Posted on 12/21/2023 6:00:24 PM PST by nickcarraway
The beginning of the country’s love affair with bread, cheese, and sauce
By Saahil Desai
Consider—just for one terrible, stressful, bleak moment—if our forebearers in Naples had never invented pizza. No perfectly charred Margherita pies, no late-night Domino’s delivery, nothing. To the pizza-deprived, the world’s most beloved food probably wouldn’t sound all that special. What’s so great about the combo of bread, cheese, and sauce, after all? The alchemy among the three creates something that is so much greater than the sum of its parts—but I don’t have to tell you that, thankfully.
In 1949, the writer Ora Dodd had a much tougher challenge. In her story for The Atlantic, simply titled “Pizza,” Dodd sought to introduce Americans to a strange new food taking over Italian neighborhoods:
The waiter moves aside the glasses of red wine, and sets before you a king-sized open pie. It is piping hot; the brown crust holds a bubbling cheese-and-tomato filling. There is a wonderful savor of fresh bread, melted cheese, and herbs. This is a pizza, Italian for pie. There is a plural, pizze, but no one ever uses it, for pizza is a sociable dish, always intended to be shared. Two people order a small pizza, about a foot in diameter. A large pizza is twice that size. Don’t imagine an American pie blown up to about two feet, however; a pizza is a nearer relation to a pancake. It is very flat, made of raised bread dough, with the filling spread on top.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
where I grew up in NYS “Pizza” was called “hot pie”....we had many Italians living in our area....
I never even heard of pizza until the 1950s .
…..
I have my mother’s Betty Crocker cookbook from 1952, and it talks about the new Italian food, pizza pie
Dean Martin - That’s Amore
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnFlx2Lnr9Q
A quadruple. I have not seen one. ;)
A much more unhappy place. Same with hamburgers.
There was a glitch in the system.
I’m originally from New Haven where apizza has been around for 100 years.
I miss Sally’s, Pepe’s and Modern a lot.
Great pizza if you ever get a chance to go.
Even Wikipedia acknowledges ‘pizza’ as a crust with tomatoes (a New World item), etc, goes back to 18th - 19th century or maybe earlier. First American pizzeria to early 20th century.
And then came the ultimate expression of goodness;
Deep dish pizza.
Restaurants that list the pies on their menus as "pizze" are usually owned and operated by Italians, and they serve the best pizza.
Pizza was taken to the United States by Italian immigrants in the late nineteenth century and first appeared in areas where they concentrated. The country’s first pizzeria, Lombardi’s, opened in New York City in 1905. Following World War II, veterans returning from the Italian Campaign, who were introduced to Italy’s native cuisine, proved a ready market for pizza in particular.
Thirteen percent of the United States population consumes pizza on any given day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza
What if the Earl of Sandwich had never invented the sandwich?
“Pompeii archaeologists discover ‘pizza’ painting”
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66031341
no tomatoes, of course
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