Pizza is surely one of the most beloved, best known, and most wide-spread Italian culinary creations. Its most basic variety, Pizza Margherita, created in Naples, is made with just a few quality ingredients: naturally leavened dough, stretched and spun into a circle, topped with San Marzano tomatoes, buffalo mozzarella, a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil, and baked in a wood-burning dome-shaped oven. In the culinary world, it is so important that in 2010 Neapolitan pizza got the designation of STG, Specialità Tradizionale Garantita. In 2017 the art of Neapolitan pizza-making was honored with UNESCO’s “intangible cultural heritage” status. To teach, promote, and preserve this culinary cultural treasure, in 1984 the VPN, Verace Pizza Napoletana, True Neapolitan Pizza Association was founded.
Pizza Margherita: Origins
Modern pizza can be traced to Naples in the early 19th century, its story really dates to the flatbreads of the ancient Etruscans who settled in Italy in the 8th Century BC. From archeological remains, we know that they made a sort of thick dough from ground grains, which was baked beneath hot ashes and then topped with seasoned oils, herbs, and other available ingredients. The Romans called these ash cakes, panus focus, which evolved into the Italian word, focaccia.
Even the word pizza is older than our concept of modern pizza. Until the 19th century, the word was used to refer to any round-shaped breads and desserts, like “pizza di Pasqua” (panettone-shaped cheesy Easter bread) and “pizza dolce teramana” (a round, layered sponge cake traditional in Abruzzo). In Pellegrino Artusi’s famed 1890s cookbook La Scienza in Cucina e l’Arte di Mangiar Bene (Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well) there are three recipes for pizza, all of them sweet. From at least the early 1500s, small round flatbreads topped with herbs and oil, referred to as pizza, were a popular street food in Naples. Later that century, after their introduction from the New World, tomatoes would top the pizza. This style was called pizza marinara (fisherman’s wife pizza), so named because it was traditionally prepared by a seaman’s wife upon his return from a fishing trip.
One popular account dates the invention of Pizza Margherita to 1889 and a Neapolitan pizza maker named Raffaele Esposito who wanted to honor the visit to Naples by Queen Margherita of Savoy and her husband, King Umberto I. The ingredients were to represent the colors of the Italian flag: red (tomatoes), white (mozzarella), and green (basil).
Pizza Margherita: Variations
There are substantial differences between northern & southern Italian pizza. While southern pizza has a soft pliable crust, in the north pizza crust is thin and crisp. Ovens, baking times, and temperatures differ too. In the south, pizza is cooked in hotter wood-burning ovens than the north’s electric ovens – about 500 degrees Celsius versus 320 degrees. It’s also cooked much more quickly – about 90 seconds in the south versus 5 minutes in the north. In Italy, and especially in the south, pizza is generally sold whole, in single-serving size, but in Rome and Sicily pizza al taglio (“by the cut”) is popular, baked in a sheet pan with a variety of toppings, and sold cut in long rectangles.
Pizza arrived in the New World with the influx of immigrants from southern Italy at the end of the 19th century and has become North America’s most popular Italian food. This import has evolved into hundreds of variations, like Chicago deep-dish pizza and Hawaiian pizza with pineapple and ham, which, notwithstanding the name, was actually invented by a Canadian. One notable difference between pizza in Italy and the rest of the world is how it’s eaten. In Italy with a fork and knife, and elsewhere more commonly out of the hand. In Italy you’d certainly never see what John Travolta’s character in Saturday Night Fever favored way of eating pizza: putting one slice onto another, creating a sort of pizza sandwich with the cheese in between.