Simple, with tomato and oregano, or overloaded with ingredients, egg and ham, vegetables, seafood. Cooked in traditional wood-fired oven or deep-frozen and heated in the microwave. A cut or round, to take away or consumed in old historic rooms with tablecloths of paper. Italian par excellence. Enough to keep his name around the world, from America to Japan, there is only one way to pronounce it: pizza. Born as poor food, built using a few basic ingredients, the pizza now has many variants, and such as to constitute a full meal and perfectly balanced. The true ambassador to the world has a long history, which starts from the buns spelled in pre-Christian times and has crossed continents, has withstood wars and invasions of gourmet ethnic cuisine, and now has conquered peacefully the world.

History

An ancestor of the pizza was probably already widespread in the Etruscan period. The Romans used to prepare cakes spelled libum calls, but already Virgil, the author of the Aeneid, describes the preparation of round flat bread made with wheat flour, water, herbs and salt. Around 1500 in Venice was preparing a thin batter of eggs, butter and sugar that was baked in the oven. With the discovery of food were imported to Europe until then completely unknown in the old continent, including the tomato, destined to become a key ingredient for pizza, only since 1700, in Naples. Until that time was widespread in southern Italy at least since 1600, a cake of wheat flour seasoned with various ingredients such as lard, replaced olive oil, cheese and fresh herbs like basil and oregano. Pizza with basil was also called pizza mastunicola, and, together with the pizza cicinielli, small fish, is the oldest of which is passed down the recipe. The second half of ’700, in addition to tomatoes, the Neapolitan pizza also start adding the mozzarella di bufala. The first recipe for Neapolitan pizza almost identical to what is known today began in mid-1800.

The pizza is mentioned in countless songs, poems and novels, from ancient times. If Virgil in one of his works quoted the preparation techniques of the ancestor of the Roman pizza, one of the first “literary apparitions” of the current version of the pizza goes back to the seventeenth century, a work in Naples, the Cunto de li Cunti, which collects various stories, including one entitled “The two pizzelle”, which speaks of a food made from a disc of dough with a filling. Dumas, a celebrated novelist of “The Three Musketeers”, but also a prolific author of travel literature, devoted to pizza notes, accurate and acute observations. In addition to listing the types of pizza in vogue in his time: the oil, the bacon, the pork fat, cheese, tomatoes, and fish. In “Rituals and traditions of Naples” De Boucard, the mid-nineteenth century, we read the first recipe for pizza and citing varieties in use: the one with garlic, olive oil, oregano and salt; with grated cheese, lard, basil with fish minute with mozzarella, ham, clams, and tomato.

{ 3 comments }