SLICES OF HISTORY: The untold journey of Pizza

Raqib Zaman :

Nowadays, pizzas are one of the favourite dishes of foodies around the world. From cosy home kitchens to fancy restaurants and late-night takeout boxes, this cheesy, savoury delight has found a place in the hearts of foodies all over the world. But have you ever wondered where it all began? Let us take a step back to explore the history behind this world-renowned dish.

The ancestor of pizza was actually a peasant dish in Naples, a region located in southern Italy. No one knows when it really first came into existence. In historical accounts, it’s been described as a street food that became popular among the working-class Neapolitans in the early 19th century.

This primitive pizza was actually not an innovative or noteworthy dish; it was rather basically a round piece of flattened dough topped with lard and salt, olive oil and onions or such simple things. It was considered a cheap, convenient and calorie-rich dish, and hence the day labourers bought it for lunch from the street vendors. It was not considered particularly tasty or some beloved delicacy.

Southern Italy remained one of the poorest regions in Europe in the 20th century. So, the majority of southern Italians were eager to leave to pursue a better quality of life in other parts of the world. Over 4 million Italians came to the eastern United States from 1880 to 1920, and southern Italians constituted the largest share of the immigrant population.

As America was a wealthier country, they were able to maintain a better quality of life there. In the US, there were abundant accessible groceries where some of the immigrants started working as cooks.

Many of them also established restaurants, offering the Americans the Italian cuisines they grew up eating at home. Here they cooked these dishes by adding all the fancier ingredients they could now obtain. This ‘Americanisation’ resulted in many of the Italian foods as we know them today, including our topic of discussion today.

Making pizzas, in the forms we know today, was an experimental practice of Italian cooks in the early 20th century, who reimagined the food for their American customers. The world’s first dedicated pizzeria was Lombardi’s in Manhattan, New York City, which was built by a Neapolitan immigrant, Gennaro Lombardi, in 1905.

In the post-World War II period, Italy would eventually become more prosperous and experience a tourism boom, with a large number of its tourists coming from the US. This phenomenon incentivised restaurants in tourist destinations in Italy to Americanise their dishes as well, to meet the expectations of the American tourist customers.

Hence, pizza historians note that in Italy, pizzas, as we know them today, became a common dish after the war, influenced by American cultures. In a 1953 edition of the New York Times, a food columnist reported that there were actually more pizzerias in the US than in all of Italy.

Italian writer Alberto Grandi argues in his book “Denominazione Di Origine Inventata” that a lot of the most iconic Italian dishes are actually recent in origin and owe their existence far more to Italian Americans than Italians themselves.

Also for pizza, he notes that in the 1970s, for Italians like his father, it was as exotic as sushi is today. However, that was definitely not the case in America by then.

In the post-war era, due to massive technological revolutions as well as growing middle-class wealth, pizzas became one of those products mass-produced in factories, fast-frozen and sold in supermarkets.

According to Canadian journalist and cultural analyst JJ McCullough, “To suburban families in the 1950s, buying frozen pizza, heating it up to eat at home, was exactly the sort of futuristic marvel that embodies all the hype and glamour of the atomic age.”

The 1950s and 60s also herald the dawn of chain restaurants. Two of the most successful chains from that time were Pizza Hut, first established in 1958 at Wichita, Kansas, and Domino’s, which was founded in 1960 in the town of Ypsilanti in Michigan, both specialising in pizzas.

To compete with the convenience of buying frozen pizzas, these restaurants adopted home delivery as their strategy, with Domino’s adopting an official 30-minute delivery policy. The company was criticised for this policy, with blame for road accidents and deaths. It abandoned the policy in 1994.

By the 1960s, when teen culture began to be defined by rebellion and non-conformity, going out for pizzas with friends became a popular exercise for teenage autonomy in the US.

By the mid-1980s, pizzas began to be marketed as an explicitly cool food. One of the most beloved cartoons from the time, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, helped popularise pizza further.

Its little viewers associated it with their turtle heroes since it was portrayed as their favourite food, and they began wanting to eat pizza all the time.

In the 90s, pizzas began to be portrayed everywhere, from movies to music videos, from board games to video games, as well as in birthday restaurants themed after pizzas. By the 2000s and 2010s, there were many pizza-themed merchandise items like socks, gums, candles, colognes, etc.

(The writer is a sixth-semester student at North South University
Email: [email protected])