Pizza

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Pizza turned into a $128 billion global business by 2017, and that same year 76,000 pizzerias in the United States split $44 billion of it. On any given day, about 13 percent of Americans eat it. Nobody planned for a flatbread topped with tomato and cheese to spread this far this fast.

  Where did the word pizza actually come from, and who gets credit for shaping the version we eat today? How did a dish that started in the streets of Naples end up folded in Turin and cut into squares in St. Louis? It even turned up served alongside a chickpea pancake in Buenos Aires. And why does a well-known story about a queen, a flag, and a pizzeria in Naples turn out to be more complicated than it sounds?

  Some of the answers start more than a thousand years before anyone in Naples ever added tomato to dough.

• 2. Long Before Naples

  ›

  In May of the year 997, a Latin notarial document called the Codex diplomaticus Caietanus recorded a tenant's yearly debt to the bishop of Gaeta. Gaeta was still part of the Byzantine Empire at the time. The tenant owed twelve pizze, plus a pork shoulder and kidney, every Christmas Day, and twelve more pizzas with a couple of chickens every Easter Sunday. That document is the oldest known written use of the word pizza.

  One theory traces pizza back to the Byzantine Greek and Late Latin word pitta. That word survives in Modern Greek and in the Apulian and Calabrian pitta, a round flatbread baked hot, sometimes with toppings. Pitta itself may descend from the Ancient Greek pikte, meaning fermented pastry, or from pissa, meaning pitch, or from petea, meaning bran. A second theory, from the Etymological Dictionary of the Italian Language, links pizza to the dialectal word pinza, meaning clamp. That word is related to modern Italian pinze, for pliers or tongs, and to the Latin verb pinsere, to pound or stamp. A third theory points to the Lombardic word bizzo or pizzo, meaning mouthful, related to the English words bit and bite. The Lombards brought that word to Italy in the middle of the 6th century. Linguists explain the shift from b to p through the High German consonant shift, noting that the German word Imbiss still means snack.

  A person who makes pizza is called a pizzaiolo. English speakers only borrowed the word pizza from Italian in the 1930s. Before that, they called the dish tomato pie, a name some regional variations still carry today.

  In the 6th century BC, Persian soldiers of the Achaemenid Empire, serving under Darius the Great, baked flatbread on top of their battle shields. They topped it with cheese and dates. Ancient Greeks did something similar, topping their bread with oils, herbs, and cheese.

  The Aeneid, an ancient epic, describes Celaeno, queen of the Harpies, prophesying that hunger would eventually force the Trojans to eat their own tables. Later, in Book VII, Aeneas and his men are served round cakes similar to pita bread, topped with cooked vegetables. Eating the bread convinces them that the prophecy has come true.

  In 2023, archaeologists uncovered a fresco in Pompeii that appears to show a pizza-like dish resting on a silver platter among other foods. Italy's culture minister said it "may be a distant ancestor of the modern dish."

  Whether that fresco really shows a proto-pizza or something else, the dish we'd recognize today was still centuries away from being invented in Naples.

• 3. Naples Invents The Modern Pizza

  ›

  In Naples, during the 18th and early 19th centuries, cooks topped flatbread with garlic, salt, lard, and cheese. That groundwork eventually became the pizza we recognize today. Nobody knows exactly when tomato joined the toppings. It could not have happened before the 16th century, once the Columbian Exchange brought tomatoes to Europe.

  Vendors sold pizza from open-air stands and out of pizza bakeries until about 1830. That year, pizzerias in Naples began adding stanze, rooms with tables where customers could sit down and eat.

  A popular legend says pizza Margherita was invented in 1889, when the Royal Palace of Capodimonte commissioned Neapolitan pizzaiolo Raffaele Esposito. He was asked to create a pizza honoring the visiting Queen Margherita. Of the three pizzas he made, the queen preferred the one dressed in the colors of the Italian flag: red tomato, white mozzarella, and green basil. Supposedly the pizza was then named after her. A letter of recognition from the queen's head of service is still said to hang in Esposito's old shop, now called the Pizzeria Brandi.

  Later research cast doubt on that story. No newspapers from the period reported the queen's supposed visit. Historians later traced both the story and the name Margherita to promotional efforts from the 1930s and 1940s. That research also cast doubt on the letter's authenticity.

  Whatever really happened at the Royal Palace, the name Margherita stuck, and pizza itself was about to leave Naples far behind.

• 4. Crossing Oceans

  ›

  Italian immigrants carried pizza to the United States in the late 19th century, and it first caught on in the neighborhoods where they settled. The country's first pizzeria, Lombardi's, opened in New York City in 1905. As Italian Americans migrated from east to west, they brought pizza with them. From there, the American version of pizza spread to the rest of the world.

  Pizza reached the United Kingdom after World War II, when Italian immigrants opened Italian restaurants in London. Peter Boizot, an English entrepreneur, tasted Neapolitan pizza while traveling in Italy in 1948. In 1965, he opened PizzaExpress, London's first known pizzeria, and pizza truly took hold in Britain. His chain eventually expanded past 500 outlets across the UK and Ireland before moving overseas.

  In 1984, a nonprofit called the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana was founded in Naples to promote traditional Neapolitan pizza. In 2009, at Italy's request, the European Union registered Neapolitan pizza as a traditional speciality guaranteed dish. In 2017, UNESCO added the craft of making it to its list of intangible cultural heritage.

  Every one of those pizzerias, from Naples to London, faced the same basic problem. How do you get a soft, topped dough into a very hot oven without ruining it?

• 5. The Craft Of Baking

  ›

  A restaurant pizza can be baked with fire bricks above the heat source, in an electric deck oven, or on a conveyor belt. It can also go into a traditional wood or coal-fired brick oven. The pizza slides into the oven on a long paddle called a peel. It bakes directly on hot bricks, on a round metal screen, usually aluminum, or on whatever surface the oven provides. Cooks sprinkle the peel with cornmeal beforehand so the pizza slides on and off easily.

  At home, a pizza can bake on a pizza stone inside a regular oven, mimicking some of the heat a brick oven provides. Cooking a pizza directly on metal transfers heat too fast and burns the crust. Some home cooks install outdoor wood-fired ovens. Like restaurant ovens, these are usually dome-shaped, a design pizza ovens have used for centuries to spread heat evenly. Grilled pizza bakes directly on a barbecue grill instead of in an oven at all. Sicilian pizza is baked in a pan rather than directly on the oven's bricks.

  Grocery stores sell pizza frozen, or as kits meant for self-assembly and finishing in a home oven. Some frozen versions even include raw ingredients and self-rising crusts. In the US, take-and-bake pizzerias assemble the pizza in-store, then sell it unbaked for customers to finish baking at home. Some grocery stores instead sell fresh dough with sauce and basic toppings for assembly in the customer's own kitchen. Most restaurants rely on standard, purpose-built prep tables, and chains can automate mass production of pizza almost completely.

  The base of a pizza, called the crust, ranges from thin, as in a hand-tossed Neapolitan pizza, to thick, as in a deep-dish Chicago-style pie. It's traditionally plain, though it can be seasoned with garlic or herbs, or stuffed with cheese. The outer edge of the crust has its own name too: the cornicione. Some pizza dough contains sugar, which helps the yeast rise and helps the crust brown.

  None of that crust matters much without what goes on top of it, and pizza's most defining topping is cheese.

• 6. The Cheese Question

  ›

  Mozzarella is the cheese most associated with pizza, and prized buffalo mozzarella is produced specifically in the area around Naples. Other cheeses commonly used include burrata, Gorgonzola, provolone, pecorino romano, ricotta, and scamorza.

  Makers of mass-market pizza developed cheaper processed cheeses and cheese analogues, engineered to brown, melt, and stretch consistently. Reaching that goal has taken years of study into vegetable oil content, manufacturing and culture processes, and denatured whey proteins. The aim throughout has been stable fat content, stable moisture, and a long shelf life. In 1997, annual production of pizza cheese was estimated at one million metric tons in the US and 100,000 metric tons in Europe.

  Mass-produced pizza from American chains has drawn criticism for an unhealthy balance of ingredients, running high in salt, fat, and calories. The USDA reports that a 14-inch pizza from a fast-food chain contains an average of 5,100 milligrams of sodium.

  Fast food is only one corner of the pizza world; a great many named regional styles set different rules for crust, cheese, and everything else.

• 7. Naming The Styles

  ›

  Pizza marinara, topped with tomato sauce, olive oil, oregano, and garlic but no cheese, was first recorded in 1734. It ranks among the oldest Neapolitan pizzas. Pizza capricciosa, topped with ham, mushrooms, artichokes, olives, and tomatoes, was first recorded in Rome in 1937. It resembles pizza quattro stagioni, except its toppings are mixed together rather than arranged by quarter to represent the four seasons. Pizza quattro formaggi is made with four cheeses: mozzarella, Gorgonzola, and two others depending on the region. It's believed to have originated in Lazio at the start of the 18th century, though its exact history is undocumented. Seafood pizza is topped with fish, shellfish, or squid. Subvarieties include pizza ai frutti di mare, made without cheese, and pizza pescatore, made with mussels or squid.

  Calzone folds pizza dough in half, turnover-style, then bakes it; the style originated in Naples. Panzerotti, from Apulia, look similar but are fried rather than baked. Pizza fritta, or deep-fried pizza, is another Naples specialty, cooked in oil instead of an oven. Pizzetta is simply a small pizza, served as a snack or appetizer.

  California-style pizza, known for nontraditional toppings like fresh produce, dates to 1980. Chicago-style pizza, from around the 1940s, bakes in a high-edged pan that holds a thick layer of toppings, sometimes with a cheese-stuffed crust. Colorado-style pizza, dating to 1973, uses a thick, braided crust piled with sauce and cheese. It's traditionally sold by the pound, with a side of honey as a condiment. Detroit-style pizza, from 1946, spreads cheese to the edges of a rectangular pan, where it caramelizes into a lacy, crispy border. New Haven-style pizza, dating to 1925, is known for its thin, oblong crust and its characteristic char. New York-style pizza, which emerged in the early 1900s, descends from Neapolitan pizza but is known for its thin, foldable crust. St. Louis-style pizza, from 1945, uses a thin, cracker-like crust made without yeast, typically topped with Provel cheese and cut into squares. Windsor-style pizza, which emerged in the 1950s in Ontario, Canada, is distinguished by shredded pepperoni and canned mushrooms.

  Dessert pizza and sweet pizza describe dishes like chocolate pizza and fruit pizza. Some sit on a traditional yeast dough base, while others use a cookie-like base instead. What unites them is simply a flat, round shape with a distinct base and topping, and some pizza restaurants now offer them as menu items.

  None of these named styles, though, capture the version of pizza most Sicilians actually grew up eating.

• 8. Pizza Beyond Italy And America

  ›

  Authentic Neapolitan pizza requires San Marzano tomatoes, grown on the volcanic plains south of Mount Vesuvius. It also calls for mozzarella di bufala campana, made from water-buffalo milk in the marshlands of Campania and Lazio. A cow's-milk alternative, fior di latte, is also allowed. Buffalo mozzarella carries its own European protected designation of origin.

  Sicilian pizza, a thick-crust, deep-dish style that's essentially a topped focaccia, originated in Sicily during the 17th century. Until the 1860s, it was the type of pizza most Sicilians actually ate, especially in the island's western half.

  In Turin, Piedmont, cooks serve pizza al padellino, or pizza al tegamino, a small, thick-crust, deep-dish pizza distinct from styles found further south.

  In the United States, common pizza toppings include anchovies, ground beef, chicken, eggplant, ham, mushrooms, and olives. Others include onions, peppers, pepperoni, pineapple, salami, sausage, spinach, steak, and tomatoes. A pizza topped with none of these is simply called a cheese pizza or a plain pizza. Americans also developed formats like deep-dish, stuffed, pocket, turnover, rolled, and even pizza-on-a-stick, alongside named styles such as Buffalo and Greek. Pizza by the slice, in particular, is tied to New York City, where pizzerias serve as both a cultural icon and a major food business.

  Argentina has more pizzerias per inhabitant than any other country in the world. Buenos Aires, its capital, is estimated to have consumed 14 million pizzas in 2015 alone. Italian immigration brought pizza to the city in the late 19th century, around the same period pizza Margherita was being invented back in Italy. Poor Italian immigrants, finding food far more abundant in Argentina, turned the originally modest dish into a much heartier meal. By the 1930s, pizza had become a firmly established part of Buenos Aires culture, with new pizzerias serving as social hubs for working-class life.

  The signature style, pizza de molde, has a thick, spongy base and a raised, bready crust. It developed because the city had no pizza ovens at first, so bakers used their bread pans instead. That's why Argentine pizzas were originally square or rectangular, a shape still used today, especially for vegetable pizzas and for fugazzetas. Other native styles include fugazza and its cheese-topped cousin, fugazzeta, plus a cheese-less version called pizza de cancha, or canchera.

  Standard Buenos Aires flavor combinations include plain mozzarella, nicknamed muza or musa. Another is napolitana, or napo, topped with cheese, sliced tomatoes, garlic, dried oregano, and a few green olives, not to be confused with Neapolitan pizza. Other varieties include calabresa, made with sliced longaniza sausage, and jamon y morrones, made with ham and roasted bell peppers. Still others come with provolone, anchovies, hearts of palm, or chopped hard-boiled egg. A distinctly Buenos Aires custom pairs pizza with fainá, a pancake made from chickpea flour.

  Pizza's basic idea, flatbread plus topping baked hot, shows up worldwide under other names entirely. Georgia has khachapuri, a cheese-filled bread, and the Middle East has lahmacun, a very thin flatbread topped with minced meat and chopped vegetables. Japan's okonomiyaki, cooked on a hotplate, is sometimes nicknamed Japanese pizza. In Stone Town, Zanzibar, street vendors sell what's called Zanzibar pizza. Its dough is thinner than a standard crust, almost like filo, wrapped around minced beef, onion, and egg.