>From a passage of Virgil’s Aeneid, (book VII, v.128 sgg.) it is possible to understand the position of fruits and other products of the fields, on sacrificial breads that function as “tables”. This reminds us of the moment in which the Trojan heroes who had finished their meal of fruits, chose to eat the bread which they had used as containers (tables). This showed the realisation of the Virgilian Epos, where a prophecy had stated that the Trojans would find a new homeland when they “arrived on unknown beaches, finished all the food,” and their hunger made them “devour also the tables”.
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.
I think they were saying that the argument "fruit doesn't belong on pizza, thus pineapples don't belong on pizza" is invalid because most people agree that tomatoes go on pizza, and tomatoes are biologically fruits.
The very first sentence: Whilst it looks like a pizza, this image from a Pompeian painting from 2000 years ago obviously can't be, since some of the most characteristic ingredients are missing, namely tomatoes and mozzarella.
If we are to accept the madness of treating tomato as a fruit culinarily (although, your comment makes a strong argument for not doing so), would it be a jam, jelly, or…?
How many jams, jellies, marmalades, or confitures do you know of that contain vinegar, savory spices, and salt? In a recipe calling for jam, would you replace it with ketchup?
There are several chutneys that include vinegar. They aren't in the same category as you listed, but the parent included an ellipsis, which I'll include chutney under.
Some "fruit preserves" also use vinegars and other acids. Which leads to the Venn diagrams of the definitions of pickles, chutneys, and preserves (fruit) all have a massive overlap and ketchup is right there in the middle as pickled tomatoes, tomato chutney, or tomato preserve depending on how much you want to classify it is a fruit, vegetable, or "it doesn't matter". (I would at least argue that "preserve" is the more accurate fruit term over jam or jelly.)
The word Pizza is related to the word Pitta (some people argue is same word even).
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.
In Italy there's a bunch of things called "pizza" which are not round flat bread.
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.
I have in front of me a reprint of Pellegrino Artusi's famous "la Scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene" (1891). It has a recipe for "Pizza alla napoletana" (recipe #609) which is a shortcrust filled with a cream of "ricotta, sweet almonds, sugar, lemon peel or vanilla, milk", about which he comments "... a me sembra che questo riesca un dolce di gusto squisito" - a dessert of exquisite taste.
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."
> In Italy there's a bunch of things called "pizza" which are not round flat bread.
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" :)
If you look at historical sources, what is called pizza, in i.e. Scampi's "Opera Nova" is more of a pie, that may be open or closed, sweet or savoury, and may not even have flour dough, but say almond flour
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).
I just want to add this because i think it’s interesting, but the word pasqua (Easter) actually comes from Passover. Also Passover in Italian is Pasqua ebraica.
I know there are several versions of Pizza di Pasqua, but the one I'm more familiar with (and the one you link to) is made with cheese and is to be eaten on Easter breakfast with salami.
the one from my home town (Cerveteri, RM) is generally _mildly_ sweet with no cheese but eaten the same way on the same occasion :)
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
or from 'pinsa' (from the Latin verb 'pinsere' or from the verb 'pansere', 'to pound'), or from the Greek dish plakous or from the piada (or piadina), mentioned in Virgil's Aeneid
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]
That is pretty interesting. Khobz appears to be the word in the Arab speaking world. (can't think of a good name for this group).
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.
> A thing as basic as a bread staple to have different names in the same region seems very significant.
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.
I would think that also but I'm hung up on some details.
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 those interested in food and history, I would definitely recommend the Tasting History series on YouTube. Every episode, Max Miller makes a dish from a (sometimes vague) old recipe and does a short, relevant history lesson. E.g. he covers 500 year old proto-pizza here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6XvMKdD2tY&t=12s), medieval trenchers here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6XvMKdD2tY&t=12s), and lots of Roman recipes.
As a fellow fan I'll second that recommendation, and add the Townsends to the mix (https://www.youtube.com/@townsends). I got into them before Tasting History was around, and I feel like they complement each other in a lot of ways. The Townsend stuff also has a wonderful "living history" approach with their historical homestead, and it's always incredibly informative.
Like you I'm not affiliated with any of this, it's just a desire to get other people into something I love.
Pizza is one of those things I can't believe someone "invented". Flat bread must have been the first kind of bread: you just mix flour and water and heat it. Put something on that flat bread and eat it together and you have a "pizza" as much as this fresco is a "pizza".
IMHO it's more like a case of getting invented in many places because it still needs to be invented and people are inventing it in very different forms.
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.
Sure, due to the history of the region(which is old as the history of humanity and religions) it's really not easy to attribute anything to any particular civilisation. It's almost a sport to argue over the origin of the dish between Greeks, Turks and Arabs.
Indeed, lahmacun (lahmajoon) clearly comes from Arabic "lahm b ajin" (meat with bread) which is just another variation of the Mankoushe (منقوشة) - a flat bread with different toppings such as thyme, cheese and the famous meat variation.
> Flat bread must have been the first kind of bread: you just mix flour and water and heat it.
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.
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
But also the technique of leavening using natural yeast has been known for thousands of years; it pre-dates the Romans, who definitely used it in their regular bread.
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.
If you consider all flatbreads with toppings to be "pizza" then sure, that goes back basically forever.
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).
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
That doesn't make sense to me, unless you mean the 'normal' instant yeasts supermarkets sell only work with wheat? If yeast from natural exposure would work then surely one of the plethora commercial yeasts (or marketed for homebrew) would do the trick?
You can use commercial yeast, but it will never be as light as with sourdough fermentation, but very dense and “soggy”.
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.
I think/thought this thread had devolved into 'regular' loaf bread - indeed my pizza dough spends at least a day in the fridge after a slightly shorter time 'bulk' outside.
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?
No, I just meant to say sourdough fermentation is slower than a quick rise enabled by commercial yeast. Though I do ferment rye breads longer than wheat, and with a rye bread, you would also usually sour more of the bread, like up to 50% of total flour amount.
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.
Rye also has different trace minerals than eg wheat or barley. That's part of why rye ale tastes different from wheat beer tastes different from barley beer.
Pizza evolved in America. High gluten flour, tomatoes, and mozzarella. Don't confuse pizza with Italy.
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).
There also has to be an aspect of the price of mozzarella in the post WW2 boom in America or else we wouldn't use such an indulgent amount of cheese as standard.
Even Canadians I know will take home an American pizza because of the ridiculous amount of cheese we put on pizza compared to Canada.
Well, someone had to do it first, therefore "invented".
For the Greeks, bread was almost as separate from other foods as drinks were, so maybe the concept of baking that other food with dough is not that obvious.
It tastes so good so why isn't it available in multiple places then?
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?
Spiced flatbreads of the middle east are pretty damn good.
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.
I’m not sure if we can call “pizza with toppings other than the strictly Italian defaults” as “trendy” anymore. Most Swedish pizzerias will happily make you a banana curry pizza, and it’ll be the one of the standard topping options on the menu. Is it a trend if it’s normal?
I think we (humans) have been putting different things on bread for as long as we’ve had bread, like GP said.
I am not aware of any traditional German dish that resembles a pizza - and we definitely have a tradition of bread making. So apparently it was not obvious to everyone.
For me, it's astounding to witness such vibrant and colorful imagery from 2000 years ago. It forges an unexpected, yet profound, sense of connection to the past.
If you ever get the chance, I would highly recommend a visit to the National Archaeological Museum in Naples. There are many more vibrant images from Pompeii and Herculaneum preserved there. It's striking how lively some of the preserved images are. They really don't feel like they are over two thousand years old, and seeing them seriously deepened my appreciation for the civilisation of ancient Rome. It's a unique experience.
(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.)
Me too. I think when we think about times before 100 AD, we think of unpainted marble, columns, and those ancient red-and-black Greek vases. We don't really consider that their painters also knew about, y'know, realistic portraits and shading and that sort of thing, but they absolutely knew how to do those things: https://joyofmuseums.com/museums/europe/italy-museums/naples...
The painting was a fresco. There are a few ways to make frescos but the one employed here was likely buono fresco: colored pigment applied directly to wet plaster. In this way the painting becomes a physical part of the wall. In contrast, an oil painting is typically a thin layer of paint applied on top of another layer of paint on top of fabric.
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."
> Whilst it looks like a pizza, this image from a Pompeian painting from 2000 years ago obviously can't be, since some of the most characteristic ingredients are missing, namely tomatoes and mozzarella.
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.
They’d have to be missing tomatoes - they were unknown in Europe during Roman times because they’re native to the Americas. Tomato usage in Italian food is _relatively_ recent.
> Tomato usage in Italian food is _relatively_ recent.
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
I always chuckle when Italian-Americans refer to coming from "the old country". I know they mean "the country I was born in", but it sounds like Italy is older than the USA, when the USA is nearly a century older.
Commonly speaking you need either tomato sauce or mozzarella to call it a pizza. Without either one, it would be called “pizza pane” but that’s basically flatbread and to be eaten as bread. Pretty rare to find a “pizza” without some sort of sauce to make it wet.
Depends on ingredients but some do not go well with tomato sauce. For example pineapple[0] + blue cheese would be better on white base or no sauce at all than on tomato one.
Italian ortography is not as bad as the english one, but nonetheless is sometimes illogical.
We have a useless lettere 'q' which is pronounced like the the hard c.
'Q' is used only before 'u'.
So there some words that are written with "qu" and other with "cu" only for etymologyical reasons.
The number 4 is spelled 'quattro'.
The pizza with the four cheeses is 'quattro formaggi'.
To be picky, the general rule is that q goes before u only if u is followed by another vowel (qui, quo, qua), c is used in the other cases, but - of course - there are a few exceptions, the most common being "cui".
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.
Yes, besides the toppings, for which there is no rule (there is pizza bianca without tomato, and there is pizza marina without cheese), I believe everybody agrees that pizza dough needs to be made with yeast or sourdough. Flammkuchen dough has neither.
Upvoted simply because this has a picture of the (cough) pizza.
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.
> Systematic attempts to evolve a system of perspective are usually considered to have begun around the fifth century BC in the art of ancient Greece, as part of a developing interest in illusionism allied to theatrical scenery.
I was also surprised when I first saw a huge Roman fresco in person. It seems that the medieval times were indeed the dark times. I get the historical reasons and all that but it's almost laughable looking at this art in museums.
Not a Historian here, but I've heard that looking at Medieval art is more akin to looking at Anime art. Yes, the art is more stylized and cartoonish, but so are many art forms of today. I'm not certain of this, but I believe we have examples of 'classical'/realistic paintings from the medieval period/places alongside the stylized/cartoonish pictures too. As in, medieval art was a fad. Again, not a historian, someone please correct me!
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.
That's not too surprising, b/c you need massive amounts of cheese to make a pizza. This means a lot of milk and a lot of rennet. It just seems it'd be really extravagant in premodern times.
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
On the subject of food history... Taiwanese food is so recent as to be a study in nothing at all. Chinese did not invent steamed buns (they came from the Ottomans) and are the only civilization known to have lost the recipe for baklava. Ramen is Chinese and super modern and derives from US dumping wheat on postwar Japan as a staple. Pasta was exceptionally rare and reserved for the aristocrats in pre-modern Italy. Which begs the question: what did they eat? Probably meat, fish, bread, fruit and rice. Finally, rice noodles were popularised in Thailand by political machinations as a means to stave off hunger by preserving rice stocks.
On the subject of "massive amounts of cheese being really extravagant in premodern times", the Roman army ate a lot of "hard tack" cheese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecorino_Romano because it was durable and energy-dense. No doubt it was expensive in the way that the military often is, and did not make up all of the rations.
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.
Super interesting! Thank you for sharing. I don't really know much about cheesemaking but I assume the rennet would be the limiting factor. So it'd be eaten rarely.. maybe as often as meat products? That'd be my completely uneducated guess
I have also never made cheese, just looked at the recipe, but my understanding is that with rennet, a little goes a long way. The ingredient that gave me pause was the milk: i.e. start with 10 litres whole milk for a small batch of cheese. That's a bulk quantity of milk! I don't' live on a diary farm. But if you do, I suppose that's everyday.
Is pizza an innovation so meaningful we need to fight over who invented it? It’s flat bread with food on top heated. I’m sure it’s been a thing since day 2 of bread
Every time I see one of these I'm amazed at their skill, since high school gives students the impression nothing but simplistic medieval doodles existed until the rennaisance. It makes me wonder why museums reconstruct painted statuary with flat pastels like they were painted by a four year old.
I read this New York Times piece [1] and “submit[ted] the original source” per HN Guidelines. It’s a creative reading of the rules, but I think it works.
I once bought a pizza at a Pizzahut in Quito, Ecuador. I am pretty sure it tasted similar to the "first pizza"... I forget how the seasoning is called, but people in Ecuador put a strange herb on almost every food which I never really got the hang of, despite trying for at least 2 months. But that pizza was the worst experience, because I sort of expected oregano. Nope, nothing resembling what I knew as a pizza, so might as well have been the first pizza ever :-)
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.