Origins
Pizza is a traditional cooking recipe of Italian cuisine, originating in Naples, based on a flatbread of bread dough, topped with various mixtures of ingredients (tomato sauce, sun-dried tomatoes, vegetables, cheese, cold cuts, olives, olive oil, olive…) and baked.
An emblematic dish of Italian culture, and of fast food around the world, it is available in many variations. « The art of making traditional artisan Neapolitan pizzas by Neapolitan pizza makers » has been listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2017.
Pizza Bianca / Pizza Rossa
Until the introduction of the tomato (one of the main ingredients of today’s pizza) in Europe and its use in cooking at the end of the 17th century, the « pizza » of that time had no relation to that of today: it came in different forms and different types, the variety of which was not limited to fillings, but extended to cooking methods (oven or pan-fried in oil).
The pizzella, a kind of bread for keeping, appears in the collection of Neapolitan tales Lo Cunto de li cunti by Giambattista Basile, published in 1634. This text specifies that it comes in sweet pizzella reserved for the court and in savory pizzella, a kind outdoor snacks, invigorating, ambulatory hunger-suppressing reserved for the little people.
The tomato was introduced in Europe at the beginning of the 16th century by the Spaniards, first in Spain in 1523, then in 1544 in Italy, by Naples, then possession of the Spanish crown.
The tomato being of the same family as the poisonous belladonna, its fruits were not first considered edible (the plant was mainly used as an ornamental plant and the fruit was used in medicine) before the beginning of the 18th century in Italy, if although initially there was only pizza bianca (“white pizza”), a flattened dough decorated with “miscellaneous things” (oil or lard, herbs) which became a plebeian dish. It has a filling and a price that vary according to market availability.
The pizza bianca is gradually dethroned by the pizza rossa (« red pizza »), in part, because the first, « too close to the many cousins that Italy has, does not allow Naples to extend its influence in the integrating into the registers of regional cuisine through the mediation of the red marker”. But it is more probably to the episode of the creation of the Margherita pizza (pizza in the colors of Italy, created in homage to Queen Margaret of Savoy, during a trip to Naples) that we owe the explanation for this substitution.
The red pizza is taken in a new process, with the massive Italian emigration (26 million Italians are expatriated between 1850 and 1900), and becomes a true symbolic standard of their nation.
Learn more :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomato
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza
