8 ms·

About a year ago (maybe more?) I read an article from someone who'd found a medieval pizza recipe and wanted to try it out. Turns out that in the middle ages, p

by mcv 4y ago

About a year ago (maybe more?) I read an article from someone who'd found a medieval pizza recipe and wanted to try it out. Turns out that in the middle ages, pizza was just round bread. Not remotely resembling anything we today would consider pizza. Pizza with toppings was apparently invented after the unification of Italy in the 19th century, when someone created three flat pizzas with different sets of toppings. The most popular one was named after the new queen of Italy. And it was mostly Italian immigrants to the US who remembered this and started experimenting with more pizza styles. When they returned to Italy in WW2, they were surprised not to find any pizzas there, and local Italians quickly started making and inventing pizzas for these Americans.

WorldMaker 4y ago
Tomatoes didn't even exist at all in Italy until the "Columbian Exchange" in the 15th/16th Century. It shouldn't be a surprise at all that pizza in the middle ages was nothing like today's pizza.
- AlanYx 4y ago
  Tomatoes were also viewed with suspicion initially in Italy and used only ornamentally. It wasn't until the 18th century that tomatoes really became accepted in Italian cuisine.
  - TylerE 4y ago
    To this day there remains a sharp geographic gradient. Northern italians do not use many tomoatoes - practically never red sauces.
    - manuelmoreale 4y ago
      Do you have a source for this? Because my experience tells me quite the opposite.
    - alanfranz 4y ago
      North-East italian here. Never knew that.
  - fmajid 4y ago
    They are a member of the nightshade family after all, which includes many poisonous plants.
    - OkayPhysicist 4y ago
      They also were rather acidic compared to most foods people ate at the time. Acidity + pewter plates makes for a bad time.
      - fmajid 4y ago
        I doubt any but the very rich could afford pewter tableware.
        OkayPhysicist 4y ago
        Nobody but the very rich could afford tomatoes.
    - WorldMaker 4y ago
      Eggplant parm is such a fascinating dish for its mix of nightshades. Relatedly, I've known Americans that rate Italian-American restaurants on their eggplant parm as their preferred benchmark dish.
      - fmajid 4y ago
        I'd use risotto as the benchmark myself, but then again I loathe eggplant.
        WorldMaker 4y ago
        Reminds me of the risotto scene early in "The Big Night" (1996), which is also an interesting movie generally in the context of this discussion. The scene is about Italian immigrants trying to run a restaurant in America, and revolves around the kitchen dispute that happens when an American customer requests a side of spaghetti to go with the risotto.
- TylerE 4y ago
  I will die on that hill that an olive oil base is so superior that tomatoes do not belong on pizza. Especially these days where so many places "tomato" sauce is basically corn syrup and food coloring.
  - smcl 4y ago
    I am curious about it and I'm quite sure that it is great but on that hill you are fighting an ... err ... uphill battle. To flip a contemporary saying around "pizza is like sex, even if it's bad it's still good" :D
    - drewcoo 4y ago
      We all know "never get involved in a land war in Asia," but uphill battles against Italy are a problem, too. On pizza and sex . . . I'm not even going there. But try some oil.
      - smcl 4y ago
        Fair :)
  - switch007 4y ago
    Why not both! Olive and tomatoes (and salt) are a match made in heaven
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Too runny. Pizzas I use olive oil on always end up messy as hell. Tomato politely stays put under the cheese, any exposed sauce cooks and dries so it's not runny, and oils and greases from other sources tend to sit on top of it rather than displacing it and turning into a kind of icky liquid-fat blend. I still use it for certain pies, but would absolutely not rate it higher than tomato sauce for this purpose, overall.
  - nonethewiser 4y ago
    Where have you found this type of pizza?
- throw0101b 4y ago
  > Tomatoes didn't even exist at all in Italy until the "Columbian Exchange" in the 15th/16th Century. The same holds true across the Pacific: > Chili peppers spread to Asia through their introduction by Portuguese traders, who—aware of their trade value and resemblance to the spiciness of black pepper—promoted their commerce in the Asian spice trade routes.[10][14][15] They were introduced in India by the Portuguese towards the end of the 16th century.[16] In 21st-century Asian cuisine, chili peppers are commonly used across many regions.[17][18] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chili_pepper#Distribution_to_Asia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chili_pepper#Distribution_to_A... All the 'traditionally' hot dishes of India and Thailand that have chili peppers are post-1492. I think that after a few hundred years it's okay to call the cuisine 'traditional'. See Mann's book for some more on this: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1493:_Uncovering_the_New_World_Columbus_Created https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1493:_Uncovering_the_New_World...
  - ahzhou 4y ago
    I’ve always considered traditional food to be based on generation. If your grandparents grew up eating it, it’s traditional. Many foods comes from cultural cross-pollination.
    - firstlink 4y ago
      So microwave dinners are not only traditional, but even post-traditional now, where one's grandparents may consider them traditional but one oneself may not eat them?
      - mcv 4y ago
        Now I want to see a SciFi story where people are having a traditional microwave dinner.
rufus_foreman 4y ago
There's an article on the US origins of pizza at https://eccentricculinary.substack.com/p/pizza-isnt-italian https://eccentricculinary.substack.com/p/pizza-isnt-italian.
- ardit33 4y ago
  That article is very annoying as it is anchoring into silly technicalities. Yes, modern pizza came from Napoli and Italy (as a unified country) didn't even exist back then. But it is a complete sillyness not saying modern pizza is not Italian. "Let me repeat that: Pizza isn’t Italian. Pizza is Neapolitan. It’s a distinct speciality of Naples, developed at at time when Italy didn’t even exist as a nation. Saying pizza is Italian is like saying haggis is British. It might be technically true, but not really. "
  - calimoro78 4y ago
    Even in Italy we say Italian pizza and Neapolitan pizza are distinct concepts. Sicilian pizza too, to be clear. Italian pizza definitely comes from the export of Neapolitan pizza. Oh wait, then there is Roman-style pizza! It's very nuanced.
  - pazimzadeh 4y ago
    Some people think that it was Marco Polo's attempt to reconstruct a Chinese dish which led to a Neapolitan chef inventing pizza. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cong_you_bing#Chinese_legend_surrounding_the_invention_of_pizza https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cong_you_bing#Chinese_legend_s...
jaclaz 4y ago
Not really-really (pizza with the same ingredients existed before, and it was just renamed as Margherita): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29132535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29132535 What is true is that pizza was common only in the south of Italy, but what made it more common in the north (I would say much later, in the '60's) was the flux of people relocating from the south to the north in those years.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
wnevets 4y ago
My favorite example of this kind of thing is Chinese food in America. Its almost entirely an American invention.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- taeric 4y ago
  This generalizes more than you'd think. $(Foreign food) in $(Country) is largely an invention of $(Country) This has changed with modern travel. But it surprises me how much of what people believe about food is basically propaganda. At best.
- pcurve 4y ago
  lol... That's part true. But I wouldn't use "almost entirely"... Egg foo young, chow mein, fried rice, lo mein, and many other items are real Chinese dishes also found in China. Sure, ingredients have been localized... but no more so than localization that also take place elsewhere. :)
- csa 4y ago
  > My favorite example of this kind of thing is Chinese food in America. Its almost entirely an American invention. It depends on where you are and what you order. I live in California. We definitely have Americanized chinese food here, but we can also easily get authentic tasting: - dim sum of various types - mapo tofu - kungpao/gongbao chicken - twice cooked pork - scallion pancakes - Peking duck - noodles of various types The list could go on. I’ve also had some mind-blowingly good Cantonese food in NYC and Philly.
  - simonsarris 4y ago
    Even then, mapo and kungpao often contain a lot of chilis, which came from the Americas via the Portuguese. So it's not untouched by American (continent) influence, just much earlier.
  - wnevets 4y ago
    What percentage of this menu [1] would you say is tradition Chinese food? [1] https://www.restaurantji.com/pa/philadelphia/szechuan-garden-/ https://www.restaurantji.com/pa/philadelphia/szechuan-garden...
smcl 4y ago
The fact that food and drink evolve over time isn't too controversial. Beer, for example, evolved from having darker "ale" being more popular, to lighter lager/pilsner/ležák being the predominant type. I don't think this means the tomato-based modern pizza is less of a pizza, but that we should maybe more widely embrace the other types if we like them. To be honest I hadn't encountered a "pizza bianca" 'til I left the UK, and I would've taken some convincing it wasn't some weirdo UK thing if I encountered it there :D
- mcv 4y ago
  I suspect the evolution of beer is quite a bit more complex than that. Beers have been brewed from a wide variety of grains, and the colour was mostly determined by what exactly they used. Subtle mixes are a fairly recent thing, and while the mass market beers are usually pale, darker beers are still very popular too. > I don't think this means the tomato-based modern pizza is less of a pizza Quite the contrary, it's more of a pizza. I've seen pizza bianca in my supermarket. I do wonder, if you don't put tomato sauce on it, what's the fundamental difference between a pizza bianca and a flammkuchen?
  - smcl 4y ago
    It definitely is more complex than that but currently the most popular type of beer now was not the original beer (or was not among the first beers, certainly not until the 1800s) and is relatively modern.
- OkayPhysicist 4y ago
  The mediocre lager/pilsner dominance is pretty interesting, because it started off as the premium product. Then it got so popular it dominated the market, became the default, and then the older less-premium products ended up specializing into premium/luxury products. A similar thing happened to tequila as opposed to other mezcals.
  - smcl 4y ago
    Actually I didn't reference any decline in quality but in some locales, like Scotland where I'm from, you're absolutely right. Tennent's lager is now the most popular, it is not good. Where I am currently the most popular beer is between two lagers/ležáky - in western Czech Republic ("Bohemia" aka Čechy) the most popular beer is Pilsner Urquell, and in Moravia, where I live, it's Radegast - both higher quality beers. So it depends, but occasionally where I live allows me a very minor flex of "I can walk into most pubs and get spectacular ležák :)
dariusj18 4y ago
Heard a pretty good interview with this author https://modernistcuisine.com/books/modernist-pizza/ https://modernistcuisine.com/books/modernist-pizza/
A_D_E_P_T 4y ago
>Turns out that in the middle ages, pizza was just round bread. Not remotely resembling anything we today would consider pizza. They mention in the article that, etymologically, pizza may be derived from "pita" -- the still ubiquitous term for a round flatbread.
- jakupovic 4y ago
  Growing up 'pita' was rolled dough stuffed with various ingredients, like meat and onions or cheese, technically burek and sirnica or pita :). Pretty close geographically to Italy, couple hundred miles flying distance. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%B6rek https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%B6rek
bitwize 4y ago
I'm to understand as well that the basis for modern pizza was one created in the late 19th century, based on the colors of the new Italian flag: red (tomato sauce), white (cheese), and green (spinach, I believe).
- occamrazor 4y ago
  The green on pizza Margherita is basil.
- fsckboy 4y ago
  the green is basil, it was called the Margherita pizza after Queen Margherita. but we're talking about simple ingredients and flavors that were already being put together in various ways.
bigbillheck 4y ago
> Turns out that in the middle ages, pizza was just round bread. Not remotely resembling anything we today would consider pizza. "None pizza, left beef"?
cjpearson 4y ago
Was pizza popular in America prior to WW2? I recently read an article [0] from 1949 that was written as if most Americans wouldn't be familiar with it. Maybe it was a regional thing and those soldiers were from an immigrant neighborhood? [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1949/10/pizza/643861/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1949/10/pizza/6...
- nerdix 4y ago
  My dad was born in the 50s in a small southern town. He didnt learn about pizza until the 60s. My great uncle moved to Queens and came back home to visit with his kids one day. The kids asked my father "Where is the pizza place here?" to which my father replied: "What's pizza?". I think most immigrant origin foods start in a big city. Then migrates to smaller cities in the same region to other big cities across the country. Only after that will it go "nationwide". And it usually takes a popular chain to make it happen (Chinese being an exception. It was everywhere before Panda Express and Pf Chang's)

by mcv 4y ago

WorldMaker 4y ago

Tomatoes didn't even exist at all in Italy until the "Columbian Exchange" in the 15th/16th Century. It shouldn't be a surprise at all that pizza in the middle ages was nothing like today's pizza.

AlanYx 4y ago
Tomatoes were also viewed with suspicion initially in Italy and used only ornamentally. It wasn't until the 18th century that tomatoes really became accepted in Italian cuisine.
- TylerE 4y ago
  To this day there remains a sharp geographic gradient. Northern italians do not use many tomoatoes - practically never red sauces.
  - manuelmoreale 4y ago
    Do you have a source for this? Because my experience tells me quite the opposite.
  - alanfranz 4y ago
    North-East italian here. Never knew that.
- fmajid 4y ago
  They are a member of the nightshade family after all, which includes many poisonous plants.
  - OkayPhysicist 4y ago
    They also were rather acidic compared to most foods people ate at the time. Acidity + pewter plates makes for a bad time.
    - fmajid 4y ago
      I doubt any but the very rich could afford pewter tableware.
      - OkayPhysicist 4y ago
        Nobody but the very rich could afford tomatoes.
  - WorldMaker 4y ago
    Eggplant parm is such a fascinating dish for its mix of nightshades. Relatedly, I've known Americans that rate Italian-American restaurants on their eggplant parm as their preferred benchmark dish.
    - fmajid 4y ago
      I'd use risotto as the benchmark myself, but then again I loathe eggplant.
      - WorldMaker 4y ago
        Reminds me of the risotto scene early in "The Big Night" (1996), which is also an interesting movie generally in the context of this discussion. The scene is about Italian immigrants trying to run a restaurant in America, and revolves around the kitchen dispute that happens when an American customer requests a side of spaghetti to go with the risotto.
TylerE 4y ago
I will die on that hill that an olive oil base is so superior that tomatoes do not belong on pizza. Especially these days where so many places "tomato" sauce is basically corn syrup and food coloring.
- smcl 4y ago
  I am curious about it and I'm quite sure that it is great but on that hill you are fighting an ... err ... uphill battle. To flip a contemporary saying around "pizza is like sex, even if it's bad it's still good" :D
  - drewcoo 4y ago
    We all know "never get involved in a land war in Asia," but uphill battles against Italy are a problem, too. On pizza and sex . . . I'm not even going there. But try some oil.
    - smcl 4y ago
      Fair :)
- switch007 4y ago
  Why not both! Olive and tomatoes (and salt) are a match made in heaven
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Too runny. Pizzas I use olive oil on always end up messy as hell. Tomato politely stays put under the cheese, any exposed sauce cooks and dries so it's not runny, and oils and greases from other sources tend to sit on top of it rather than displacing it and turning into a kind of icky liquid-fat blend. I still use it for certain pies, but would absolutely not rate it higher than tomato sauce for this purpose, overall.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  Where have you found this type of pizza?
throw0101b 4y ago
> Tomatoes didn't even exist at all in Italy until the "Columbian Exchange" in the 15th/16th Century. The same holds true across the Pacific: > Chili peppers spread to Asia through their introduction by Portuguese traders, who—aware of their trade value and resemblance to the spiciness of black pepper—promoted their commerce in the Asian spice trade routes.[10][14][15] They were introduced in India by the Portuguese towards the end of the 16th century.[16] In 21st-century Asian cuisine, chili peppers are commonly used across many regions.[17][18] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chili_pepper#Distribution_to_Asia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chili_pepper#Distribution_to_A... All the 'traditionally' hot dishes of India and Thailand that have chili peppers are post-1492. I think that after a few hundred years it's okay to call the cuisine 'traditional'. See Mann's book for some more on this: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1493:_Uncovering_the_New_World_Columbus_Created https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1493:_Uncovering_the_New_World...
- ahzhou 4y ago
  I’ve always considered traditional food to be based on generation. If your grandparents grew up eating it, it’s traditional. Many foods comes from cultural cross-pollination.
  - firstlink 4y ago
    So microwave dinners are not only traditional, but even post-traditional now, where one's grandparents may consider them traditional but one oneself may not eat them?
    - mcv 4y ago
      Now I want to see a SciFi story where people are having a traditional microwave dinner.

rufus_foreman 4y ago

There's an article on the US origins of pizza at https://eccentricculinary.substack.com/p/pizza-isnt-italian https://eccentricculinary.substack.com/p/pizza-isnt-italian.

ardit33 4y ago
That article is very annoying as it is anchoring into silly technicalities. Yes, modern pizza came from Napoli and Italy (as a unified country) didn't even exist back then. But it is a complete sillyness not saying modern pizza is not Italian. "Let me repeat that: Pizza isn’t Italian. Pizza is Neapolitan. It’s a distinct speciality of Naples, developed at at time when Italy didn’t even exist as a nation. Saying pizza is Italian is like saying haggis is British. It might be technically true, but not really. "
- calimoro78 4y ago
  Even in Italy we say Italian pizza and Neapolitan pizza are distinct concepts. Sicilian pizza too, to be clear. Italian pizza definitely comes from the export of Neapolitan pizza. Oh wait, then there is Roman-style pizza! It's very nuanced.
- pazimzadeh 4y ago
  Some people think that it was Marco Polo's attempt to reconstruct a Chinese dish which led to a Neapolitan chef inventing pizza. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cong_you_bing#Chinese_legend_surrounding_the_invention_of_pizza https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cong_you_bing#Chinese_legend_s...

jaclaz 4y ago

Not really-really (pizza with the same ingredients existed before, and it was just renamed as Margherita): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29132535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29132535 What is true is that pizza was common only in the south of Italy, but what made it more common in the north (I would say much later, in the '60's) was the flux of people relocating from the south to the north in those years.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

wnevets 4y ago

My favorite example of this kind of thing is Chinese food in America. Its almost entirely an American invention.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
taeric 4y ago
This generalizes more than you'd think. $(Foreign food) in $(Country) is largely an invention of $(Country) This has changed with modern travel. But it surprises me how much of what people believe about food is basically propaganda. At best.
pcurve 4y ago
lol... That's part true. But I wouldn't use "almost entirely"... Egg foo young, chow mein, fried rice, lo mein, and many other items are real Chinese dishes also found in China. Sure, ingredients have been localized... but no more so than localization that also take place elsewhere. :)
csa 4y ago
> My favorite example of this kind of thing is Chinese food in America. Its almost entirely an American invention. It depends on where you are and what you order. I live in California. We definitely have Americanized chinese food here, but we can also easily get authentic tasting: - dim sum of various types - mapo tofu - kungpao/gongbao chicken - twice cooked pork - scallion pancakes - Peking duck - noodles of various types The list could go on. I’ve also had some mind-blowingly good Cantonese food in NYC and Philly.
- simonsarris 4y ago
  Even then, mapo and kungpao often contain a lot of chilis, which came from the Americas via the Portuguese. So it's not untouched by American (continent) influence, just much earlier.
- wnevets 4y ago
  What percentage of this menu [1] would you say is tradition Chinese food? [1] https://www.restaurantji.com/pa/philadelphia/szechuan-garden-/ https://www.restaurantji.com/pa/philadelphia/szechuan-garden...

smcl 4y ago

The fact that food and drink evolve over time isn't too controversial. Beer, for example, evolved from having darker "ale" being more popular, to lighter lager/pilsner/ležák being the predominant type. I don't think this means the tomato-based modern pizza is less of a pizza, but that we should maybe more widely embrace the other types if we like them. To be honest I hadn't encountered a "pizza bianca" 'til I left the UK, and I would've taken some convincing it wasn't some weirdo UK thing if I encountered it there :D

mcv 4y ago
I suspect the evolution of beer is quite a bit more complex than that. Beers have been brewed from a wide variety of grains, and the colour was mostly determined by what exactly they used. Subtle mixes are a fairly recent thing, and while the mass market beers are usually pale, darker beers are still very popular too. > I don't think this means the tomato-based modern pizza is less of a pizza Quite the contrary, it's more of a pizza. I've seen pizza bianca in my supermarket. I do wonder, if you don't put tomato sauce on it, what's the fundamental difference between a pizza bianca and a flammkuchen?
- smcl 4y ago
  It definitely is more complex than that but currently the most popular type of beer now was not the original beer (or was not among the first beers, certainly not until the 1800s) and is relatively modern.
OkayPhysicist 4y ago
The mediocre lager/pilsner dominance is pretty interesting, because it started off as the premium product. Then it got so popular it dominated the market, became the default, and then the older less-premium products ended up specializing into premium/luxury products. A similar thing happened to tequila as opposed to other mezcals.
- smcl 4y ago
  Actually I didn't reference any decline in quality but in some locales, like Scotland where I'm from, you're absolutely right. Tennent's lager is now the most popular, it is not good. Where I am currently the most popular beer is between two lagers/ležáky - in western Czech Republic ("Bohemia" aka Čechy) the most popular beer is Pilsner Urquell, and in Moravia, where I live, it's Radegast - both higher quality beers. So it depends, but occasionally where I live allows me a very minor flex of "I can walk into most pubs and get spectacular ležák :)

dariusj18 4y ago

Heard a pretty good interview with this author https://modernistcuisine.com/books/modernist-pizza/ https://modernistcuisine.com/books/modernist-pizza/

A_D_E_P_T 4y ago

>Turns out that in the middle ages, pizza was just round bread. Not remotely resembling anything we today would consider pizza. They mention in the article that, etymologically, pizza may be derived from "pita" -- the still ubiquitous term for a round flatbread.

jakupovic 4y ago
Growing up 'pita' was rolled dough stuffed with various ingredients, like meat and onions or cheese, technically burek and sirnica or pita :). Pretty close geographically to Italy, couple hundred miles flying distance. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%B6rek https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%B6rek

bitwize 4y ago

I'm to understand as well that the basis for modern pizza was one created in the late 19th century, based on the colors of the new Italian flag: red (tomato sauce), white (cheese), and green (spinach, I believe).

occamrazor 4y ago
The green on pizza Margherita is basil.
fsckboy 4y ago
the green is basil, it was called the Margherita pizza after Queen Margherita. but we're talking about simple ingredients and flavors that were already being put together in various ways.

bigbillheck 4y ago

> Turns out that in the middle ages, pizza was just round bread. Not remotely resembling anything we today would consider pizza. "None pizza, left beef"?

cjpearson 4y ago

Was pizza popular in America prior to WW2? I recently read an article [0] from 1949 that was written as if most Americans wouldn't be familiar with it. Maybe it was a regional thing and those soldiers were from an immigrant neighborhood? [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1949/10/pizza/643861/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1949/10/pizza/6...

nerdix 4y ago
My dad was born in the 50s in a small southern town. He didnt learn about pizza until the 60s. My great uncle moved to Queens and came back home to visit with his kids one day. The kids asked my father "Where is the pizza place here?" to which my father replied: "What's pizza?". I think most immigrant origin foods start in a big city. Then migrates to smaller cities in the same region to other big cities across the country. Only after that will it go "nationwide". And it usually takes a popular chain to make it happen (Chinese being an exception. It was everywhere before Panda Express and Pf Chang's)