Deep Dive
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Hello, my friends, Sakui here, and welcome back to the History of Everything podcast. Yes, my friends, hello, and welcome back. Today's episode, I thought, you know what? We need to go back to something a little bit original. We need to get back into something that we used to do oftentimes, which I need to do more of this. And that is the very weird, very hyper-specific things. In today's episode, what I'm talking about, as you can probably guess from the title here in the first place, is that we're going to be exploring the origin of pizza.
Yes, we are coming back to the history of food, which is something that personally, when I talk about this, I love. I find it something that is fascinating, especially with just how weird some of the background stories can be when it comes to all these different food items. Like after all, the first episode that I ever did on this podcast was the history of potatoes. And honestly, I don't know.
Just by virtue of sound quality, I genuinely think I might end up going back and redoing that episode at some point. And I don't mean like, oh, I'm going to redo it by going and modifying the audio because no, to be honest, considering everything that I did from the beginning with that, that whole thing is absolutely screwed. I probably need to do a straight up re-recording of it, which is just fine. I love it. That is still to this day my favorite episode. And that was the first one that I ever did. If you haven't gone back and listened to it,
feel free to go do so. I apologize for everything that you were going to hear in it. Either way, pizza.
We are going to be getting into that. But I did want to go ahead and say so from the very beginning that if you have not checked out any of the trips that we are leading, there is a lot of stuff that's happening. First off, we launched our Japan trip, which I gave a warning about that this last time that that was something that was going to happen and to look out for announcements. Yeah, the pre-sale of those tickets sold out within, well, instantly, pretty much, uh,
That led to only eight or nine spots being available when the trip actually launched, which caused the trip to sell out completely. Now we are working currently on seeing if we can get another trip up, but as it stands, there are still three spots left for Mongolia. So if you want to join us on an adventure to Mongolia and ride around in the desert and explore different kinds of environments, go to Ulamatar, see all the stuff with Genghis Khan, by all means, feel free to join us.
According to many different studies, pizza is the most popular food in the world. I don't think that anyone is really going to question me when I go ahead and say that. I mean, when I say that specifically talking about pizza, we're talking about it as a cooked food that is not made from just a singular ingredient or food stuff, if you will. Like if we were going to be talking about that, then easily the number one food in the world would be rice.
There is no question about it. Just considering how much of it is consumed in all the different variants, easily the number one thing would be rice. And then after that, we could make an argument that it would be bread. But at that point, I'm not even sure if it would be bread or if it would be corn, considering just how corn is used in so many different things. Really?
There is no single most popular food in the world because people have different tastes and preferences. Whether we're talking about pizza, which is, I would argue, the most global one and biggest one. When we go into Europe, you have Doner Kebab, which is one of the most popular things that we'll see in places like Germany. You have burgers, you have sushi, pretty much whatever it is, that is all kind of irrelevant. Because the one thing that I can say with
Quite a bit of certainty is that pizza is the item that is globally dominant, as there are variants for every single kind of taste that you can imagine all over the world. According to research, there are more than 2 billion people who enjoy pizza and are willing to have it at least once a month.
Now, that being said, there are many factors that determine which country loves a certain food more than another. But the thing that really stands out with the popularity of pizza is just how easy it is to get, how easy it is to consume, and the fact that there is just a ludicrous number of different combinations of toppings that could satisfy even the most picky of eaters or even
Even better, toppings that appeal to regions based on dietary preferences or limitations. If you have a place that is largely vegetarian, oh, hey, look, you can make a vegetarian pizza. Oh, do you have a place where it is more common to put reindeer meat on it? Like in the case of, you know, Sweden and Finland? Sure, you can do that. You can pretty much do whatever it is that you want to a pizza and someone in the world is going to enjoy it or, you know, be able to eat it at least.
While pizza today is something that is synonymous with, you know, Italian heritage or however you want to describe it, the history of pizza is in fact significantly older. It is something that began in antiquity as various different ancient cultures produced flatbreads with several toppings, which I mean, guys, when we go and talk about this, that's pretty much the basic idea of pizza, right? You have a flatbread, you put sauce on it, you cover that with different toppings and then boom, hey, you got pizza.
Or at least that's the gist of it. It's one of those things that ends up becoming a debate like, oh, is a hot dog a taco or a sandwich? Or there's a lot of different stuff that really goes into it. But that is, again, the basic gist of it. Modern pizza is made with a doughy base. It has tomato sauce and it's varieties of different topics. But the thing is, that did not come until much later in history.
Because of this, there are many different places or cuisines that like to claim pizza as being something that they, if not invented, helped to invent. Like in the Near East, when agriculture was still new, humans were figuring out that cooking a wet dough of roasted and ground cereals or unleavened bread on stone was a good way to actually get food that could last for a semi-decent amount of time and was easy to travel with.
Really, it was people like the ancient Egyptians, the ones who really discovered how to do so much more with bread and yeast, that that is where we get the beginning of the history of pizza.
Now, I know what you're saying. Guys, stack. What the hell are you talking about? The Egyptians and pizza. I know it's a stretch, but really we're talking about origins because this is the whole point with bread and you can't have pizza without bread. Because after leavening, the dough made of cracked or milled cereals becomes softer, lighter, tastier, easier to digest after cooking, which is where bread comes into play. And it's only because of that that we're then able to get things to put on bread. That's kind of the point.
In the 6th century BC, you had Persian soldiers that served under Darius the Great who would bake their own kind of flatbreads while they marched, or once they had settled down, I should say, with different toppings like cheese or dates or other dried fruits that they would put on top of it. And they would be able to make this, not over campfires, but it's reported that they would do so on top of their shields.
Now, that may sound a little bit surprising, and it's like, okay, well, here's the thing. You can put the shield, technically speaking, over a fire, which would allow it to cook if it was made of metal. Or you could kind of run into a scenario where if you are marching through a very hot climate in the Near East, in the basic desert, well, if your shield is metal, you could technically heat things up pretty effectively. Like, have you ever tried to cook an egg on a mailbox in Texas? Think of it like that, I guess.
In other places, like in ancient Greece, citizens would make flatbreads called blakas, on which you would have different flavored toppings and a variety of other things. Herbs, onion, cheese, garlic, pretty much whatever was local.
See, blakos often is translated as cheese pie, and it is something that is mentioned in many different texts, whether we're talking about religious texts or just general history when writing about things. A number of writers would talk about these. It was often found in rural areas and was made from rough or ready ingredients that you had on hand. If you were a farmer in ancient Greece, you had a series of these things and those would commonly be used.
The basic ingredients were, of course, you had cheese, honey, flour. And it was said that the Athenian ones were especially good due to the fact that they had Attic honey, like Attica being the region here where Athens was. And they had exceptionally good quality honey that was great for trading or, in this case, used for their cuisine. According to the varying different writings, these ingredients,
Not pizzas. These almost pastry-like substances would be drenched with melted honey, which would be gradually blended in to the pastry or flour, which would release its flavor. And while still hot, it would become almost inseparable and would then be filled with fresh goat's milk cheese.
These were apparently irresistible. At least when I talk about that, we're judging this by the words of a Greek rhetorician called Athenaeus, who quoted, when I saw the large, round, golden, sweet, soft child of Demeter arrive, a warm pluckus, just like absolutely enraptured by just how nice and delightful something like this was.
In another case, there are references in the early days to things that are similar to pizza like that in the Aeneid, which if you've ever gone and read that story, the in the Aeneid, you have the harpy queen that foretells a prophecy that the Trojans were not going to be able to find peace until they were forced by hunger to eat their tables. And this is something that is said in book three.
By the time you get around to book seven, you have Aeneas and his men who are served a meal that includes round cakes, which are topped with cooked vegetables. So it's basically a flat bread on top of which there are vegetables. And when they eat the bread, they realize that these are the tables that were prophesied by the Harpy Queen. Thus, their curse is broken. It's done. It's over. They are finally able to rest.
which is, you know, its own kind of little legendary tale, but that's how that arises. It is here then from the Aeneid that we finally get to Italy. But when I say that, we're not talking about modern day Italy. No, we are talking about Rome.
Here, peasants would knead milled wheat flour with water, herbs, salt. They would put this round loaf to cook on a hearth in hot ashes, and then from there, it became common to make discs of bread, which would be able to hold a variety of different sauces and dishes and tastes and different things, which...
would effectively create round pizzas, more or less. I say that, but of course, again, we're all being relative here. These are still very distantly related to the pizzas that we have here today. And in fact, many of the ingredients that we would talk about with modern pizzas are just completely absent. They are not here at all. These remain unknown until centuries later. Instead of sauces like tomato sauce, the big thing that was oftentimes used here at this time was fish paste.
Not fruit tomato based because again, that doesn't come into existence until the new world is discovered. Yes, my friends, fish sauce. This is Garum. I wanted to figure out a way to be able to incorporate the tale of Garum into something, but I didn't really have a way to do so because, well, it's a very specific thing of which there would be a lot of data to potentially talk about, but not necessarily as many things in fun stories.
Garum, for those of you that are unfamiliar, is a fish sauce. And now not much is necessarily known about the earliest fish sauces in Europe. The first recorded fish sauce was produced by ancient Greeks along the coastline of the Black Sea, at least the one that we are familiar with. The varying different abundant amounts of fish would allow significant Greek populations to produce huge amounts of fish sauces for trade, even as early as the 7th century BC.
Though they didn't call this garum, that was the Roman term, they called it garos, which was made by fermenting small fish with salt, which produced an amber-colored liquid. The Roman version that we're referring to here, a fish sauce, that was called garum, with many believing that it did originate from Greek garos, as contemporary accounts suggest that they had many similarities, like their smell, which is funny when we talk about this, since it's a little fermented fish, it was really strong,
But that still being said, they were probably composed of different kinds of fish and were manufactured in different ways. We don't quite know. This is just a thing that was fairly common around the Mediterranean was to have some kind of fish sauce. And once the Romans controlled literally everything around the Mediterranean, well, it was garum. That's it. That is the end of it. That is the fish sauce.
And when I say that, the Romans had a number of different varieties, including Garum, Liquimen, Maria, Alec, and Hamadian. And when I say that, it can be kind of hard to denote what exactly is what, as there were many different names that were used at the exact same time to describe the exact same thing.
Like liquamen, as an example, became a catch-all term for any fish sauce, though it was also the specific term for a fish sauce that was made from the whole fish. But it didn't matter necessarily because depending upon where you were, you would have people that would describe it in just any kind of term imaginable.
Like as an example, garum. Garum is the term that is often used to describe all Roman fish sauces, but that's not exactly correct. It may come from Greek garos, and garum began as an elite food made from fish blood that would be extremely expensive, but then there were much more low-quality versions, like liquamen. Liquamen would translate as liquid mixture, and Pliny, one of the famous writers that we mentioned about here many times, he described it as the sediment of garum.
It is believed that it had a lower status than pure garum and might have been used to extend salt supplies when, you know, oh, they have this very salty paste or liquid that is capable of being used rather. But their actual salt supplies, sea salt has run out.
The fish sauce industry was something called a liquiminarium, and a dealer in fish sauce was called a liquiminarius. Liquimin was something that was primarily made with small fish like sardines, but you could also use herring or eel or other kinds of things. You could pretty much use whatever was available, but there were some things that were more popular. On the other hand, you have the most expensive type, pymadion.
This was a type of garum that was reportedly the highest quality fish sauce, and therefore it was mostly the wealthy, well-to-do senatorial class and merchant class and others that would be able to get this. This was a blood sauce. And when I say that, I can't even know how I begin to describe it. It was made of the blood and guts of fish. That's the point.
Like broadly speaking, Roman fish sauces were made by mixing fish, blood, guts, and heads with large quantities of sea salt, but then certain mixtures could be more of one specific type, and that in and of itself made it more pure. So if it was just the blood and guts, that was a more pure, well-to-do thing versus the less desirable parts that would be mixed in.
Either way, the mixture of whatever it was would be left to ferment for varying amounts of time, and according to Pliny, garum could be made from pretty much any variety of fish or shellfish. You could have marina, mullet, oysters, sea urchin, tunny, and much more, although apparently the most popular one was mackerel. When I describe this,
There is not actually all that much that is known about how garum was used in the Roman world, at least in the early days, not until the first century AD through the works of people like Marcus Gavius Apicius. Now, Apicius was an individual who would record about 350 different recipes that used fish sauce. And when I describe this, fish sauce was added as an ingredient to just about every single kind of recipe you can imagine. It
It's like imagine opening up a baked goods recipe guide, like some kind of cookbook, and you see something that has eggs. I mean, pretty much everything should have eggs if you're talking about making something from scratch because you need a binding agent. Very few recipes would use that in comparison. Almost every single one would use an egg. In that same way, Romans would use garum.
It was added to an ingredient in just about every single recipe, including sweet dishes, savory dishes, anything you can imagine. It was put on bread with other ingredients as toppings on top of it, which on that note, does that last part sound familiar? Yeah, this, you could argue, was early Roman pizza. So, okay then, when did Italy switch from garum to tomatoes?
Well, the reality is it's not exactly clean or easy. It's not a simple transition for the story, which is unfortunate for me. I like when things are much cleaner because there is a huge gap between the fall of Rome and the arrival of tomatoes. Like we're talking a thousand years.
In Europe, the fall of the Roman Empire would gradually lead to heavier taxes on salt as the empire was broken up into much smaller states which would govern themselves. They were independent kingdoms and from there it was not nearly as easy to transport goods. Heavy taxes on salt would drive up the price of garum because, well, people wouldn't have access to this anymore.
Alongside this, an increase in pirate activity in the Mediterranean meant that traditional trade routes were no longer going to function to the same degree. Some areas would continue production of garum, at least for local consumption, but naturally this would be in much smaller amounts in southern parts of Italy. But in general, production all across the Mediterranean would disappear. You wouldn't really see fish sauces be a common trade good anymore, like it was back in the Roman days.
And that, at what point, we're talking about the 400s, 500s, and 600 AD. That is well before anything to do with modern pizza. You may wonder then, okay, well, where does that leave us with pizza then? Well, first off, the terminology. Funnily enough, in the 7th century AD, with the arrival of the Lombards in Italy, you now had a new Gothic Lombard word that began to circulate and become common.
sometimes written as pizza or pizze, which in German would mean bite. So literally a little food item. This is where arguably one of the first stages of the term begins, but it was not until around the year 1000 that the first official documents with the term pizza began to appear. Like as an example, there was one that was dated from 1195 and drawn up in Pene in the Abruzzo region, or those of the Roman Curia in 1300, where the term pizza
Pizzas or pizzi would refer to local baked goods that were made in the southern parts of the Italian peninsula, especially when talking about things that are made in Abruzzo. And that is what brings us to the crucial junction of our story, southern Italy. By the late medieval and early modern era,
Flatbreads, cakes, or pastries were fairly common things that were eaten with varieties of different toppings. You had cocas, galettes, etc. A lot of different types that were fairly common throughout the Mediterranean. But in 1535, in his description of ancient places of Naples, the poet and writer Benedetto de Falco would write that, quote, focaccia in Neapolitan is called pizza.
And that is the point in which we officially see, at least from the records that I find, that it became official for this area that this type of food is called pizza. Now, I'm going to explain a little bit of context here because a lot of people are probably going to be confused when I go and say that statement. Naples is something that is quite old and yet new. It has a very mixed history.
Founded around 600 BC as a Greek settlement, Naples in the 1700s and going into the early 1800s was a thriving waterfront city with a very distinct background.
It had been under the control of a variety of different powers, and under the Bourbon kings of France, Naples became one of the largest cities in Europe, growing extremely fast. Fueled by overseas trade, as well as a steady influx of peasants from the countryside who would come into the city in order to be able to find work, the population of Naples would boom from 200,000 in the year 1700 to almost 400,000 in 1748.
doubling in the span of just 50 years. As the urban economy struggled to keep pace with the number of people that were coming in, this meant that an increasing number of the city's people would fall into poverty. There wasn't really much for them to do, though they would go and try. And the closer that you got to the bay and the docks and the seaside, the denser the population became as many people would rely on little work that they could get from the area.
Much of their living was done outdoors, sometimes in homes that were little more than just a single room. Basic shacks. The most poor of these were known as the "Lazaroni" because they appeared extremely ragged and resembled that of Lazarus. Numbering around 50,000, these individuals would just scrape by barely as they would find work doing basic things such as serving as messengers, casual laborers, dock workers, porters to transport goods.
As you can imagine, these individuals were always trying to move, always trying to find work, always trying to do more. And in order to do that, these individuals required inexpensive food that could be consumed quickly as they were on the go.
Pizza, this being just flatbreads with various different toppings, eaten for any kind of meal, and sold by street vendors or informal restaurants, this is something that became the perfect kind of food to be consumed by the poor of Naples. As at the time, it would include a variety of different toppings that we actually know today. You'd have some that would have cheese, oil, anchovies, garlic, pretty much whatever was available on the market at the time. This is something that...
you would have, or, you know, if you could grow it in your own garden, or if you could catch it in the ocean that was thrown onto bread and then boom, there you go. Pizza.
The simplest of these things were topped with nothing more than garlic, fat like lard, and salt. That's pretty much it. But others would be a little bit more fancy. They would include cheeses that were made from varieties of milk, sometimes horse milk, small fish, basil, or other goods. Some later on even had tomatoes on top.
Which, when I say that, these were things that had only recently been introduced from the Americas and were still a little bit questionable. For those of you that remember the episode that I did very early on about the history of tomatoes and how weird that whole thing was, definitely go back and check that out, especially the whole thing with that and the potatoes. This is where this comes into play. So while they weren't necessarily popular and with how they were produced primarily focusing around the poor,
That was something that actually helped them. It was the fact that they were not popular. It was the fact that they were able to be produced so cheaply for a low price and made so quickly and given to people on the go. That is what made them so attractive to the poor of Naples.
When talking about things for tomatoes, tomatoes are a very interesting tidbit when it comes to Italy, because as I've talked about before, even though we think of all these Italian foods being tomato based. No, absolutely not. Tomatoes were way late in the game in the whole Italian food scene.
It is said that the tomato reached the kingdom of Naples and Sicily when it was part of the Spanish Empire, either through Pedro Alvarez de Toledo in the 16th century or Viceroy Manuel de Amat, who may have at some point gifted seeds to Neapolitans in the 1770s on behalf of the Viceroyalty of Peru. At some point, we don't know when, tomatoes began to become more common in the region as they grew relatively easily and were able to be consumed, sliced up, or mashed onto flatbreads.
Though, when I say that, we don't have an exact date. We don't. I wish I could point out something specific, but we don't. This is something that would continue with time, but it is not something that would ever really get popular. That's the thing that confuses a lot of people. They think, okay, these are pizzas, right? These are the early days. Surely these things must have been loved. No.
For a long time, pizzas were scorned by just about everyone that wasn't dirt poor in Naples. Food writers hated them. Anyone of any kind of social means looked down on them. These were a food that were associated with crushing poverty.
And as a result, they were frequently mocked for being disgusting, especially by any foreign visitors that went and saw it, which admittedly, I'm not a fan of anchovies myself. So if I actually went and saw a bunch of just like fish being smeared onto bread with garlic, I too would think exactly that. Yeah. So I can't really blame them. In 1831, Samuel Morse, who actually, if you know the term, Morse code, the inventor of the telegraph,
He would go and describe pizza as a, quote, species of the most nauseating cake, covered over with slices of pomodoro or tomatoes and sprinkled little fish and black pepper. And I know not what other ingredients. It altogether looks like a piece of bread that had been taken reeking out of the sewer. Yeah, not exactly a kind description. When the first cookbooks would appear later on in the 19th century, they ignored pizza altogether. It was not a part of Italian cuisine at all.
Even those that were dedicated to the cuisine of Naples completely ignored it. Like, this is not something that you would talk about. Despite the fact that the Lazzaroni, with time, would gradually lose the worst of their poverty. They would bring themselves a bit out of there, which allowed pizzas to develop a bit and saw the development of the first ever pizza restaurants rather than it just being a quick street food that you grabbed on the go. So, what happened?
Why did pizza get so popular? Well, there is a story about it. Unconfirmed, I will say. Again, unconfirmed. There is very little way to actually confirm the story is 100% true, but it is by far the most popular origin story for the spread of pizza popularity, even though the overwhelming majority of any kind of historians completely dismiss this. The reason being is because it is basically a royal fairy tale.
You see, prior to the 19th century, Italy was divided into numerous different independent states, which on that note, I absolutely have to do another episode on Italian unification. I also need to do one on German unification. In fact, I need to do probably a whole unification series on how different countries came into existence because that in and of itself would be something that's, you know what? No, I talked about in the beginning of this, and I know that I'm sidetracking here right now. Sorry for anyone that gets distracted.
I specifically said when I started things on TikTok that I wanted to do a history of the entire world. I need to do that. I definitely need to do that. But oh, dear God, the amount of countries in this world that will take actually years to produce. And I'm not sure how many people would actually enjoy it because that's tying something into geopolitics.
I'm going to post a thing on Instagram. If that's something that you want to see or if you want to see that series, maybe I will do that series as specifically a patron exclusive. So that on top of the other patron exclusives that I already put on there, which, by the way, is only a dollar a month. I will put that as well because that could be just some extra content that goes to people. I think that would be nice. Anyway, Italy, not Unify. Yes. Anyway.
After many centuries of being split into all these different entities, Italy would finally unify in 1861. And fast forward a bit of time, almost 30 years later, King Umberto I and Queen Margarita would visit Naples in 1889.
According to legend, the traveling pair were bored with their food. Their diet at the time was just French cuisine. That was what was popular at the point, and apparently they grew tired of this. So they asked for an assortment of pizzas from the city's Pizzeria Brandi. The variety the queen ended up enjoying the most was called Pizza Mozzarella, which was a pizza that was topped with soft white cheese, red tomatoes, and green basil, which is...
Honestly, when we go and describe that, if you know the colors of what Italy is, white, red, green, it's probably not a coincidence that, oh, the Queen's favorite pizza was the same colors as the Italian flag.
Yeah, it really does sound like the perfect patriotic origin of a food that the Italians would absolutely love to push. So according to legend, from then on, as the story goes, that particular topping combination was dubbed pizza margarita after the queen, and it became a very popular food throughout Italy. Or I say that, not exactly.
Pizza did spread in popularity. It did, but it didn't quite blow up. It just became more accepted. And when I talk about that, we're referring to Italy itself, not anywhere else. Pizza was still ignored or even looked down upon elsewhere. And that is not something that would change until America came onto the scene.
Now, I need to cover this in a future episode, I know, and I've mentioned that about multiple topics here so far. But the different waves of migration that came to the United States could easily be its own episode. For the purpose of our story today, we're going to be focusing primarily on the Italian one. You see, in the 1880s, Italian immigrants to the U.S. numbered around 300,000. By the 1890s, 600,000. A decade after that, 2,000,000.
By the year 1920, when immigration began to slow down, more than 4 million Italians had come to the United States. At the time, they were one of the largest groups, representing more than 10% of the nation's foreign-born population. A good percentage came from Italy's traditional poorer south.
Naples, and many of them would bring a taste of home with them, which would allow them to replicate their pizzas in places like New York and other American cities, such as Boston, Chicago, Trenton, New Haven, etc.
In fact, one of the first documented United States pizzerias was G. Lombardi's on Spring Street in Manhattan, which was licensed to sell pizza in 1905. Prior to that, if you bought the dish, it would almost be like a situation with a street vendor like what you see in Naples with them just selling pizzas or these flatbreads on the street to workers as they went to construction work or dock work, etc.,
Funnily enough, Lombardi's is still in operation today, and although it's not in the same location that it originally was, it reportedly has the same oven that it did originally, which is cool. I would actually like to go to that. It sounds nice. However, just like in Italy, the food was not that initially popular. Before the 1940s, in the United States, pizza consumption was pretty much limited to those that were Italian, like the Italian-Americans that were fresh off the boat.
From the 1930s onwards, though, a growing number of New Polesons would move north in search of work and would then take their cuisine with them as they moved west. And that is something that was only accelerated by World War II.
You see, my friends, when Allied soldiers went and invaded Italy in the Southern Operation in 1943 heading into 1944, they ended up really liking the pizza that they encountered there. And as a result, it seems that American soldiers, British soldiers, when they were moving through the area, they would order pizza. They would get it whenever they could. This is something that would help stimulate things.
But it was after the war when tourism became a larger factor for European growth and economic development, especially with the fact that Italy in many places were so wracked by war that the cost of everything for wealthier foreigners was so super cheap that this would allow pizza to consolidate its position as a truly Italian dish.
As tourists became increasingly more curious about Italian sites, food, ideas, etc., this meant that restaurants throughout the peninsula started offering more regional specialties that were specific to their area, including pizza.
Now, when I go and say that, the quality of these pizzas was not the same, of course, like not every restaurant was going to have a pizza oven or just know how to do it necessarily immediately. But with time, because of just how popular they were, pizzas would quickly spread throughout all of Italy. It's almost like that kind of scenario where you have a child that you are trying to take to a restaurant and you need to verify whether or not they have chicken nuggets first. So, yes, we'll go to a restaurant in Italy, but does it have pizza?
That is something that became a staple of even if they had their own regional specialties, they all kind of started to have pizza. And as this happened, it meant that new ingredients were being introduced in response to local tastes and higher prices were elevating the status of pizza as it appealed to more wealthy tourists. This was how it grew more in Italy, but it was in America that pizza would truly find its start.
As I had said, by the end of the 19th century, Italian immigrants had already reached the East Coast, and in 1905, the first pizzeria, Lombardi's, was opened in New York City. It wasn't too long after that, really within the next 30-40 years, that pizza became an American institution. It was spread across the country with urbanization as Italian immigrants would move from the East Coast heading further inland, which in turn allowed pizza to be adopted by locals of the area and...
be changed to their own form. It would be taken up and modernized or it would be changed to suit local tastes, identities, needs.
Shortly after the U.S. entered the Second World War, as an example, there was a Texan by the name of Ike Seawall who had attempted to attract new customers to his newly opened Chicago pizzeria by offering a bigger, heartier version of pizza, something that was complete with a deep, thick crust and rich toppings with cheese at the bottom and then just a huge amount of tomato sauce that was put on top of it.
This was the Chicago deep dish style pizza, something that, again, when you go and talk about things with pizzas around all the United States, there's a lot of contention as to what exactly is the best. You had others that were developed in different places, like the Rocky Mountain Pie, which was more of a dessert. You had the Hawaiian style pizza that was topped with ham and pineapple.
There were thousands, thousands of different variants that were made all over the United States. Really, it just depends upon what it is that you would like. And hey, lo and behold, you'll find a pizza for you, at least fresh ones. From the 1950s onwards, things began to change. As the economy of the United States exploded and technology changed, this allowed pizza to adapt and become even more popular. Which when I say that, there are two things that really need to be mentioned.
The first thing is that pizza became more domestic. As people had more money and were able to get more appliances, this meant that they were able to get fridges and freezers, which in turn allowed them to preserve their food. Not only did it allow you to preserve your basic groceries, your fruits, your vegetables, your basic meats, etc., but it meant that when you got food fully cooked and already prepared, you could refrigerate it and then prepare it later again much more easily.
Convenience foods such as pizza became significantly more popular, especially after the development of frozen pizza, something that was designed to be taken home and then cooked whenever it is that you wanted it without needing to actually go out to a restaurant.
This is where the popularity of tomato sauce became so incredibly important. Because when you had a pizza that was covered with a smooth tomato paste and it was frozen, when it heated up, it meant that the dough was not going to dry out. This would allow it to stay fresh, moist, and soft, good, along with the ability to cover it then in different cheeses, toppings, etc. that would melt into it.
The second change was how pizza became significantly more commercialized. With the developments of the suburban living standards, with the greater adoption of cars, motorcycles, highway systems, and more, it became possible to deliver fresh food to customers' doors in rapid order, which in turn allowed different restaurants to begin taking delivery orders.
As an example, in 1960, this is where we would see the foundation of Domino's, which would grow to dominate the market in the early days and age. They and their competitors would gradually expand abroad. So at that point, there would be hardly a city anywhere around the United States where you could not have pizza delivered to your house. At the same time, even though all these new popular commercial variants were coming into existence, this did something else.
It also made pizzas more standardized. And yet, it made them different too. Now, it's going to sound weird, but there's a very clear reason for that. The basic idea of the pizza became fairly standard. You'd have a dough base, which would be topped with tomato sauce and cheese. And that was in almost every pizza, not everything, but almost every pizza, that is how they would operate. But as pizza became more popular...
New variants were needed to appeal to customers' desires for new tastes and experiences, as well as local tastes and restrictions, which would allow more variants to end up occurring with that same base still existing. As just one example, you have spicy Indian pizza that would be available in Poland, or you could have the Mexican-style pizza that would feature ranch and corn. There's so many different ones that you could have. And so that, my friends, is really how pizza developed.
The thing is, the way it became so incredibly popular is because of that mix of standardization and yet ability to adapt. Today's pizzas are not the same that was used by the Lazzaroni, not at all. And many people who perhaps are more specific and pure in their taste for pizza do not enjoy the variants that have been created, but I find them to be rather fascinating.
Pizza is something that is still recognizable as pizza, even after all these centuries. The thing is, depending upon where it is that you go in the world, you will find different variants that will suit your tastes or needs or anything. And I know it's random, especially if you're talking about this at the end. This is not an advertisement for pizza. I'm not saying, hey guys, go now to this pizza place. Not anything like that. I just find it fascinating.
Because no matter where you are in the world, it seems you will find a variant for a local people, a culture, an ability for them to represent themselves through bread, some kind of sauce and toppings that are on top of it. And all of it in the modern day commercial age is labeled pizza. That, my friends, is the end of today's episode. Everyone, thank you so much for listening. I appreciate all of you. I will see you all here next time. Goodbye and thank you.
The French Revolution set Europe ablaze. It was an age of enlightenment and progress, but also of tyranny and oppression. It was an age of glory and an age of tragedy. One man stood above it all. This was the Age of Napoleon. I'm Everett Rummage, host of the Age of Napoleon podcast. Join me as I examine the life and times of one of the most fascinating and enigmatic characters in modern history. Look for the Age of Napoleon wherever you find your podcasts.