'Poor Man's Pizza' Was A True Struggle Meal From The '80s

Dinner from America's favorite pizza chains can be pricey, and frozen pizzas often taste like cardboard. If you're looking for a budget-friendly version of this culinary mainstay, you may want to adopt a struggle meal from the 1980s known as "poor man's pizza." This dish uses pantry staples to create a satisfying bite that can make even the pickiest eaters happy. Unlike the beloved pizza bagel, which uses marinara sauce, pizza toast, as it's affectionately called, only requires bread, ketchup, and a little bit of cheese.

To recreate this retro meal, you can use white, wheat, sourdough, or whatever bread you have on hand for your sandwich base. And the cheese doesn't have to be fancy, either. Use Kraft singles, shredded pepper jack, or slices of cheddar — whatever you have in the fridge. The important thing is to spread the ketchup evenly over the bread before you add this topping. If you have a well-stocked herb and spice cabinet in your kitchen, you may want to sprinkle some dried oregano, basil, or herbs de Provence over the cheese before popping it in the toaster oven for three to five minutes, or until the cheese melts and starts to bubble.  

While this isn't a Depression-era food that's making a comeback, like water pie or peanut butter and pickle sandwiches, it's definitely an economical meal. What's great about "poor man's pizza" is how you can customize it for each person and use up those leftovers from meals past. Use whatever veggies you might have from previous dinners as toppings. Leftover chopped onions, tomatoes, and bell peppers, for example, are sneaky ways to get kids to eat this healthy but often unpopular food group. Some pepperoni, leftover ground hamburger from Taco Tuesday, and sausage from breakfast are perfect proteins to make the meal more substantive.

While ketchup is the sauce most people grabbed to make this dish in the 1980s, feel free to use barbecue sauce instead. Add some shredded cheese and leftover shredded chicken, and you might just feel like you're eating a barbecue chicken pizza. And bread isn't the only base for this affordable homemade delicacy. Consider using tortillas to create something akin to a flatbread-style pizza. You can alternatively use an English muffin or some French bread from pasta night that would otherwise go stale.