Pizza Quiz
Tomatoes reached Italy long after flatbreads did, and were first feared as poisonous.
A pizza quiz with answers about where the dish came from and how it spread: the city that claims it, the toppings people argue over, the rules of a traditional oven and one very long-distance delivery.
Did you know?
- The word 'pizza' is more than a thousand years old. Its earliest known written use is in a Latin document from the year 997, from the town of Gaeta in central Italy, which lists twelve pizzas among the goods a tenant owed to the local bishop each Christmas.
- Pizza marinara contains no seafood at all. It is topped simply with tomato, garlic, oregano and oil. The name means 'in the sailors' style': the ingredients kept well on long voyages, and it was the meal sailors' families prepared for their return.
- The small plastic 'table' placed in the middle of a takeaway pizza has an inventor. Carmela Vitale of New York patented it in 1985 to stop the lid of the box from sagging onto the cheese. It is officially called a package saver.
From street food to world favourite
Flatbreads baked with oil and herbs are thousands of years old and were eaten all around the Mediterranean. What turned one of them into pizza was the tomato, which arrived from the Americas in the sixteenth century. Europeans at first grew it as an ornamental plant and suspected the fruit of being harmful. The poor of Naples began putting it on bread, and a new dish was born. The earliest toppings were garlic, lard and salt.
The pizzerias of Naples
For a long time pizza was sold in the street from copper tubs carried on the seller's head. One establishment in the old city began as a stand for street vendors in 1738 and became a pizzeria with tables in 1830; it is still open. Customers who could not pay at once could eat on credit under a system whose name meant roughly 'pay in eight days'.
Crossing the ocean
Emigrants from southern Italy took pizza to the Americas. The first licensed pizzeria in the United States opened in New York in 1905. The dish remained a local speciality of Italian neighbourhoods until the middle of the century, when it spread across the country and changed along the way, gaining thicker crusts, more cheese and a long list of new toppings. Frozen pizzas reached supermarkets in the 1950s and home delivery followed soon after.
Rules and variety
Today pizza exists in countless forms: rectangular slices sold by weight in Rome, thin and foldable in New York, baked in a deep pan elsewhere. Naples defends the original. An association founded there in 1984 certifies pizzerias worldwide that follow its rules, which specify the type of flour, the hours the dough must rest and even the maximum width of the finished pizza. Even so, the most popular choice worldwide remains a simple one: cheese and tomato.