Pizza

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For millennia, pizza, a food of various origins and multiple styles, has played an important role in the diet of those who inhabited the land now called Italy. Neolithic nomads, the Etruscans from the North, and the Greeks from southern regions were the three earliest societies to develop pizza prototypes, for example, focaccia. Each group made small adaptations that changed the original product into a slightly more refined dish.

As early as the Stone Age, Neolithic hunter-gatherer tribal groups foraged throughout what would become Italy for wild grains, among them wheat varieties such as emmer and einkorn, as well as barley. Commonly first soaked or boiled, these grains were mashed into pastes and cooked on hot stones over open fires.

Later, …show more content…

Probably not coincidentally, the Neapolitans were responsible for the addition of the ingredient most commonly associated with pizza today—the tomato.

No one is sure of the precise reason, but it took well over two centuries from the time the New World tomato was introduced to the continent of Europe during the Columbian food exchange for Neapolitans, and various other inhabitants of the peninsula, to begin consuming tomatoes in quantity.

There are several theories about why adoption of a fruit that has almost come to symbolize Italian cuisine took so long. One argues that it was because tomatoes were believed to be poisonous, another that the earliest tomatoes were inferior and, therefore, eaten only in modest amounts until quality improved enough to make the fruit genuinely popular. In the area of Naples, for example, a key moment appears to have come in the middle of the eighteenth century with the development of a pleasing, large, and sweet tomato. The fruit quickly became the mainstay of Neapolitan pizza …show more content…

In one version of the story, the queen (Marie Antoinette 's sister and the daughter of Empress Maria Teresa of Austria) is said to have been described by the king as having "common tastes," apparently a quality thought to explain her love of pizza, a dish of the people. It is, however, a measure of the confounding nature of pizza lore that in a variant of the story, it is the king who relishes pizza and the refined queen who does not understand his passion.

Whichever of their majesties was the real enthusiast, the object of desire was probably flavored with lard (a less expensive alternative to oil), tomatoes, salt, and sometimes tiny eels, anchovies, or sardines. Over time, craving for this pie became so great that either the king, to gratify his wife 's yearning, or the queen, to gratify the king 's hunger, had a pizza oven built at the Capodimonte palace, so they could make the dish at home, an act that brought the pie even more attention. Pizza became the fashion, and other nobles followed suit, building pizza ovens where they

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