Pizza, the signature Italian dish that is a favourite in just about every country in the world, wasn’t actually invented in Italy. The ancestor of the modern dish was created thousands of years ago by the ancient Greeks and Persians.
It is said that soldiers of the Persian king Darius I (521–486 bc) baked a type of flatbread – in an improvised oven made by placing their shields over their camp fires – which they covered with cheese and dates.
The ancient Greeks, meanwhile, served a similar type of bread, which they covered with cheese, herbs and olive oil.
Indeed, it is thought that there could be an etymological connection between the Greek pitta and the Italian ‘pizza’, which is believed to have evolved from the Old German pizzo, meaning ‘to bite’.
The first recorded use of the word was in ad 997 in a Latin text from Gaeta, a southern Italian port near Naples, which has remained the home of the pizza ever since.
Pizza was cheap and filling way to eke out the contents of a bare larder and the people of Naples were famously poverty-stricken.
In 1830, the French writer and food expert Alexandre Dumas, (1802–70), wrote how the Neapolitan poor subsisted on pizza during the winter and that it was typically flavoured with ‘oil, lard, tallow, cheese, tomato or anchovies’.
Today, pizzas are topped with a wide range of ingredients – including spicy meats from India and the Far East and, for the more adventurous, kangaroo and crocodile from Down Under – although the Neapolitan style still predominates. Here are four modern favourites:
Marinara
Topped with tomato, oregano, garlic and olive oil, marinara is the oldest and most basic type of Neapolitan pizza. The full name – pizza alla marinara, or ‘sailor-style pizza’ – reflects its seafaring origins.
This was a dish that might well have been prepared by la marinara, the sailor’s wife, for her husband, either to sustain him on a sea voyage or to feed him on his return.
These days some chefs interpret the name to mean a sauce or topping containing seafood, but that does not reflect the original, authentic version of the dish.
Margherita
Another type of Neapolitan pizza, made with a topping of tomato, mozzarella, basil and olive oil, links an Italian queen with the country’s poorest city. Margherita Maria Theresa Giovanna of Savoy, born in Turin on 20 November 1851, was the daughter of Ferdinand, Duke of Genoa, and his wife, Elizabeth of Saxony.
With such a privileged background, it is hardly surprising that Margherita’s future was planned long in advance, and on 21 April 1868, aged just sixteen, she was married to Umberto, the heir to the Italian throne.
Margherita became queen in 1878 when Umberto succeeded as the second King of Italy, now a unified country, and her passionate patronage of the arts and outspoken support for organizations such as the Red Cross earned her the respect of the young nation.
Indeed, she was held in such affection that the third highest mountain in Africa was named after her, Margherita Peak (which you could translate as ‘Mount Daisy’ as that is the meaning of her name in Italian), and she is also commemorated in a culinary way.
It was a visit by the popular queen to Naples in 1889 that prompted Raffaelle Esposito, owner of the Pizzaria di Pietro, to prepare a special meal in her honour.
Using the colours of the new national flag, green, white and red, Esposito combined cheese and tomato (white and red) with basil (green) to create what has become one of the world’s biggest-selling pizzas, and the base ingredients for most of the others.
He called it pizza Margherita (daisy pizza, in other words, although that doesn’t sound quite as appetizing) after his queen. And so it’s been called ever since.
Calzone
The pizza equivalent of a pasty or a savoury turnover, the calzone has all the normal filling of a pizza but is folded in half, which makes it much easier to eat on the move. In reference to its less-than-glamorous looks, calzone means ‘trouser leg’ or ‘drooping sack’.
In America, where this form of pizza is very popular, it is typically served with marinara sauce for dipping.
The American
It was the arrival of thousands of Italian immigrants in America in the last two decades of the nineteenth century that introduced the rest of the world to pizza. At first it was served as a street food, as it had been in Italy, but once the first pizzeria opened in Little Italy, New York City, in 1905, pizza spread like wildfire.
The first pizza vendors sold versions of the dish they had eaten in their home country, but soon all kinds of variations slipped in.
A favourite topping was pepperoni, the American version of the spicy salamis of Naples and southern Italy: it became so popular that a cheese and pepperoni pizza is now known throughout the world as an American. (And with the addition of another American ingredient, the jalapeño pepper it becomes the American hot.)
It is estimated that US citizens eat an average twenty-three pounds of pizza, per person, per year.
And that makes the American second only to the hamburger as their favourite food. – Albert Jack
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