Get a pizza of Italian action

Italian fans wearing pizza hats before the Rugby World Cup 2015 match between Italy and Romania.

Italian fans wearing pizza hats before the Rugby World Cup 2015 match between Italy and Romania.

Published Apr 29, 2016

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Rome - It’s a truth quickly discovered by visitors to Italy that the country has no national cuisine. Italian food is very regional, with the availability of world famous dishes usually limited to their place of origin (some, such as spaghetti Bolognese, aren’t even Italian).

As a rule, Italians prefer to eat their native region’s cuisine at home, only enjoying specialities from other areas while travelling.

There is, however, one notable exception. There is one dish that has managed to transcend the many internal borders of the nation and to take on the status of a cultural icon. It’s the dish which you are likely to find in every town, village, and hamlet up and down the Italian peninsula. It is, of course, pizza.

Italians are crazy about pizza, and why not? The basic combination of cheese and tomato results in the classic umami taste that we’re so fond of. The wood-fired oven, considered essential for cooking the perfect pizza, is traditional in most Italian regions. Despite Italy being a country of only 60 million people, an estimated 56 million pizzas are eaten every week!

In the past 60 years or so, for most Italians pizza has become a Sunday evening ritual. It’s the time when you can leave the house, give the kitchen a rest and try to forget that the weekend is almost over. I wouldn’t advise turning up at any pizzeria on a Sunday night without a reservation. In the small Tuscan village where I live, the local bar becomes a pizzeria every weekend.

 

On Sunday night the large restaurant area, dark for the rest of the week, becomes a stage for people to recount the dramas of the past seven days to their friends and families. If the village football team has won, they’ll be celebrating and toasting the coach for permitting them a cheese-topped indulgence. Even the parish priest makes an appearance, relaxing after his busy day.

It’s sometimes claimed that the pizza is not really an Italian dish, that it was brought to the country by Italian-American soldiers during World War II. Considering that the popularity of pizza is a post-war phenomenon, this sounds convincing, but a little probe blows the theory out of the water.

The first piece of evidence is the pizza margherita. In the late 19th century there was a fashion for naming things after the Italian Queen Margherita whenever she went on a visit.

The medieval panforte from Siena came to be known as panforte margherita following her visit to the city. In 1889, she visited Naples and was served a patriotic red, white and green pizza with cheese, tomato and basil by a certain Raffaele Esposito. It bears her name to this day.

 

 

A photo posted by @daldalbawoo on Apr 28, 2016 at 5:24pm PDT

 

Secondly, flatbreads feature in many Italian regional cuisines. These are often eaten with cheese and other fillings inside or on top. Most tellingly, in Calabria there is pita, which comes from the Middle Eastern word for flatbread and is very close to the word pizza.

There’s evidence that the Romans consumed flatbreads in this way. In the epic poem Aeneid, written in the first century AD, there is a moment when the hero and his band arrive in Italy and are dismayed to discover they only have stale bread to eat. Their quick-thinking leader orders them to go foraging and then to eat what they find on top of the bread.

The men are so taken with the idea that Aeneas’s son exclaims excitedly, “We’re even eating the plates!” Ask Italians and they’d say that pizzas are from Naples and originated as street food in the city. When you consider that a pizza will cook in a wood-fired oven in under two minutes, they could be considered the original fast food.

Both of the essential ingredients of a standard pizza (mozzarella cheese and tomato sauce) come from Campania, the region where Naples is located, and across Italy you’ll see signs touting la vera pizza napoletana (real Neapolitan pizza).

There are two common ways of serving pizza. The first is as pizza al taglio (sliced pizza). Eaten as street food, this tends to be rectangular with a thicker base to facilitate eating on the move. The second is more familiar round pizza with a much thinner and usually floppy base.

A variation on the pizza is the calzone, which is a pizza folded in half and cooked rather like a large Cornish pasty.

The Independent

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