The History of Pizza

Flatbreads or rounds of dough with various toppings can be found throughout the history of civilization. What is known as pizza today can be traced to Naples, Italy in the Middle Ages. The Italians are also credited with coining the term pizza, although its origin is not clear. It could have derived from the Italian word for point, pizziare, meaning to pinch or pluck, or a verb meaning to sting or to season.

Early toppings may have included cheeses, dates, herbs, olive oil, and honey. Tomatoes or tomato sauce were not introduced until the sixteenth century when New World explorers brought the red fruit back from South America. The wealthy classes regarded the tomato as a fruit to be avoided; indeed many thought it to be poisonous. But in the peasant neighborhoods of Naples, residents were enjoying it with the rounds of dough that constituted their primary staple. Somehow the news of this tomato pie spread, and open-air pizza parlors began to do a brisk business. It was also not unusual to see the pizza marker, or pizzaioli plying his wares through the streets.

Just as the tomato made its way to Europe, the pizza traveled to the United States with the large influx of Italian immigrants in the latter part of the nineteenth century. One of the earliest known pizzerias was opened by Gennaro Lombardi in New York City in 1905. The thin-crust pie served featured a layer of tomato puree, mozzarella cheese, and various toppings such as sausage and pepperoni. In 1943, Ike Sewell created a deep-dish version at his Chicago restaurant, Pizzeria Uno. The deep-dish pizza combines the sausage, pepperoni, mushrooms, and such with the cheese, which is then poured into a high-sided crust. A layer of tomato sauce is then ladled over the top.

By the end of the 1940s, Frank A. Fiorello was packaging and marketing the first commercial pizza mix. Frozen pizzas were introduced in 1957. By the 1990s, one out of every 20 meals eaten American homes each week was pizza. From its humble beginnings as a staple of the peasant diet, pizzas now sport everything from shrimp to pineapples to barbecued chicken. The manufacturing process, however, remains virtually the same.