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 ...
America Before Pizza
BEFORE PIZZA
AFTER PIZZA
Deep dish pizza? Get behind me satan! 😁
Nice.
YouTube has a lot of people reviewing New Haven pizza places that are fun to watch.
I have an affinity for Modern because my father’s church was across the street when I was a teenager, so I’d go there a lot. The clam pie, delish
Matrix cats
In “Splendor in the Grass,” a movie set in the 1920s, Warren Beatty asks, “What is pizza?”
That’s when pizza first hit US. The first time I heard of it was early 50’s. Heard pizza pie for dinner one night and thought it was a pie pie. Looking for sweets which I dearly loved but was shocked at the reality!!
Was there an America before pizza? No way...
bread, cheese, and sauce
Don’t forget the toppings, which is meat and other things. And more cheese.
THIS IS YOUR BRAIN...
THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON DRUGS...
Wow, you must have liked that post...
Do we have consensus on the best pizza place in NYC?
I was born in ‘51 and grew up in upstate NY. I honestly cannot remember when I first heard (or had) “pizza.” My mom had a dish she liked to make called “meatza pie,” but that might have been when I was in high school (I never told mom it was “meh” at best — she always thought it was a treat for us).
My wife is a native Californian and doesn’t remember it as a kid, either.
The first pizza we can remember was around 1980 or so at a little pizzeria in midtown Palo Alto. We ate more pizza when the kids came along in the mid and late 80s.
Maybe pizza would have arrived here sooner...Mama Mia...
I don’t.
Honestly, if I venture into nyc nowadays I’m not eating pizza. Not because it isn’t good, but because I’ve got reservations somewhere much better. 😁
You’re from Palo Alto? So am I. What was the name of the pizza place you went to?
Do you remember Magoo’s Pizza in Menlo park where an early Grateful Dead played?
I think that number is a little low.
Fun fact-
although tomatoes were eaten by tribes for hundreds of years-
it wasn’t until pizza was invented in the late 1800’s that civilized society consumed them.
Depends what you consider civilized society I guess. They were in Europe and eaten in the 1500s
Pepperoni?
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