool of olive oil. The mozzarella is under the copious amounts of sauce. The pepperonis are tiny grease chalices. It's a beauty and it'll feed 6 people. Well, maybe 4 to be honest.

1946. In the months after World War II, the Motor City roars with the sound of a booming industrial economy and America is high off the promise that has come with victory in Europe and victory in the Pacific. After the horrors of war, the hardship of the Depression, it’s the dawn of the new world.

But Gus Guerra wasn’t feeling it. One fateful night, he was sitting in the back of the empty restaurant and bar that he owned, sipping the warm swill of a tasteless pilsner. He wondered if all this post-war prosperity would pass him by. His restaurant, Buddy’s Rendezvous, wasn’t doing well, and the prospect of losing his business and livelihood were all too real.

No one knows the exact circumstances that led Gus to bake up the first deep dish pizza. I like to think that old Gus finished off more than his fair share of beers that night and stumbled into the kitchen where he saw a couple of heavy industrial utility trays. Maybe he drunkenly thought he’d use them to make a pizza. That’s too much dough, he probably thought. Nonetheless, all Elizabeth Warren-like, he persisted. He got off his seat of self-pity and had the gumption to try baking a pizza with an unimaginable thick crust. Mixing up the monster wad of dough he scoffed at what the would-be mockers. Doubling up on the marinara, adding mushrooms, cutting up some sausage and because that mozzarella he had was going bad (slow business and all) he just went all in with the cheese.

It may not have happened in this way, but this is 2017, it’s okay to play fast and loose with the facts. Why not? The truth is, no one knows the truth. The inspiration for the Detroit Sicilian style of pizza is shrouded in legend. Per the name, it has its origins in Sicily and most think that either Gus’s wife Anna or an old Sicilian guy named Dominic, taught Gus how to make the dough, in the “Sicilian way”: fluffy, slightly spongy, with a crispy bottom layer, preferably slightly charred.

While the historic facts might be shaky, the consequences of Gus’ invention are all too real. In addition to creating a new and delicious variation on pizza, Gus also opened the doors to one of the most decisive issues of the 20th century: What constitutes a pizza? New Yorkers will call Detroit Sicilian style a kind of bread baked with sauce and cheese. Midwesterners will call New York style pizza nothing more than a big cracker with toppings. Is it a matter of taste or of identity? Do you side with the coastal elites or the hearty flyovers?

Obviously, this is not a conversation suitable for mixed company, so bring it up with caution.