A proto-pizza emerges from a fresco on a Pompeii wall
pompeiisites.org
pompeiisites.org
Once upon a time, I did the Aeneid in the original and we came across this meaning of the word 'mensa' as a bread base which was weird because it was the very first Latin word we had all learned: table. And then immediately afterwards in the text one of the warriors makes the joke that they're so hungry they're eating their tables as well. It still blows my mind that I could understand a pun written thousands of years ago and find it amusing.
So you're saying pineapple is in fact a pizza topping!
if the recipe was for French fries and jam: yes.
Lots of people been eating round flat bread with toppings around the Mediterranean for a very long time now.
One of the theories of the modern Pizza origin is that it was just a Pizza like any other (or Pitta...) until a certain restaurant in Naples invented the version with tomato sauce (the Marinara Pizza). And modern Pizza are just variations of the dish of that restaurant.
By the way, that restaurant still exists, or so people claim. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antica_Pizzeria_Port'Alba
Consider the pizza di Pasqua (dough with liquor, chocolate, cheese, +20cm tall), pizza alla pala (1.5m long), pizza sbattuta (sponge cake), pizza in teglia (rectangular and cut in square slices), and many more.
Could be related to pita, and I would not argue every culture on earth made flat round dough and put stuff on it, but it's a very large family.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_di_Pasqua
https://www.tasteatlas.com/pizza-alla-pala
https://blog.giallozafferano.it/inventaricette/pizza-sbattut...
True, although the canonical/widespread pizza is the round/flat one.
I've never heard of "Pizza di Pasqua" and "Pizza sbattuta" in Italy (I don't doubt they exist, but they must be very uncommon).
Pizza in teglia is common, at least in certain parts of Italy; I believe it's generally sold in bakeries rather than in pizzerias (restaurants).
Pizza alla pala is not so common in Italy, at least in restaurants (not that I remember). In other countries is very common in takeaways.
There's also a type of pizza that is round but thick, and with lower-quality toppings. I can't find any reference to it; it's somewhat widespread over Italy, but considered a "lesser pizza" :)
Funny, in Romanian, Pasqua(spelled Pasca) is a sweet bread Easter dish.
do you mean 'pizzetta'?
I've found this type of pizza both in the north and in the south. The overall quality is consideraly lower, starting from the cheese, which is not mozzarella (I believe they use provola, which is cheaper).
He mentions two other pizze: "Pizza a libretti" and "Pizza gravida", both of them sweet. "Our" pizza is completely absent.
It is intriguing that the above 19th century "pizza" recipe is called alla napoletana given that Wikipedia states that "... modern pizza evolved from similar flatbread dishes in Naples, Italy, in the 18th or early 19th century."
Although I guess fry dough is basically dessert pizza if you think about it.
But in some families/bakeries it is done with Strega liquor or Alchermes liquor[0], and it's also good. It's only the one with chocolate bits[1], which I find heretical since you can't eat it with salty stuff :D
[0] like this https://blog.giallozafferano.it/dolcissimamentez/pizza-di-pa...
In certain regions of Southern Italy, the word 'pizza' also refers to a part of the male anatomy which is not flat.
Edit: feels good to be downvoted by people with socially acceptable sense of humor
frankly speaking, I don't think we can find the true origin of this dish, it's like looking for the inventor of the wheel or the three-year rotation
either way, the history of modern pizza in northern Italy is truly fascinating (and controversial)[1]
[1] https://www.vanillamagazine.it/le-pizzerie-furono-sconosciut...
A thing as basic as a bread staple to have different names in the same region seems very significant.
Does anyone have any insight into this? I'm definitely going to try to dig deeper.
I used to go to a "pizza" restaurant in Jaffa. It claimed to be the oldest pizza restaurant. It has high lip edges and eggs... I think it was like shakuka on a type of pita. I wish I could remember what they called it.
Nah. It's just the result of a long history. In Italy, different towns can call the same specialties with completely different names (crescentina / gnocco fritto, etc...), often simply out of spite or because of some long-forgotten feud.
40 years ago, in Rome a pizza was often called a "torta", which is the word the rest of Italy uses for sweet cakes.
Pita is a pretty basic word for a human staple. Large regional areas use a very similar word for millenniums. One culture doesn't and is just as interspersed as through time and space as the others.
In fact they share many texts.
I think this is different than the examples you provided.
I would describe some pizza's in Berkshire Country as a Torte.
For something more academic, Ken Albala has a whole course on the cultural history of food here: https://www.wondrium.com/food-a-cultural-culinary-history
I'm not connected to either - they are both just great sources of fun that will make you think about food differently.
Like you I'm not affiliated with any of this, it's just a desire to get other people into something I love.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/An_Etymological_Dictionary_of...
But i haven't been able to find out if we know whether it was sweet or savoury, or anything else about it.
Presumably though the domestication of wheat had a symbiotic relationship with bread making. The (ancestral) wheat that exists today is like bread-powder when it is milled, but it was probably bred for that purpose (no pun intended). So I’m not sure we can be confident what the first breads were like, made with whatever pre-wheat grasses they had at the time. Perhaps it required other ingredients at first before those aspects were “automated” into the grass itself, etc
However, if you eg want to make a 100% rye bread, you really have to make it a sourdough, because otherwise the chemistry doesn't work out.
There are more factors at play here but the tldr is that, other than wheat, rye flour contains a very high level of amylase, an enzyme that breaks starches into sugars. Amylase prevents bread from rising, and rye contains so much of it that it stays active even with the high temperatures of baking. Add that to the fact that rye has very little gluten to hold up the structure of the bread…
That‘s where sourdough comes into play. The acids produced during a slow fermentation slow down the reaction of amylase, giving you a lighter bread. For a good rye bread, I ferment for over 24h in three steps.
Interesting you say that though, because I find three days about the limit, starts to really over-ferment, becoming really 'pockety', even at refrigeration temperatures. I suppose if I did it all in there as you imply, no fermentation time at room temp. at all, that might be better?
How active is your sourdough starter? Commercial yeast by contrast tends to be very active, so timings are shorter.
That said, I think they cultivate newer rye varieties to be less rich with enzymes. I presume that is to meet the requirements of industrial baking.
(Though you shouldn't use that kind of yeast for breadmaking, if you want it to taste good.. At least get some fresh yeast. (Which not quite coincidentally is also the 'normal' kind of yeast in eg Germany.) Better yet, make a rye sourdough starter.)
The problem is that rye doesn't have enough gluten. So you need to get the structure of your bread from the starches, and they only do the Right Thing when it's sour enough. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36504484 for a slightly more in-depth description.
And keep some "old dough" for starting the next batch. The general concept of a "sourdough starter" arises from that. This was pretty much the only form of bread yeast until 1850 or so https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baker%27s_yeast#History
And have a look at the wood-fired bead ovens in Pompeii. They're quite similar to the Pizza ovens down the road in Napoli. It's likely that the Romans made similar dishes: flatbread with cheese, meat, sauce and herbs baked on top.
But not tomatoes yet, until 1600s or later, after the Columbian exchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_exchange
It wouldn’t even need to rise. Just heat dough and you’ll have something you can put other food on top of and eat the whole thing.
I'd say that running a bakery under those conditions: i.e. would always be yeast around and there is no refrigeration, so for any given dough it's a question of when, not if, a given piece of dough will start to rise.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/26/exceptionally-...
In some districts in Rome, they had large apartment blocks (insualae) several levels high, and fire was forbidden, so people had to buy food on the streets.
From wiki: The insulae could be built up to nine storeys, before Augustus introduced a height limit of about 68 feet. Later, this was reduced further, to about 58 feet
Pineapple about same time.
I think enough people, early enough, tried every combination of tasty things on bread. Oil and vinegar with bread were probably found thousands of years ago.
Tomato and corn don't arrive in the Old World until the early 16th c. Cheese goes back to 7th mill. BCE but was too expensive for most people.
You have the French/German Flammkuchen, which is an amazingly good version that I don't know why it's not widely known.
There's Lahmacun, which is the "Turkish Pizza" - a lot more spicy and thin version with minced meat with spice as topping. There's also Pide, which is thicker and closer to Italian pizza but the shape and the toppings are quite different(cubed meat, egg).
Then there are the American pizza types like Chicago-style that look significantly different than the Italian ones.
The one on the fresco looks like the Italian version.
As you said it was invented in many places though.
No such thing has actually existed since at least WWI.
Let us not overlook the deep-fried Mars bar.
I think we (humans) have been putting different things on bread for as long as we’ve had bread, like GP said.
Did some of the peoples involved in the parallel construction have their bloodlines wiped off the whiteboard of humanity? Or did they just get sick of eating it?
People however usually think of the origin of pizza to be when tomatoes were added to the equation, and that has a much more well-defined history (mainly due to the limited availability and spread of tomatoes in Europe and around the world).
American wheat flour has been the key innovation. No one else has the gluten to hang. People import Americanized flour from Italy with Italian names and such but you can get better in the US. The lower gluten flours from Italy are good for the style they make over there...margherita (the Italianized version of pizza--very thin, high temp).
Even Canadians I know will take home an American pizza because of the ridiculous amount of cheese we put on pizza compared to Canada.
Though this way of painting is ridiculously long lived, it is very difficult to work with. The plaster dries so quickly that the painting has to be done is small chunks, like a jigsaw puzzle. There is also very little room for correction.
" natural earths, minerals and rare artificial pigments. Paintings are made up of thin paint layers (0.01–0.10 mm thick) strongly adhering to the underlying preparation layer."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13861...
" To obtain the green color, green earths and malachite were used, together with mixture of Egyptian blue and yellow ochre."
(I would advise trying to read up a little in advance though. The labels in the museum are rather self-indulgent. There's reams of text about how various pieces came to be in the collection, and quite little about what the piece is / represents.)
There are more types of pizza than the now globally common tomatoes and mozzarella pizza. Heck olive oil and garlic pizza is thing, unless there is more specifics regarding the origins of pizza available it's possible it is indeed just a pizza.
Nowadays you can ask for white pizza.
I think it is mostly about language. Pizza is loan word from Italian in German language in this case. So you may also say it other way around: Pizza counts as flammkuchen.
[0] Read it as pear or fig if you are Italian.
There is also a relatively new series of Chef's Table: Pizza if you want to see some uncommon pizzas in a beautiful documentary.
Italy as a country is VERY recent. There is no such thing as "Italian food", it used to be small estates in the peninsula for a very long time after the romans
Italy the country might be young, but the Italian language, for example, has been around for 600+ years. The Divine Comedy is from 1308.
I heard about this on the radio during my commute. Obviously, no picture!
Then, this story popped up in my Android news feed... But it had no picture of the item that the article was about. (Seriously, WTF is with news articles that don't include a picture of the thing they're writing about?)
But this contains a picture of the (cough) pizza. I didn't even bother reading the article. I just wanted to see the damn thing after hearing about it for 10 minutes on the radio and seeing another 1-million word article last night.
(Dupe comment on dupe submission) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36498783
The book along with its excellent predecessor Modernist Bread and the companion podcasts to both do a great job of both illustrating the history of bread and pizza but also debunking a lot of popular myths about their origin.
A lot of pizza (and bread for that matter) traditions and styles are much more recent than you might think. I'd highly recommend the volumes to anyone curious about the topic.
And I think that goes for a lot of cuisine. While in China I learned that actually a lot of Chinese cuisine is quite recent - and yet it's really central to regional identity and has a interesting timeless quality to it. For instance people will rarely get experimental or make significant modification to the original recipe (the idea of "fusion food" is mostly absent outside of bougie areas)
I've heard similar things about Korean food - a lot is very recent and meat heavy. Go not too far back in time and people rarely ate meat at all.
In Taiwan a lot of the "traditional food" is based around beef - but traditional/elderly Chinese would normally refuse to eat beef entirely - so it must be a product of the past few decades.
I'm skeptical anything deep-fried goes back too far as well since it's a colossal waste of oil
What does this mean?
On the subject of "how much cheese do you need to make a pizza" - in traditional styles, not all that much really. And with even less, just a sprinkling, it would still be recognisably the same dish.
And don’t forget that the inventor/father of the Hawaiian pizza (my favorite) was a Greek Canadian ;-)
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/27/world/europe/pizza-mural-...
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2023/jun/28/rightwingers-sa...