A Slice of History

by Sarah Baird | Photo by Romney Caruso

For anyone who’s ever taken a mythology course, it becomes very clear, very quickly just how much the stories of Greco-Roman tradition used food as a means of storytelling.

There’s Persephone, the kidnapped goddess of the underworld, who eats pomegranate seeds and dooms the earth to experience winter each year. There’s the infamously decadent (and lewd) feast of Trimalchio in Petronius’ Satyricon, where — among other things — guests are implored to eat from “a circular tray around which were displayed the signs of the zodiac, and upon each sign the caterer had placed the food best in keeping with it…a piece of beef on Taurus, kidneys and lamb’s fry on Gemini…a small seafish on Scorpio, a bull’s eye on Sagittarius, a sea lobster on Capricorn, a goose on Aquarius and two mullets on Pisces.”

But it was in translating a passage from the epic poem The Aeneid during my years as a Latin buff that I stumbled across a dish that seemed, well, curiously modern. Our hero Aeneas and his men devour a form of flatbread piled high with toppings (without realizing the meal had been cursed earlier in their journey by Celaeno, the Harpy queen):

“Thin loaves of altar-bread Along the sward to bear their meats were laid (Such was the will of Jove), and wilding fruits Rose heaping high, with Ceres’ gift below.”

And while this particular version of the dish didn’t work out quite so well for the wandering Trojans of ancient lore, it’s ended up serving us all pretty well since Virgil penned the tale between 29 and 19 BC. That’s right: I’m talking about pizza.

In the United States today, Americans eat roughly 350 slices of pizza per second (yes, really), scarfing down a dish that hasn’t changed all that much in its basic concept since Persian soldiers serving under Darius the Great baked flatbreads with cheese and dates on their battle shields in the 6th century BC.

The Greeks, Romans, Egyptians and Babylonians were all exceptional bakers, and used their dough-driven skills to create flatbreads that were cooked in outdoor ovens and then topped with herbs and oils. The Greek historian Herodotus noted that, in most Egyptian households, the fermented dough used for baking was treated with great reverence, and also included several recipes for flatbreads — which would eventually come to be referred to as “focaccia” in the Middle Ages —throughout his works. A first-generation pizza oven was even unearthed from the ruins of Pompeii (the ancient city destroyed by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD) after having been preserved for centuries in volcanic ash.

The word pizza most likely derives from the Latin pix, meaning “pitch,” which began as an adjective for describing how wellcooked the flatbread base (the “pitch” of its color) was in the oven. Strangely enough, over the past few years, this Roman proto-pizza has come full circle, with pizza places across the world opening specifically to serve what they call pinsa: a style of pie made using the more traditional Roman method for dough. Hailed as a healthier option and made using a technique and ingredients that produce a lighter, fluffier base for toppings (thanks to the inclusion of a spelt or soy flour), this everything-old-is-new-again pizza style has even reached as far as Japan. “Widely considered to be the original pizza from ancient Roman times, the pinsa has become a hot topic lately with pinsa pizzerias popping up all around Europe,” Time Out Tokyo wrote of a recently opened pinsa restaurant. “Think of it in terms of Sean Connery — every James Bond that came after him has paled in comparison!”

The cyclical nature of human tastes aside, what’s perhaps most telling about pizza’s inherent appeal as a dish — then, now and every time in between — is that it’s always been a meal of the people, even long before it became synonymous with American fast-casual comfort. While more formal dining settings require a host of tools and trappings for the enjoyment of a meal — plates and glasses, at least, plus a table on which to serve the dishes, and chairs for sitting — a large part of pizza’s appeal throughout history has been its inherent mobility and ease of enjoyment. Chicago deep dish pizza aside, it’s hard to imagine someone slicing up their pizza slice with a fork and knife and not being met with a few painful winces.

“We might call ancient flatbreads ‘pizzas’ because they embodied the basic concept of having one’s meal on an edible plate or using one’s bread as the plate and utensil,” writes Carol Helstosky in her 2008 book, Pizza: A History. “The universality of flatbread-as-plate suggests that convenience, perhaps for the sake of mobility or out of economic necessity, shaped ancient eating habits…. We might also describe these ancient flatbreads as the precursors to pizza because they were more than bread: topped with herbs or mushrooms, or a sauce, they constituted an entire meal.”

Pizza is inextricably linked to a tale of bothconvenience and economic necessity, particularly when it comes to Naples, the birthplace of the dish as we recognize it today. By the 18th century, the bustling seaside Italian city was packed with a working class in need of thrifty, on-the-go meals. Street vendors with woodfired ovens were more than happy to oblige in the form of a flatbread topped with herbs, lard and salt (similar to a “white pizza”) that could be easily folded in one hand for chowing down while hustling back to work. Pizza quickly became the omnipresent weekday meal of the working class.

Where’s the tomato sauce, you may ask? Even though tomatoes — a “New World” food — first made their way to Italy in 1519, it wasn’t until a couple of decades later that Italians were wholly convinced that tomatoes weren’t poisonous. (Plants from the nightshade family, which also include eggplant and tobacco, had a particularly bad reputation back in the day as being toxic.) But by 1830, Naples had not only embraced the tomato, but pizza culture itself, wholeheartedly. Several pizzerias, including the legendary Antica Pizzeria Port’Alba, had opened across the city, even introducing chairs for patrons to sit down in while they enjoyed their wood-fired slices.

In his work Le Corricolo, French writer Alexandre Dumas recorded just how prevalent pizza was among the working class of Naples — particularly during the winter — and recalls the several options for toppings that were popular during the time. “In Naples,” he writes, “pizza is flavored with oil, lard, tallow, cheese, tomato, or anchovies.”

While pizza certainly became a draw for tourists to Naples throughout the 1800s (as well as a favorite of Spanish soldiers), pizza stayed fairly localized in the city until royalty came calling. In 1889, Raffaele Esposito — the most famous pizza maker in all of Naples and owner of Antica Pizzeria Port’Alba — was summoned to make pizzas for King Umberto and Queen Margherita of Italy while they were staying at the Royal Palace of Capodimonte in Naples. He (and his wife, Rosa Brandi) made three different types of pies: one with lardo, cheese and basil; one with garlic, oil, oregano and tomato; and a final pizza topped with tomatoes, mozzarella and basil — the colors of the Italian flag. The queen was so enraptured with the final pie that it is said Esposito named it after her: pizza Margherita.

Of course, Esposito didn’t invent the pizza specifically for the queen — that part’s a false history. What we now know as the pizza Margherita had been produced at least as far back as 1796, and even described by historian Francesco De Bourcard in an 1866 account of the most common pizzas of the day: “The most ordinary pizzas, called coll’aglio e l’olio (with garlic and oil), are dressed with oil…as well as salt, oregano and garlic cloves shredded minutely. Others are covered with grated cheese and dressed with lard, and then they put over few leaves of basil. Over the firsts is often added some small seafish; on the seconds some thin slices of mozzarella. Sometimes they use slices of prosciutto...”

Today, Neapolitan pizza is on UNESCO’s list of Intangible Cultural Heritage items, and the construction of “authentic” versions of the dish is policed by the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana. Among other super-strict guidelines, true Neapolitan pizza dough must be formed by hand without the help of a rolling pin or machine and baked for 60 to 90 seconds in a 905-degree wood-fire oven.

And while Queen Margherita didn’t exactly get a pizza made just for her upper-crust taste buds, her affection for pizza saw its popularity flood every region of Italy in a fever pitch for an affordable working-class food that had suddenly received the royal stamp of approval.

Seemingly overnight, almost every region of Italy was eager to offer their own spin on pizza, establishing regional traditions that continue to this day. In Rome, there’s pizza al taglio (“by the cut”), where pizzas bake in a large rectangular pan and are then sliced into whatever size the customer desires. (Much like in a fancy cheese shop, the pizza is weighed, paid for according to weight, and eaten as a to-go snack.) There’s also pizza Romana tonda in Rome — a round pie with a particularly crispy, thin crust — as well as an eclectic mix of pizzas categorized according to size or presentation, like pizza a metro (pizza by the meter) and pizza in pala (pizza served on a wooden paddle).

And then there’s Sicilian pizza, which is known for its doughy, dense crust that’s closer to focaccia than the flexible-yet-thin Neapolitan style. In addition to its distinguishable bready base, this type of pizza is perhaps most recognizable for its emphasis on locally sourced toppings: lots of anchovies, strong sheep’s milk cheese like caciocavallo and a smattering of bread crumbs make frequent appearances on Sicilian pies.

But even within the Sicilian region, there are hyperlocal differences in pizza styles. In the province of Catania, scacciata satisfies pizza cravings with a thin dough that has been folded over on itself several times and stuffed with a certain pairing of acceptable ingredients (ricotta cheese and onion or tomato and eggplant, for example) to form a loaf-like treat that some refer to as “lasagna bread.” In the province of Messina, a local cheese known as toma and endive reign supreme as toppings. And in the province of Siracusa, there’s the pizzolo, which involves stacking two fairly plain, herb-dusted pizzas atop one another and then stuffing a filling between the two.

This kind of malleability can also be seen in how pizza has taken on numerous forms in cities across the United States, bringing with it a heap of contentiousness and some hotly contested rivalries. There are the thin, Neapolitan-influenced pies of the Northeast-at-large: from New York City’s “by the slice” culture, to New Haven’s coal-fired “apizza,” to clam-topped pies. There’s the almost casserole-like deep dish pizzas of Chicago — an All-American construction if ever there was one. Detroit has its own chewy-meets-crispy spin on pizza crust, while St. Louis pledges pizza allegiance to a crust that’s cracker-thin.

Above all else, pizza’s simplicity and true timelessness are qualities that make it infinitely open tointerpretation. And whether you’re eating at the latest high-end pizzeria with a gorgeously tiled, wood-fired pizza oven, or ordering delivery from an old standby neighborhood joint while watching Netflix in your sweatpants, pizza will continue to strike the perfect balance between being an old friend and an ever-evolving form of ovenbaked, edible art.