Back home, pizza was not always one of the basic food groups. In the 1940’s, food writers and Italian restaurants were still trying to fight the American-imagined pizza pie as huge apple pie crusts stuffed with cheese, tomatoes, and strange spices and herbs. By the 1950’s, the pizza had become a companion of the hamburger and the hot dog (German immigrant foods?).
In a 1953 story, The Times reported about:
…what is perhaps inevitable — a packaged pizza mix. The highly seasoned pizza with its tough crust and tomato topping is such a gastronomical craze that the open pie threatens the pre-eminence of the hot dog and hamburger.
Ms. Miller goes on to fill in the history of pizza.
Modern pizza originated in Italy, although the style favored by Americans is more a friend than a relative of the traditional Neapolitan pie. Residents of Naples took the idea of using bread as a blank slate for relishes from the Greeks, whose bakers had been dressing their wares with oils, herbs, and cheese since the time of Plato. The Romans refined the recipe, developing a delicacy known as placenta, a sheet of fine flour topped with cheese and honey and flavored with bay leaves. Neapolitans earned the right to claim pizza as their own by inserting a tomato into the equation. Europeans had long shied away from the New World fruit, fearing it was plump with poison. But the intrepid citizens of Naples discovered the tomato was not only harmless but delicious, particularly when paired with pizza.
Cheese, the crowning ingredient, was not added until 1889, when the Royal Palace commissioned the Neapolitan pizzaiolo Raffaele Esposito to create a pizza in honor of the visiting Queen Margherita. Of the three contenders he created, the Queen strongly preferred a pie swathed in the colors of the Italian flag: red (tomato), green (basil), and white (mozzarella).
The Italian pizza pie has changed in America as we made it our own. The American pie has more cheese, a huge selection of toppings, and, of course, the drive-up, take-out, microwavable and home-delivered pizza.
The American version of the Neapolitan street food has become international — probably now an American emigrant. In case you’ll soon be visiting Poland, you can check out Dominium Pizza. They even offer a Mexican style pizza, with "wolowino, cebula, czerwona fasola, chili," and a seafood style, ("frutti del mare") with "malze, tunczyk, krewetki, anchois" as well as the house "Dominium" with "piec dowolnych skladnikow." Eat your hearts out.
Some dangers remain with the importation of foreign foods. The Smoking Gun" reported on April 27th:
In what will surely repulse Pennsylvanians, a Domino's delivery man used a car to transport corpses to funeral parlors when he wasn't using the vehicle to bring pies and Cheesy Bread to pizza enthusiasts. Last Friday, a Lower Southampton Township Police Department officer pulled over a 1993 Buick after noticing the vehicle did not have an inspection sticker. Additionally, William Bethel, 24, was driving with a suspended license, so cops informed him that the vehicle was going to be impounded. According to a police report, a copy of which you'll find below, when officers began taking an inventory of the station wagon, they noticed a stretcher in the rear of the vehicle (along with rubbish and wet clothing) where "pizzas were sitting to be delivered." Asked about the items, Bethel explained that when he finished delivering Domino's pizzas, "he transports deceased bodies in the same vehicle for a funeral home." A police check with local health officials determined that the use of the car for stiffs and slices did not violate county ordinances. Bethel, who was not arrested, is facing $400 in fines for driving with a suspended license and operating a vehicle without an inspection certificate.
Americans could buy pizzas as early as 1905 when Lombardi's opened in Lower Manhattan. Most Americans, it is said, stuck to their "boiled fish and toast." The modern pizza of the American soul began in the Midwest where there were few Italians. Ike Sewell and Ric Riccardo decided to open a Mexican restaurant. After eating some Mexican food, Sewell wrote that he fled to Italy where he tried the Neapolitan dish.
Sewell eventually agreed to forgo enchiladas for pizza, but not until he’d inflated the thin-crusted Neapolitan recipe to make it more palatable to Americans. “Ike tasted it and said nobody would eat it, it’s not enough,” Evelyne Slomon, author of The Pizza Book, said. “So he put gobs and gobs of stuff on it.”
That was 1943. The restaurant, without enchiladas, became Pizzaria Uno. It was the 1950’s before pizzas really became an American staple. James Dean liked it; around 1957, his fans began to seek it. So go the teenagers who are now senior citizens — probably still eating pizzas.
Article comments
1 - Heloise
Illegal Avenue--coming soon to a theatre near you.
I wrote about how illegals are creating an obesity crisis here with their low wages and more junk food available in this country. In fact school districts are replacing black women, single with children, with illegals in the cafeteria who speak NO English. They are impacting the food thing here.
But not so fast with Heloise because she knows how fattening their foods are plus she's a vegetarian so I am not tempted by much of their fare. I do not eat Mexican food or texmessmex food because it is just not my culture.
I am part Italian and most of my food choices reflect that. Look at their kids, they're fat. The grocery stores in my area, mostly Mexican, are crammed with women and two shopping carts full of FOOD paid with by food stamp cards.
The kids are as fat as black kids and there is no end in sight.
Heloise
2 - Bliffle
Ethnic food, like everything else ethnic, is detestable and noone should eat it.
Instead of just slavishly eating the same food your mother made, one should investigate what foods one needs, and the side effect of foods and then design onesown diet. As I do (more people should be like me!)
Most ethnic foods are nothing more than cheap food-components which are combined into fatty globs which is easily packaged and easily sold to masses of ignorant people.
3 - Howard Dratch
Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report showing that recent immigrants reported significantly better physical and mental health (such as lower rates of obesity and high blood pressure) than their U.S.-born counterparts, despite having limited access to health care and little or no health insurance. The study found that people from other countries (African-American, Asian and Hispanic) who move to the United States become progressively less healthy the longer they stay in the country. Those who were U.S. residents for five years or more were 54 percent more likely to have high blood pressure and 25 percent more likely to have cardiovascular diseases, for example, than those who lived here less than five years.I must disagree with these comments. "Illegals" may or may not be fat. America is suffering its own obesity epidemic which comes as much or more from fast foods, junk foods and convenience foods than from foreign foods. Unless the chains of McDonalds, Pizza Huts, Kentucky Fried and the rest are really owned by "illegals".
Bliffle wrote, "Ethnic food, like everything else ethnic, is detestable and noone should eat it." Which ethnic foods: slabs of roast beef (English), watercress soup (Chinese), Tandoori chicken (India), stuffed grape leaves (Greece), vichyssoise (French), Fish in Veracruzana sauce (Mexican), Miso soup (Japan)?
Obviously different ethnic groups have "... cheap food-components which are combined into fatty globs..." There are hot dogs covered with bacon, Quarter-pounders with cheese, deep-fried ham and cheese sandwiches, brie baked in a pastry shell, Cuban sandwiches with everything on them... I have made myself hungry with the first group and would be dead if I ate from group B.
In Newsweek on line today Dr. Dean Ornish wrote on "Globalizing Health",