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Comment by mcv | Hacker News Reader

About a year ago (maybe more?) I read an article from someone who'd found a medieval pizza recipe and wanted to try it out. Turns out that in the middle ages, pizza was just round bread. Not remotely resembling anything we today would consider pizza.

Pizza with toppings was apparently invented after the unification of Italy in the 19th century, when someone created three flat pizzas with different sets of toppings. The most popular one was named after the new queen of Italy.

And it was mostly Italian immigrants to the US who remembered this and started experimenting with more pizza styles. When they returned to Italy in WW2, they were surprised not to find any pizzas there, and local Italians quickly started making and inventing pizzas for these Americans.

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Tomatoes didn't even exist at all in Italy until the "Columbian Exchange" in the 15th/16th Century. It shouldn't be a surprise at all that pizza in the middle ages was nothing like today's pizza.

Tomatoes were also viewed with suspicion initially in Italy and used only ornamentally. It wasn't until the 18th century that tomatoes really became accepted in Italian cuisine.

To this day there remains a sharp geographic gradient. Northern italians do not use many tomoatoes - practically never red sauces.

Do you have a source for this? Because my experience tells me quite the opposite.

North-East italian here. Never knew that.

They are a member of the nightshade family after all, which includes many poisonous plants.

They also were rather acidic compared to most foods people ate at the time. Acidity + pewter plates makes for a bad time.

I doubt any but the very rich could afford pewter tableware.

Nobody but the very rich could afford tomatoes.

Eggplant parm is such a fascinating dish for its mix of nightshades.

Relatedly, I've known Americans that rate Italian-American restaurants on their eggplant parm as their preferred benchmark dish.

I'd use risotto as the benchmark myself, but then again I loathe eggplant.

Reminds me of the risotto scene early in "The Big Night" (1996), which is also an interesting movie generally in the context of this discussion. The scene is about Italian immigrants trying to run a restaurant in America, and revolves around the kitchen dispute that happens when an American customer requests a side of spaghetti to go with the risotto.

Heh. I have French friends who eat rice with bread as for them rice is a vegetable.

I will die on that hill that an olive oil base is so superior that tomatoes do not belong on pizza. Especially these days where so many places "tomato" sauce is basically corn syrup and food coloring.

I am curious about it and I'm quite sure that it is great but on that hill you are fighting an ... err ... uphill battle. To flip a contemporary saying around "pizza is like sex, even if it's bad it's still good" :D

We all know "never get involved in a land war in Asia," but uphill battles against Italy are a problem, too.

On pizza and sex . . . I'm not even going there. But try some oil.

Fair :)

Why not both! Olive and tomatoes (and salt) are a match made in heaven

Too runny. Pizzas I use olive oil on always end up messy as hell. Tomato politely stays put under the cheese, any exposed sauce cooks and dries so it's not runny, and oils and greases from other sources tend to sit on top of it rather than displacing it and turning into a kind of icky liquid-fat blend.

I still use it for certain pies, but would absolutely not rate it higher than tomato sauce for this purpose, overall.

Where have you found this type of pizza?

Most decent places will be able to do it. Somestime they call it something different, like "white sauce" (although that can mean something else, so ask first)

But, like, to give a national chain, you can get oil instead of sauce on any pizza at Mellow Mushroom.

... where are you buying your tomato sauce???

Standard basic common brands like Ragu and Prego have none of those. Tomatoes as the first ingredient, zero added sugar/syrup or food coloring.

I've never even heard of corn syrup or food coloring in tomato sauce. Do you have a source for that? Because I can't even see how it would make sense -- large cans of tomato purée are cheap enough already.

Italian tomatoes _in Italy_ taste so much better it's like a different food. Even buying canned San Marzano isn't quite the same.

Well, get decent tomatoes and make your own sauce.

Good quality tomato is just incredibile.

Here in Vancouver, Via tevere makes an shockingly good tomato sauce, to the point that I get only margherita as pizza, because the flavor is so intense.

That being said, neither of them is better than the other: provola, mushrooms and truffle on a white base will blow your mind.

It's just that here in north america, they have so little choice in toppings, everything is pepperoni, something spicy, chicken everywhere. Damn!

I'm an Italian who now lives in Canada

Chicken does not belong on pizza.

You get arrested if you put it on pasta too.

What about pineapple? Doesn't Pizza Hawaii now exist long enough to count as traditional?

We don't put pineapple on pizzs either.. We do put nutella and apples, or nutella and strawberries on it, but it would be on "pizza bianca" (white pizza), which is not something you have in north America. It's similar to bread.

> Tomatoes didn't even exist at all in Italy until the "Columbian Exchange" in the 15th/16th Century.

The same holds true across the Pacific:

> Chili peppers spread to Asia through their introduction by Portuguese traders, who—aware of their trade value and resemblance to the spiciness of black pepper—promoted their commerce in the Asian spice trade routes.[10][14][15] They were introduced in India by the Portuguese towards the end of the 16th century.[16] In 21st-century Asian cuisine, chili peppers are commonly used across many regions.[17][18]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chili_pepper#Distribution_to_A...

All the 'traditionally' hot dishes of India and Thailand that have chili peppers are post-1492. I think that after a few hundred years it's okay to call the cuisine 'traditional'.

See Mann's book for some more on this:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1493:_Uncovering_the_New_World...

I’ve always considered traditional food to be based on generation. If your grandparents grew up eating it, it’s traditional.

Many foods comes from cultural cross-pollination.

So microwave dinners are not only traditional, but even post-traditional now, where one's grandparents may consider them traditional but one oneself may not eat them?

Now I want to see a SciFi story where people are having a traditional microwave dinner.

Not really-really (pizza with the same ingredients existed before, and it was just renamed as Margherita):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29132535

What is true is that pizza was common only in the south of Italy, but what made it more common in the north (I would say much later, in the '60's) was the flux of people relocating from the south to the north in those years.

>Turns out that in the middle ages, pizza was just round bread. Not remotely resembling anything we today would consider pizza.

They mention in the article that, etymologically, pizza may be derived from "pita" -- the still ubiquitous term for a round flatbread.

Growing up 'pita' was rolled dough stuffed with various ingredients, like meat and onions or cheese, technically burek and sirnica or pita :). Pretty close geographically to Italy, couple hundred miles flying distance.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%B6rek

Was pizza popular in America prior to WW2? I recently read an article [0] from 1949 that was written as if most Americans wouldn't be familiar with it. Maybe it was a regional thing and those soldiers were from an immigrant neighborhood?

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1949/10/pizza/6...

My dad was born in the 50s in a small southern town. He didnt learn about pizza until the 60s. My great uncle moved to Queens and came back home to visit with his kids one day. The kids asked my father "Where is the pizza place here?" to which my father replied: "What's pizza?".

I think most immigrant origin foods start in a big city. Then migrates to smaller cities in the same region to other big cities across the country. Only after that will it go "nationwide". And it usually takes a popular chain to make it happen (Chinese being an exception. It was everywhere before Panda Express and Pf Chang's)

My favorite example of this kind of thing is Chinese food in America. Its almost entirely an American invention.

This generalizes more than you'd think. $(Foreign food) in $(Country) is largely an invention of $(Country)

This has changed with modern travel. But it surprises me how much of what people believe about food is basically propaganda. At best.

lol... That's part true. But I wouldn't use "almost entirely"...

Egg foo young, chow mein, fried rice, lo mein, and many other items are real Chinese dishes also found in China.

Sure, ingredients have been localized... but no more so than localization that also take place elsewhere. :)

> My favorite example of this kind of thing is Chinese food in America. Its almost entirely an American invention.

It depends on where you are and what you order.

I live in California. We definitely have Americanized chinese food here, but we can also easily get authentic tasting:

- dim sum of various types

- mapo tofu

- kungpao/gongbao chicken

- twice cooked pork

- scallion pancakes

- Peking duck

- noodles of various types

The list could go on.

I’ve also had some mind-blowingly good Cantonese food in NYC and Philly.

Even then, mapo and kungpao often contain a lot of chilis, which came from the Americas via the Portuguese. So it's not untouched by American (continent) influence, just much earlier.

What percentage of this menu [1] would you say is tradition Chinese food?

[1] https://www.restaurantji.com/pa/philadelphia/szechuan-garden...

I’m not sure what your point is.

Yes, every city has Chinese restaurants with stylized Chinese food. It’s usually “Americanized”, but it can just as be as easily Thai-ized or Korean-ized or Japan-ised or whatever.

Fwiw, I recommend this place:

http://www.ocean-harbor.com/

There are many other good ones.

> I’m not sure what your point is.

That Americanized Chinese food is American.

Chinese food is like a chameleon. It gets adapted very significantly to whatever local ingredients are available in a way many others don't, and also intentionally adjusted to local palates (I remember when the first Chinese restaurant in Oslo to serve "authentic" Sichuan cuisine in the late 90's -- the unimaginatively named Dinner in Stortingsgata for any Norwegians on here -- had to warn people to interpret the spice levels the way you would at an Indian restaurant, because most Norwegian Chinese restaurants before that made their food more bland to fit local preferences but the Indian restaurants didn't, so they became the benchmark)

The same is true for Chinese food in Netherland; it's mostly a Dutch invention. Or more specifically, it's Indonesian food for Dutch colonialists.

It's so incredibly ingrained in Dutch culture that the very first restaurant of any town or village is either a snackbar or a Chinese restaurant.

Sort of. Even if you had simply isolated a group of Chinese people in a new location for a long period, you'd expect the food to evolve independently.

New submission: The Ottomans invented the doner kebab, yet its fast-food variant served as a sandwich with sauce and extensive salad was invented by an ethnic Turk in Berlin. Berlin has, for historical reasons, a lot of ethnic Vietnamese inhabitants. Some of these have moved to Vietnam, taking with them the kebab, and inventing a variant called banh my doner kebab, which uses pork for the meat part, and adds sour vegetables and chili sauce.

And the mexican taco pastor is pretty much similar and also come from imigration.

Oh my. That sounds like something I need to try.

As noted, Lebanese immigrants to Mexico led to Al Pastor through a similar process.

I find it interesting that Cilantro which is in so many Mexican dishes is an Old World plant. Culantro is native to the Americas, as is Quillquiña.

Same for Chinese food in the Netherlands.

It's more like Indonesian food (former colony), but not really, it's more a collection of Asian-like dishes with tons of sugar added.

The fact that food and drink evolve over time isn't too controversial. Beer, for example, evolved from having darker "ale" being more popular, to lighter lager/pilsner/ležák being the predominant type.

I don't think this means the tomato-based modern pizza is less of a pizza, but that we should maybe more widely embrace the other types if we like them. To be honest I hadn't encountered a "pizza bianca" 'til I left the UK, and I would've taken some convincing it wasn't some weirdo UK thing if I encountered it there :D

I suspect the evolution of beer is quite a bit more complex than that. Beers have been brewed from a wide variety of grains, and the colour was mostly determined by what exactly they used. Subtle mixes are a fairly recent thing, and while the mass market beers are usually pale, darker beers are still very popular too.

> I don't think this means the tomato-based modern pizza is less of a pizza

Quite the contrary, it's more of a pizza.

I've seen pizza bianca in my supermarket. I do wonder, if you don't put tomato sauce on it, what's the fundamental difference between a pizza bianca and a flammkuchen?

It definitely is more complex than that but currently the most popular type of beer now was not the original beer (or was not among the first beers, certainly not until the 1800s) and is relatively modern.

The mediocre lager/pilsner dominance is pretty interesting, because it started off as the premium product. Then it got so popular it dominated the market, became the default, and then the older less-premium products ended up specializing into premium/luxury products. A similar thing happened to tequila as opposed to other mezcals.

Actually I didn't reference any decline in quality but in some locales, like Scotland where I'm from, you're absolutely right. Tennent's lager is now the most popular, it is not good. Where I am currently the most popular beer is between two lagers/ležáky - in western Czech Republic ("Bohemia" aka Čechy) the most popular beer is Pilsner Urquell, and in Moravia, where I live, it's Radegast - both higher quality beers. So it depends, but occasionally where I live allows me a very minor flex of "I can walk into most pubs and get spectacular ležák :)

Heard a pretty good interview with this author https://modernistcuisine.com/books/modernist-pizza/

I'm to understand as well that the basis for modern pizza was one created in the late 19th century, based on the colors of the new Italian flag: red (tomato sauce), white (cheese), and green (spinach, I believe).

The green on pizza Margherita is basil.

the green is basil, it was called the Margherita pizza after Queen Margherita.

but we're talking about simple ingredients and flavors that were already being put together in various ways.

> Turns out that in the middle ages, pizza was just round bread. Not remotely resembling anything we today would consider pizza.

"None pizza, left beef"?

There's an article on the US origins of pizza at https://eccentricculinary.substack.com/p/pizza-isnt-italian.

That article is very annoying as it is anchoring into silly technicalities. Yes, modern pizza came from Napoli and Italy (as a unified country) didn't even exist back then. But it is a complete sillyness not saying modern pizza is not Italian.

"Let me repeat that: Pizza isn’t Italian.

Pizza is Neapolitan. It’s a distinct speciality of Naples, developed at at time when Italy didn’t even exist as a nation. Saying pizza is Italian is like saying haggis is British. It might be technically true, but not really. "

Even in Italy we say Italian pizza and Neapolitan pizza are distinct concepts. Sicilian pizza too, to be clear. Italian pizza definitely comes from the export of Neapolitan pizza. Oh wait, then there is Roman-style pizza! It's very nuanced.

Some people think that it was Marco Polo's attempt to reconstruct a Chinese dish which led to a Neapolitan chef inventing pizza.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cong_you_bing#Chinese_legend_s...

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