Pizza: A Brief History
May people think of Italy when they think of the origins of pizza. This is not wrong, but not entirely correct either. The actual origin of the pizza dates back to neolithic times when the Babylonian, Egyptian, and other Middle-Eastern cultures were baking unleavened flat bread in their mud stone ovens. Over time and when the idea of pizza spread, the Greeks and Romans began topping the bread with olive oil and spices. The pizzas of the past were all stepping stones and in Naples, Italy is where what we can call a modern pizza was made. In the 1800s, Italian baker Raffaele Esposito came up with a style of pizza to give to visiting royalty. Prior to Esposito's take, pizza was cheap food for the poor. Esposito took the finest flat bread and topped it with the colors of the Italian flag: tomatoes, mozzarella cheese, and basil.The monarchy that visited Esposito were beyond satisfied and when word spread of the success of the new take on pizza, everyone was making their own style.
In the early 1900s Italian immigrants brought their pizza recipes with them to America. The rest is history. Now the American food markets are flooded with Pizza Huts, Dominoes, and Papa John's. The two prominent pizza towns in the United States are Chicago and New York. Chicago has their deep-dish styled pizzas and New York has the more traditional styled pizzas of Italy. One of the things that seems to have been lost in all of this is the original wood fire ovens used in Italy that are comparable to the mud brick ovens of the Neolithic ages, but that is apart of progression and there are still pizzerias that use the old method. Similar to Italy, once pizza hit America, many different people put their own spin on the pizza and helped it to become one of America's favorite foods.