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| Once again, Mental Floss tackles the important topics. Like many kids, I found history classes boring. Later, history became a favorite topic. I often wondered why that's the case. Part of it is because kids lack context, I'm sure. But another part is that they never taught the history of pizza. The history of pizza is a large pie—half Margherita and half lies. If you have to order a half-and-half pizza, you have failed at diplomacy and compromise. The most famous story about its origins, in which the classic tri-color pie was created to honor Queen Margherita of Savoy, is a work of fiction. And yet, it's the first thing people hear, so they'll stick with the fictional version. U.S. soldiers did not fall in love with pizza en masse during their time fighting World War II and bring it back to the States. Pretty sure I've never heard that tale. And the pizza in New York is not good because of the magical tap water. That bit, I knew. The pizza there is good because it's New York pizza. While New York City tap water is remarkably good for drinking, it doesn't contribute much to the taste of New York's most perfect food. Nor does it do anything to improve the taste of beer from their local breweries. Let’s take a look at some iconic pizza styles... Some of which aren't pizza, but okay. In 2014, newly-elected New York mayor Bill DeBlasio set off a small international incident when he was photographed eating his pizza with a knife and fork... So, was the then-mayor wrong? Right? Obviously, he was wrong, as he's a politician. The answer is both, and that’s because pizza is at once internationally recognizable and completely regional. That’s why some people look at a Hawaiian pie and see the greatest crime ever committed to leavened bread and others see a beautiful story about immigration, intercultural influence, and innovation (or, at least, lunch). The only thing I love more than watching Chicago vs. New York pizza arguments is watching the pineapple-on-pizza arguments. Well, actually, I love pizza more than any argument, but they still amuse me. The article goes into the Margherita thing, then: According to food historian Tommaso Esposito, up until the mid-20th century, pizzas were usually ordered by simply listing the ingredients you wanted on top. Esposito wrote a book all about pizza songs (yes, that’s a thing) from the 16th century up until 1966 and found that none of the songs mentioned specific pizza types by name. Hey, I still order by listing the ingredients I want on top. Also, how come I don't know any pizza songs? Neither of those two famous Neapolitan pie varieties would have been possible without tomatoes. And I'm glad the article acknowledges this. While something resembling pizza undoubtedly existed long before tomatoes were brought over from the Americas (I've seen histories tracing it back to classical Rome), it took the nightshade fruit to really make pizza what it's recognizable as today. When we think of pizza today, tomatoes—a crop the Aztecs had introduced to the Spanish—often seem like an essential ingredient. That's a kind way of putting "the Spanish stole tomatoes from the Aztecs." The Oxford English Dictionary, in fact, defines pizza as a dough “baked with a topping of tomatoes, cheese, and any of various other ingredients.” I don't accept dictionary arguments, but this one reflects common usage. Anyone who’s ever had a white pie might blanche at that definition. Ha ha. I see what you did there. There’s a written record from Gaeta, about 60 miles up the coast from Naples, dating back to the end of the 1st millennium CE. It lays out an agreement in which someone owes a local bishop 12 pizzas every Christmas and Easter Sunday. As the article notes, this was in the B.T.E. epoch (Before Tomatoes in Europe). We don’t have any way to know exactly what that proto-pizza looked or tasted like, but consider what the simplest version of a pre-Columbian-Exchange pizza might entail: a simple Mediterranean flatbread. Kind of like … a pita. Now here's where the article gets into that linguistic parallelism, something I've wondered about often myself, but never cared enough to look up. Plenty of sources think this is no accident, and draw a linguistic line straight from pita to pizza. That’s not the only possible etymology for the word, though. There's one important difference between pita and pizza, though: the former is generally baked on its own, while pizza dough is topped and then baked. Now, I've had things called "pizza" which feature pita or naan or other flatbread, pre-baked, topped with traditional pizza toppings (tomatoes, mozzarella, pepperoni) and then baked again, but I've always thought it's not true pizza. It can be good, though. If we define pizza as a flatbread with toppings, we can imagine it being “invented” more or less independently by the Ancient Greeks, Egyptians, and Natufians (from modern-day Jordan, who were apparently making bread more than 14,000 years ago). Yes, putting stuff on bread is as old as civilization, I can accept that. I can also easily see someone putting another hunk of flatbread on top, so I've never truly accepted the "Earl of Sandwich" story for eating something between two pieces of bread. The article backs me up on this, too: The idea of putting something delicious inside a pizza-like bread likely dates back thousands of years. They talk about figs as the "something delicious" before going on with: Eventually, pizza with figs became popular beyond those who ate it out of economic necessity. Wealthier eaters embellished the simple dish with prosciutto, creating a new variation that harkens back to pizza’s historical roots and remains popular today. This parallels the history of a lot of cheap eats. You take what's available in an area, and it feeds the masses. Then, later, it becomes a gourmet delicacy. Hell, France made basically a national cuisine out of that idea. Snails and frog legs, anyone? The Hawaiian pie was invented in 1962, according to most accounts, by Sam Panopoulos, a restaurateur living in Ontario. Sam was originally from Greece, and the boat he left on stopped, fortuitously, in Naples, where he first became acquainted with pizza. Unlike the murky origins of pizza itself, that story checks out. I like it because it's international: Greek, Italian, Canadian, Polynesian, American. The article also discusses other styles of pizza, like Detroit and Chicago, which I don't consider pizza. Again, though, it can be good. A different approach to that same long cook time may have given us Ohio Valley-style pizza. One of its defining features is the last-minute additions of cold toppings, including cheese. Unlike some other regional pizzas, Ohio Valley style tends to stay in the Ohio Valley. There's a lot more at the link. I won't belabor it further, except to say that regardless of categorization arguments, I only have one pizza advice about pizza, or pizza-adjacent concoctions: if you like it, eat it, and don't listen to those of us who need to be purists or pedants. |
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