The wild pizzas of southern Italy
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Looks at picture to make sure he's not misunderstanding, sees that, no, it's that
What does the author think pizza sauce usually is?
I am Italian, and you need to define these things way more off feel and appearance than some scientific definition of "sauce" that you just made up.
Regardless of whether "pizza sauce" is cooked or not, you look at and you know it's sauce. It's near-puree consistency, with all the ingredients having been blended together, you could spread it easily with a spoon.
Look at that picture, those are clearly crushed tomatoes that were very recently a full tomato, not like a canned "crushed tomato" you would get in a store that's already like 95% of the way to sauce consistency. You could not spread those around evenly or easily with a spoon. It's not a sauce. It's crushed tomatoes, with salt, oregano, and olive oil.
If you want to "gotcha" go with the fact that the vast majority of these would not be called "pizzas" by anyone in Italy - as mentioned by @elrond89. Again by feel - you look at a big piece of woven/folded bread with some other ingredients - does it feel like pizza to you? Probably not. Most of those would be called "focaccias" or similar.
> practically a recipe for pizza sauce
You're saying it yourself but not absorbing it. The ingredients themselves do not make a final product, in the same way that a fajita plate is not a burrito which is not a quesadilla.
Also: so you're telling me they put the crushed tomato on, then put salt and oregano on top of it, rather than stirring those into the crushed tomato? I guess if the oregano is fresh and goes on after the bake, but I'm not seeing that in the photo. One way or another, it's settling in to the sauce.
Pizza sauce, being (in its minimum form) so very simple and uncooked, is a weird case. The ingredients themselves do make the final product, for that. I'd still call that a pizza sauce, and again, I think you'd get a lot of weird looks showing that photo to people and telling them it lacks sauce. If it's not sauce, then lots of more-normal pizzas "don't have sauce" either. Like, if you just had salted crushed tomato, not even any oregano, on a pizza, I would absolutely say it's got pizza sauce on it. Oregano's common, but not required. It'll taste weird enough without any salt that I might start to reconsider then, but only then.
[EDIT] I'm not trying to be a dick about this, I was just really surprised to read that description, coupled with the photo above it. "no tomato sauce" goes on to describe its toppings as exactly what one might mix to get a pizza sauce
EDIT: see my comment on the grandparent and stop being so pedantic
Pizza must always be a dough with a raised border and something on top. Also we really care about how you cook it. Real good pizza is only cooked in a brick oven with timber, everything else is good but not real pizza (is usually lower quality)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVo_wkxH9dU
The spaghetti tree hoax is a famous 3-minute hoax report broadcast on April Fools' Day 1957 by the BBC current affairs programme Panorama. It told a tale of a family in southern Switzerland harvesting spaghetti from the fictitious spaghetti tree, broadcast at a time when this Italian dish was not widely eaten in the UK and some Britons were unaware that spaghetti is a pasta made from wheat flour and water. Hundreds of viewers phoned into the BBC, either to say the story was not true, or wondering about it, with some even asking how to grow their own spaghetti trees. Decades later CNN called this broadcast "the biggest hoax that any reputable news establishment ever pulled."
Or the Pizza Farm from Funny or Die!
But coming back to roaming Pizzas. Another anecdotal food myth (in the UK) is the haggis that roam the Scottish highlands. They allegedly have shorter legs on one side so that it is easer to go round and round the hills.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/gnmeducationcentre/archive-educa...
Not so casually the only actual pizza in the list is the one that is called pizza (pizza al taglio[1]) all the others are different specialities that may (or may not) be overall similar to a pizza.
In Italy there are tens or hundreds of regional variations of "focaccie" (that are not pizza) or similar "bread with something", the traditional diets all revolve around bread or pasta (i.e. flour+water), (olive) oil, vegetables and cheese, i.e. the most economical ingredients, more or less always the same and people had centuries to invent variations on the same theme.
[1] which is common enough, literally "pizza for cut", it is actually a "normal" pizza cooked in largish rectangular pans that is sold in rectangular slices.
Suffice to say, I think Italians have a wee bit more of a right to define the word than I do.
Source: am Italian too.
https://www.treccani.it/vocabolario/pizza/
There are two main school of thoughts.
The first one has a limited number of "coded" pizza's:
Margherita
Napoletana
Marinara
Prosciutto
Prosciutto e funghi
Capricciosa
and a few others.
The second one is whatever floats your boat or "everything goes", normally there are some 10-15, maybe 20 "standard" pizza types in the menu of a pizzeria, but you can usually ask (within reason) to add or remove any ingredient, basically anything that is edible (and salted, NOT sweet) can be used.
Pizza with peperoni (peperoni are "sweet peppers") is "border line", though what in the US is called pepperoni pizza (i.e. with salame piccante, no peperoni anywhere):
https://www.innaturale.com/la-pizza-pepperoni-non-e-con-i-pe...
is usually "accepted" (IF the salame piccante is available, which depends on where in Italy you ask for it, you will always find it in the south, not so commonly in center/center-north)).
Also it depends on the integralism of the pizzeria personnel.
As an unrelated note, in any "normal" bar you would be frowned upon if asking for a cappuccino any time past - say - 11 AM.
Of course this does not apply in cities where there are many tourists, where it is not so rare to see people eating a pizza while drinking a cappuccino. (personally the mere thought of this sends shivers down my spine)
(except when the title is the full contents of a solitary linked tweet)
Anyway most of them are "focaccia" we use pizza to mean a lot of different things, it also means "slap in the face" in roman slang, so don't take everything literally, sometimes pizza means the same thing americans are used to, the only difference, except maybe raw materials, is that we make them of the correct size (enough to feed only one person), sometimes it's not, it's simply "pizza shaped"
We also use the same Italian word used for cake to mean this, it's obviously not a cake (anglophones call them pies) and you can call it pizza as well (stuffed pizza to be precise)
https://www.tavolartegusto.it/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/...
they are simply baked in a cake pan
South Korea takes the idea of pizza into downright absurdity. Imagine corn, squid, blueberry, garlic, sweet potato, and mayonnaise on a single pie together.
They take pride in producing and obtaining the good quality ingredients and I see Italians conservatively sticking to the basics.
On the other hand, in other countries where the produce quality is not exactly on the level of the ones in Italy, they tend to experiment with different techniques or ingredients. I would say that often the succeed in coming up with good combinations.
There are some Korean dishes which do rely on ingredients and simplicity, thinking of a dish like mulhwae, but pizza is kind of a novelty. And if it's going to be a novelty, it might as well be a bit of a spectacal.
Personally, I love exploring both sides!
No tradition or culture can claim to be purely from one place. Everything has mixed in the world by now. All of us are immigrants.
Failing to do so often and on an industrial scale quickly becomes cultural appropriation.
In HN terms: it's like systematically violating FOSS licenses that require attribution.
Also, about not butchering something and/or making false claims its originality.
- if it's an exact copy, give attribution
- if it's inspired-by but different, say it
- if it's a new thing, don't give false attribution (e.g. with a misleading name)
- if the origin is forgotten or unclear, don't claim ownership
The Culinary Cultural Appropriation Police are not going to come after anyone for not explaining spaghetti or tacos to an American audience. Everyone knows what those are even if they don't know every bit of the history of those items.
But if you're going to introduce a lesser-known dish, it'd be better to provide some context. When a white chef puts his twist on Ghanaian groundnut soup on the menu, that's ok - but don't just call it "Tim's Tasty Nut Soup" without referring to what it was inspired by. Give credit to the culture that invented the thing (and no, I don't think your menu needs to dive into the fact that it contains tomatoes which aren't native to Ghana, etc).
Also don't slap the name of a food that people heard about on something very different.
I think peppers are the one that blows my mind the most. They're centered in quite a few food cultures, and I got quite far into life not realizing how relatively new that phenomenon is.
You can also read up on the ancient roman diet, there are many sources on that.
My understanding is that pizza maybe originally from Italy, but it was popularized in the US by Italian-Americans. When American tourists started traveling in Europe in large numbers, they wanted "authentic" pizza, so Italians obliged by serving them a reinvented pizza.
Sweden and Southern Germany had pizzerias before WWII. Same for São Paulo (Brazil) and Buenos Aires (Argentina), both cities with a big Italian immigration on the 19th century.
The town of Nice, in southern France, has pissaladiere as a local dish since the end of 19th century.
And then there are the hundreds of different versions of flat-breads from Asia to North Africa.
Edit: Come to think about it, tomatoes in Italy have existed longer than Italy itself.
(Specifically in the post above I was referring to the chip, on the basis that the potatoe "came" to England in a similar timeframe to the quote of the tomato beginning commonplace in Italy from.)