A History of Pizza
historytoday.com
historytoday.com
It's essentially a drier version of mozzarella, though (very similar to Italian provalone).
Edit: non-sensical sentence
> A beautifully preserved thermopolium (cook shop), one of the places in #Pompeii where one could purchase hot and ready-to-eat food. Most Romans resided in insulae and did not have facilities to cook at home and relied on thermopolia to buy their hot meals. (photo)
https://twitter.com/carolemadge/status/1184381800656920577
The baking ovens in Pompei are - of course - wood-fired brick structures with domed tops on the inside. Like a pizza oven.
http://www.pompeiin.com/en/Bakeries_in_Pompeii.html
I would be completely unsurprised if there is an unbroken lineage from these shops (in other towns that were not obliterated by Vesuvius) through to Pizzerias in present-day Napoli.
Well that settles it. Next time a pizza traditionalist blasts me for having pineapple on my pizza, I'll counter that he shouldn't have tomatoes on theirs.
Something can be both practical and not a "regression."
Dont get me wrong, margherita is great, but to say pizza sauce is a regression is a bit silly IMO
I'd assume a common origin with the Italian variety via the Romans (ancient).
I find them in Turkish restaurants around here as well. They often look like this: http://loveantalya.com/turkish-pide-with-meat-filling-cheese...
Pizza-like but not pizza. I love them for what they are. But again I love any kind of pizza (Naples, Chicago, thin, thick, doughy etc.)
(It's not bad, it's just that if you were looking for tomato-less pizza in Italy, you wouldn't find pesto.)
I don't think it's a matter of tradition. It's a matter of taste.
:)
I don’t understand the whole pineapple pizza lobby, it’s just not a particularly good fruit for pizza.
In Australia pineapple on pizza is a really common thing. The only person I've ever met who didn't like pineapple on pizza just doesn't like pineapple at all in any context. Over here it is also pretty common to have pineapple on burgers.
My Canadian born girlfriend (who mostly grew up here) has told me that when she visited Canada at 14 and was shown a mango over there she didn't recognise it as a mango because it was so small and weirdly coloured compared to the ones we get here.
I'm beginning to think the objection to pineapple on pizza comes from people not having access to halfway decent pineapple
Basically if you have a wooden oven to bake bread, baking is risky. If the oven is too hot, the bread will become burnt before being thoroughly baked within, if you put it in too late, the heat will not be enough. So how do you, as a baker (or farmer baking for your own supply) test whether the oven has the right temperature? You trial-run with very thin patches of dough, that you can pull out easily and are always done inside, when the outside is nicely burnt: a kind of flat bread.
Putting stuff on top of the flat bread and making it your snack on baking day is just a logical conclusion.
In fact, around here, there are several regional dishes similar to a pizza serving this purpose. Flammkuchen from Alsace, and Denede from Swabia. The village where I work still has preserved (and renovated recently) a "Backhaus", a common oven of the village that would be fired regularly and then used by all villagers to bake their own bread. Did they triage the heat of the fired oven by putting in a small piece of dough? probably. Did they put stuff on top of that piece? I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised.
Second worst was when I first had Imo's without knowing what provel was. I think I got through almost half a slice on that one. You must have to grow up eating it to find it edible.
The next few rankings after that, moving up the list, would be very cheap frozen pizzas. Like, the dollar or two a pie (on sale) kind.
Well duh. It's conference center food. Might as well complain how the worst hamburger you had was at a McDonalds in Portland.
Believe me - I was allowing for that!
https://www.google.com/maps/uv?hl=en&pb=!1s0x531c1ec8469aabe...
Truly an abomination.
The pizza is rectangular, incredibly thick (almost a cake-like consistency and crumb), with tomato sauce on top and usually nothing else.
I like it, but probably more due to it being comfort food from when I was a kid at parties than the pizza actually being particularly good.
https://s3-media1.fl.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/JkEI-lNlRm-ELKgV2keU...
Having said that, there is a lot of good Pizza in the US, especially in areas with heavy Italian immigrations like the north east. Obviously its a different style than most Italian Pizza, but its still really good.
I have only been to Italy once for three weeks to visit my cousins, but I read a lot about pizza. From what I have read/watched from Italian sources, even Pizza in Italy was in somewhat of a rut ~20+ years ago.
Northeast region pizzerias are a given. Varasano's down south in Atlanta is pretty fantastic however.
I would probably put a well done Regina's pizza (Boston) or a Prince Street (NYC) spicy pepperoni square slice ahead of any neapolitan pizza, and I say that as someone who owns a pizza oven and makes a lot of neapolitan style pizza.
Yep! But not in the American south.
Chicago pizza and its dip dish really on the other hand, was one of the biggest deception of my life ^^
But i’ll definitely agree - i find your typical usa pizza (HUGE crust, terrible ingredients) impossible to enjoy ;p
> It's good. Nothing great, but once I stopped thinking of it as a pizza, I found it was good food.
It's truly delicious... and nowhere near my favorite pizza in the US.
In the rest of Italy is the same: you call it "pizza", but you distinguish between places that make good Naples pizza, bad Naples pizza, good not-Naples pizza, bad not-Naples pizza.
If there were no good local substitutes you have to pump up the grease and toast the ingredients a bit more to make it flavorful enough.
Given that these places served a lot of immigrants when they opened, I also wouldn't be surprised if it helped having a sturdier pizza that you could take to work with you.
As for the ingredients, I’m not sure why Italy would have inherently better local ingredients. I can understand why northern Europe has shitty tomatoes (too cold to grow compared to, for example, southern Italy), but with its size, population and diversity of climates I imagine you can grow pretty much anything in the US at a decent quality, without the need to grease stuff to give it flavor.
It's also possible to live among wheat fields and not be able to buy good bread for anything less than insane luxury food prices here. All I can figure is our ovens cost more to run? I mean I know it's not that but I can't figure out WTF else could be the problem.
Decent cheese is also a lot more expensive—but again, we have lots and lots of fairly bad but very cheap options. And the cheaper end of our wine market is (much) less consistently good than in, say, France.
You could grow anything in the US and there are indeed great producers for everything. The problem is recognition.
PDO/DOP Parmigiano, prosciutto and olive oil and san marazano tomatoes are in the you cannot do wrong cathegory. They are always excellent.
A pizza maker in the US will have a lot harder time discovering great ingredients made in US. Not because they don't exist, but because anyone can label almost anything.
I believe this is true, subject to the original source material (seeds?) being imported.
> but with its size, population and diversity of climates
This makes it tricky, as producing enough of the high quality ingredients in appropriate locations, that can survive the transportation distances, creates a whole new range of problems.
Solving this at Italy scale is a different matter to solving this at USA scale.
Italian cuisine is all about letting the ingredients speak for themselves and success really depends on having high quality ingredients. So, yes, selecting for tomatoes that have long shelf life and trucking them long distances would violate Italian food sensibilities.
The Italian point of view would be to make the most of the ingredients that are available where you are. In other words, if you don't have fresh tasty tomatoes in the middle of winter, don't substitute subpar global-supply-chain tomatoes from the supermarket. Instead, use something else, like high-quality sundried tomatoes or don't use tomatoes at all. This is what happens in Italy, and it's why what visiting Americans might consider "iconic" Italian dishes aren't always present or recognizable.
With a coal fired pizza, the goal is to get a bit of black on the outside, a crispy crust with a fluffy inside.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_pizza
Dig a bit more and it seems the German claim is a bit stronger. The postwar years were difficult in Europe.
It's a symbol of post-war economic growth that a household could afford both ham and cheese and exotic fruit for a single meal. It didn't matter that it taste that nice. Neither do many other meals that only serve to demonstrate the wealth of the host.
So it would be an anachronism in scene set in 1953 Germany?
So if the scene is set in '53 and mentions "Oh I just saw this on TV", then it would definitely be anachronistic, otherwise it's entirely in the realm of possibility.
And we're pulling faces at the TV.
https://metawitches.com/2019/06/30/dark-season-2-episode-2-d...
Oh, and when someone claimed that Wilmenrod stole the "recipe" of putting an almond into a strawberry, he threatened to kill himself on live TV [0]. (He actually killed himself a few years later, though it is speculated that he was diagnosed as having stomach cancer shortly before).
That's interesting to know.
I recently saw this dish on a TV show set in 1950s Germany, and I had questions about it. Starting with "wat?" and "But why?" and "was that really a treat?"
Perfectly valid question. One thing that is true is that it is extremely easy to prepare for many people. When I was a child in the 90ies, we often ate Toast Hawaii at my grandparents at birthday parties. Just open a pack of toast, a can of pineapple, a pack of ham and a pack of cheese, place it on top of each other, put it in the oven, done.
> "was that really a treat?"
As a child, I never liked it, and even the generation of my parents did not really enjoy it and preferred a more sane toast topping. But the postwar generation swore on it. Keep in mind that the country was basically in ruins after WW2. That you were able to afford (or even get) canned pineapples in the 50ies again was kind of a sensation, so I guess they still ate it in the 90ies out of nostalgia.
It was interesting. Absolutely vile cold though.
When it opened in the late thirties pizza was totally unknown in Detroit. The founder was an immigrant from Naples. An Italian friend of my father's introduced him to the place and he took my Mother there on one of their first dates.
The owner and his wife were by then good friends of my Dad and it was almost like being in someone's kitchen, if things were slow they'd sit at the table with us.
Also, the flag of Italy was only adopted in the mid 1940's, and Queen Margherita was around about 100 years earlier.
The best pizza I’ve ever had was from a van in a lay-by off the A470, the “Route 66” of Wales.
Scott's Pizza Tours