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.
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.
> 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]
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'.
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?
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.
Standard basic common brands like Ragu and Prego have none of those. Tomatoes as the first ingredient, zero added sugar/syrup or food coloring.
I've never even heard of corn syrup or food coloring in tomato sauce. Do you have a source for that? Because I can't even see how it would make sense -- large cans of tomato purée are cheap enough already.
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.
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
Well, get decent tomatoes and make your own sauce.
Good quality tomato is just incredibile.
Here in Vancouver, Via tevere makes an shockingly good tomato sauce, to the point that I get only margherita as pizza, because the flavor is so intense.
That being said, neither of them is better than the other: provola, mushrooms and truffle on a white base will blow your mind.
It's just that here in north america, they have so little choice in toppings, everything is pepperoni, something spicy, chicken everywhere. Damn!
We don't put pineapple on pizzs either..
We do put nutella and apples, or nutella and strawberries on it, but it would be on "pizza bianca" (white pizza), which is not something you have in north America. It's similar to bread.
Most decent places will be able to do it. Somestime they call it something different, like "white sauce" (although that can mean something else, so ask first)
But, like, to give a national chain, you can get oil instead of sauce on any pizza at Mellow Mushroom.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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)
Chinese food is like a chameleon. It gets adapted very significantly to whatever local ingredients are available in a way many others don't, and also intentionally adjusted to local palates (I remember when the first Chinese restaurant in Oslo to serve "authentic" Sichuan cuisine in the late 90's -- the unimaginatively named Dinner in Stortingsgata for any Norwegians on here -- had to warn people to interpret the spice levels the way you would at an Indian restaurant, because most Norwegian Chinese restaurants before that made their food more bland to fit local preferences but the Indian restaurants didn't, so they became the benchmark)
New submission: The Ottomans invented the doner kebab, yet its fast-food variant served as a sandwich with sauce and extensive salad was invented by an ethnic Turk in Berlin. Berlin has, for historical reasons, a lot of ethnic Vietnamese inhabitants. Some of these have moved to Vietnam, taking with them the kebab, and inventing a variant called banh my doner kebab, which uses pork for the meat part, and adds sour vegetables and chili sauce.
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.
Yes, every city has Chinese restaurants with stylized Chinese food. It’s usually “Americanized”, but it can just as be as easily Thai-ized or Korean-ized or Japan-ised or whatever.
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
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?
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.
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.
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 :)
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).
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. "
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.
I'm skeptical whenever someone talks about traditional national food as opposed to traditional regional food. Seems like the further back you go, the less likely you are to find a unified food culture (or any culture really) across a nation of significant size. Even in the U.S., it's much more meaningful to talk about traditional midwest cuisine, or traditional southern cuisine, or traditional northeast cuisine than it is to talk about "traditional American food", because people in those places had access to different ingredients and had much more distinct cultures, until recently. This is a crude oversimplification, but in general I think cuisine can be either traditional, or national, but rarely both.
Even "traditional" vastly over simplifies things. Every traditional dish I've learned to cook from a variety of cuisines around the world have huge variation within the same village let alone a metro area or province.
Take borsch, for example: not only are there half a dozen or more national variations (Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, etc.) but each family has their own little trick for choosing the best meat and aromatics for the broth or ratios for and ways to caramelize the vegetables before throwing them in the pot. Most of these variations impart dramatic flavor differences when you compare them side by side. Availability of different varieties of vegetables and meat further creates a layer of regional differences
There's also an interesting phenomenon happening with the industrialization of international foods: the flavor of Thai food in the United States, for example, is dominated by the quality control of a few suppliers like Maesri and Aroy-d. Since ingredients like curry paste and coconut milk are so time consuming to make, everyone except the poorest of families fall back to the industrially produced ingredients from those suppliers, even in the home country. As the ingredients are globalized through popularity, the entire world market tends to settle on a small number of vendors, homogenizing the flavor of the dishes. There is still plenty of variation between families like the amount of fresh makrut leaves, galangal, or lemongrass and the different techniques to toast the curry paste and coconut milk and so on, but the base flavors are all very much the same.
While we're at that subject: The national administration of Thailand has for the last, well, more than twenty years, been very actively pushing a big gastrodiplomacy and economy program (with certifications/labels, loans/subsidies and lots of other measures) to expand the number of Thai restaurants all over the world… and to standardize the recipes that are considered traditional "Thai cuisine".
On the positive side, that does help to guarantee some quality standards… but on the negative side, it did also have a strong effect of homogenization and reduction of diversity within "Thai cuisine".
Completely agree. I am Indian and grew up in a rural area of a western state and I had never heard of chicken tikka masala or saag paneer or any of the typical Punjabi dishes you get in an Indian restaurant outside of India, until I was in my 20s when we moved to a large city.
Apple butter with fritters, biscuits and gravy, fried bologna, sugar cream pie. At state fairs: battered and fried everything: oreos, snickers, pickles, Twinkies…
“In the same house, in the 1980s, Nonna Fiore once served some English guests lasagna, per my uncle’s request. The lasagna was cooked from frozen, her story goes. Life was busy and, anyway, she had no qualms about serving a supermarket ready meal; people could only dream of such a luxury during the war. None of the guests suspected that she hadn’t made it from scratch and everyone was delighted, her Italian son included. She reminds me of this, then looks up at me and winks”.
Chinese food is an interesting case too. For one, it's a moving target. Stuff like mala xiang guo (dry hot pot), skewer hot pot, boba, and so on are all modern inventions. And of course, these modern inventions were borne out of experimentation and fun ideas. What if we took hot pot base and made a stir fry out of it? What if we took grilling skewers and dumped them in hot pot? What if we took tea and added tapioca pudding? So why bother with an obsession on authenticity that requires slavish reproduction of how things are done in the old country?
With that said, I do think there's something to be said about keeping the provenance of ingredients and flavor. I don't think you need to make mapo tofu exactly how they make it in Chengdu, but it might be good to understand the core ideas of mala (spicy-tingly flavor) or the importance of doubanjiang (fermented chili bean paste). Likewise there's something to be said about Italian food's focus on fresh, seasonal ingredients.
I always enjoy articles about commonly accepted traditions/facts that turn out to be relatively modern inventions. Similarly with the counterpart of ideas that seem like modern concepts, but have been practiced much further back than I had anticipated.
Yeah what we think of spicy Asian dishes existed some time after the 16th century as the Europeans brought chilies with them eastwards. Funny thing is that it did not really get broad adoption in Europe.
It was used to flavor drinks for hundreds/thousands of years in the Americas. But chocolate in a solid form suitable for baking is a European invention; and bars/pieces of chocolate that you would eat as a standalone item are from the UK, if I'm not mistaken.
This is an interesting read. I had read some of it before but not all of it.
This reminds me of the gongfu method of tea preparation, which acquired a sort of reputation of being the "authentic" means of tea making in certain circles but turns out to be fairly modern outside of a specific region of China.
“In religious studies and sociology, the pizza effect is the phenomenon of elements of a nation's or people's culture being transformed or at least more fully embraced elsewhere, then re-exported to their culture of origin”
synthesizing this article with one from history.com [1], it seems accurate to say the modern pizza was invented by italy but popularized by america.
key passage from history.com
===
Queen Margherita’s blessing could have been the start of an Italy-wide pizza craze. But pizza would remain little known in Italy beyond Naples’ borders until the 1940s.
An ocean away, though, immigrants to the United States from Naples were replicating their trusty, crusty pizzas in New York and other American cities, including Trenton, New Haven, Boston, Chicago and St. Louis. The Neapolitans were coming for factory jobs, as did millions of Europeans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; they weren’t seeking to make a culinary statement. But relatively quickly, the flavors and aromas of pizza began to intrigue non-Neapolitans and non-Italians.
I've had pizza in italy, it's very much each person orders their own and eats it with a knife and fork, it's a restaurant, experience. I think this meshes with something I've read, that there's an additional factor in the American links in these food chains, in that America into the 20th century was simultaneously "inventing" the trend toward portable foods, eating on the go, simple lunches. Many europeans even today take 2 hours for sitdown lunch (with sometimes 1/2 of that for a nap). The hot dog, the hamburger, the sandwich, etc. were not distinctly American, but eating them for lunch was. In the US the "work more and strive" culture looked for foods that were all-in-one, like slices of pizza, and the consumers were from a mix of origins so there was much less of a "it's not done this way" culture to fight against.
Italy has its share of fast food as well and pizza can be fast also. The famous Italian espresso was adopted by business trying to make and sell coffees faster. It’s a big country and 60 million people means a lot of ways to live in it.
i read that "espresso" actually means "made one at a time expressly for you" rather than "made at an express pace", but wiktionary has it as meaning "squeezed out"
the french baguette though is a modern invention designed to require less time to prepare because labor regulations cut baker's hours.
Espresso was first known as crema coffee. It was a sensation that people queued for rather than a mundane efficiency improvement or "fast foodification" of an existing product. The crema and intense flavour made it special.
I think it would be slower to prepare than pre-espresso cafes that batch brewed with multiple samovars.
i'm not saying Italy doesn't have fast food, or that food trends around the world don't influence each other, I'm saying at the time these questions were raised about "is pizza American or Italian?", fast food was an American export in the same way pasta was imported from Italy. The famous Italian Slow Food movement is explicitly making that claim.
Chilis in Indian and Chinese cousins did not arrive until the 16th century. Before that the spicy spice to use was black pepper which had enormous trade value.
"And his mission is to disrupt the foundations on which we Italians have built our famous, and famously inflexible, culinary culture"
My initial thought is considering how much modern Italian food was meant as a way to unite the various regions, I'm not sure he wants the outcome that may come with it. I always found it interesting to hear comments about people from other regions of Italy by commenting on how/what they eat. Like the rice eaters in the North.
"Fabio Parasecoli identifies and defines the phenomenon of “gastronativism,” the ideological use of food to advance ideas about who belongs to a community and who does not. As globalization and neoliberalism have transformed food systems, people have responded by seeking to return to their roots. Many have embraced local ingredients and notions of cultural heritage, but this impulse can play into the hands of nationalist and xenophobic political projects. Such movements draw on the strong emotions connected with eating to stoke resentment and contempt for other people and cultures."
why is italian supermarket wine in the 5 to 20 euro range so crappy? big mystery. by now i just won't buy it anymore. french, spanish, argentinian, south african, australian, ... but f italian wine.
also as a german i disregard italian coffee culture as a sharade. i want a proper cup of coffee to drink. not this tiny cup or variations on it. german style filter coffee, heck, even drip coffee, with a sip of milk and some sugar beats all that crafty nonsense any time of the day.
italian restaurants are usually always providing a bad experience. the waiters are stuck up or even down right arrogant pricks. any alternative is preferential.
italian olive oil. well-documented [1] trash. go for greek.
i give them pasta science, tomato sauce and i love making pizza socially.
> italian olive oil. well-documented [1] trash. go for greek
lol. If you consider greek oil a valid substitute then you've never tasted actual italian oil. Some exported italian oil was altered by mafia, so you stop using it altogether? What should we do with your cars after the diesel scandal then?
> italian restaurants are usually always providing a bad experience. the waiters are stuck up or even down right arrogant pricks. any alternative is preferential.
Tourist traps generally are. You have to be a pretty naive tourist to fall for it tho, there's plenty of great restaurants with great service.
German waiters on the other hand are almost always unfriendly and restaurants close way too early in the evening.
We do, I learned to enjoy the long, watery filter coffee Germans/Austrians like and I think italian espresso is overrated. Still espresso is my favorite after lunch, it works well as a digestive.
Try Ligurian or Tuscanian fresh olive oil if you can, you'll be surprised how different it is from the classic mediterranean oil and even from the mixed italian oil you find usually abroad.
