No matter the month, people love comfort foods, and a favorite comfort food of many is a big, warm, cheesy pizza with lots of toppings. For the last hundred years, people across the U.S. have come up with a vast array of pizza types and toppings. Deep dish, stuffed crust, and barbeque chicken pizza have all made their way into menus, courtesy of American chefs. This article explains how this distinct food developed and became popular, first in Italy, then in the U.S. After reading it, head by the library for a look at books on pizza for some recipe ideas!
Proto-Pizza
The earliest pizza-type food originated not in Italy, but ancient Persia. In the time of Achaemenid Dynasty, opens a new window, the Persians controlled a vast amount of territory in Asia, ranging from northern India in the east to Greek city-states in the west. Soldiers of the Persian Empire were often deployed along its vast borders and had to find creative ways to eat when they were far from home. In the 6th century BC, opens a new window, they developed a method of baking a flat bread on their shields and covering it with cheese and dates for flavor. The concept of eating a round flatbread eventually spread to the Greeks as well, possibly through the many Greeks who served as Persian mercenaries, opens a new window.
The Persian and Greek versions of pizza tasted quite different from the pizza of today. Neither the Persian flatbread nor the Greek plakous, opens a new window had a tomato-based sauce, since tomatoes were not known to people in the Old World at the time. The taste of these proto-pizzas tended to be sweet rather than savory, as fruits and honey were often used for flavoring, and meat was much rarer. Plakous and other Greek flatbreads first entered Italy through Magna Graecia, opens a new window, the Greek colonization of the Italian peninsula. The cities they founded retained many aspects of their Greek mother culture well into Roman times. One of them, a Campanian city they called Neapolis, would be pivotal to the development of modern pizza.
The Gift of Naples
The city of Neapolis retained aspects of its Greek mother culture through the Roman Empire and into the Middle Ages. Even as the Greek language gradually faded and the city became known as Napoli, its distinct identity remained. Flatbreads were often eaten as a quick meal by the working poor, opens a new window on Napoli’s docks, but the food was looked down upon by wealthier people. Something was still missing. Italians knew about the tomato (which they first called pomodoro, opens a new window or “golden apple”) since 1548, but they were very reluctant to use it to alter their centuries-old recipes at first. It was only in 1790, opens a new window that the first recipe for tomato sauce was published, in Francesco Leonardi’s cookbook L’Apicio moderno, opens a new window (“Modern Apicus”). Part of an effort to create a unified and distinctly Italian style of cooking, L’Apicio moderno popularized the use of tomato sauce in pasta dishes.
As pasta recipes that used tomato sauce proliferated in the 19th century, tomato sauce also came to pizza. The first pizza to use tomato sauce was pizza marinara, opens a new window, which was topped with a combination of olive oil and tomato sauce and had no cheese. Popular history claims that these pizzas were first prepared by the wives of sailors (marinaras) while their husbands were at sea, so they could have something delicious to eat when they came back.
Pizza Margherita, opens a new window was the first pizza to have a tomato sauce base and a cheese topping at the same time. The simplicity of its recipe is sometimes seen as a mirror of the Italian flag, with the tomato representing the red, basil as the green, and cheese for the white portion. An often-repeated story credits Queen Margherita of Savoy, opens a new window for creating the recipe in 1889, as she specially requested the basil so the pizza could resemble the flag of recently unified Italy. Yet there is no solid evidence that Queen Margherita created the first pizza Margherita, and letters from Francesco De Bourcard describe a form of pizza that sounds exactly like it in 1866, opens a new window. While Queen Margherita did enjoy pizza (an article from the Geneva Gazette describes her visiting a pizzeria in Naples in 1880), it is unlikely the pizza was specifically created by her request and named after her.
A New World of Pizza
Pizza’s arrival in the United States was linked to the wave of Italian immigration in the nineteenth century. New York City, an important hub of Italian immigration, was the place where the first pizzerias were opened. Gennaro Lombardi is often credited for opening the first U.S. pizzeria in New York in 1905, opens a new window. Analysis of business records suggests that pizzerias had actually operated in New York since the early 1890s, by a man named Filippo Millone. The oldest pizzeria in the U.S. that remains open today is PaPa’s Tomato Pies, opens a new window in Robbinsville, New Jersey, which has been owned by the same family since 1912. Other early pizzerias still in operation include Frank Pepe Pizzeria, opens a new window (since 1925), Totonno’s, opens a new window (since 1924), and Regina Pizzeria, opens a new window (since 1926).
America’s large cities began to develop distinct pizza traditions in the first half of the twentieth century. The most universal remains the New York recipe, opens a new window, which favors a thin crust topped with tomato sauce and cheese. This pizza is easy to cut into individual slices and eat. Chicago gave birth to two distinct styles of pizza. Deep dish, opens a new window, the type most people think of when referring to Chicago-style pizza, was invented by Ric Riccardo in 1943. He favored using round cast iron pans to create a deeper, more cakelike pizza that could be covered thoroughly in cheese and other toppings. But the dough of Riccardo’s version was much like regular pizza dough and could not stretch to reach his ambitions of a truly deep pizza. Pizzeria Uno’s cook, Alice Mae Redmond,, opens a new window created a spongier crust, more similar in texture to biscuits, that could stretch much further. Today’s deep dish pizza is considerably larger than Riccardo’s version and would be impossible without Redmond’s crust.
Another style of pizza popular in Midwestern cities is tavern-style pizza. Tavern-style pizza, not deep dish, is Chicago’s oldest, opens a new window and most popular kind of pizza. This type of pizza has a thin, almost cracker-like, crust, and is cut into squares rather than slices. Tavern-style pizza is mainly associated with the Midwest, unlike deep-dish and New York-style pizzas, which can be found everywhere. In Chicago, pizza was less popular as a distinct food than it was in New York and gained popularity more slowly. It mainly became popular after the end of Prohibition, opens a new window, when bars began offering it as an enticement for patrons. The small square slices could easily be eaten off napkins, and the thin crust allowed for easy cooking.
Pizzerias were also popular among Greek immigrants. A notable contribution to pizza history by a Greek immigrant was made by Sam Panopoulos, opens a new window, who ran a pizzeria in Ontario. In 1962, Panopoulos first came up with the idea of combining slices of pineapple with ham on top of a pizza based on his earlier work of combining sweet and savory tastes in Chinese dishes. There was at least one earlier “Hawaiian Pizza” in 1957, opens a new window from Portland, Oregon, that featured pineapple slices, but no ham. Since the pizzeria that created it operated less than a year, it was unlikely to have inspired Panopoulos’ creation, making him the father of the Hawaiian pizza so many love (and others love to hate).
The most recent pizza innovation to become widely popular is the stuffed crust pizza. The invention of this type of pizza is controversial to the point that it spawned a lawsuit. Anthony Mongiello insists that he was the first to create a stuffed crust through the invention of a stuffed pizza dough shell in 1987, opens a new window, for which he obtained a patent. Mongiello claims to have tried to sell his patented pizza to the Pizza Hut chain, but was turned down. Pizza Hut released its own stuffed crust pizza in 1995, heavily promoted with a national ad campaign featuring Ringo Starr, opens a new window, Deion Sanders, opens a new window, and Donald Trump. Pizza Hut’s vast and expensive ad campaign successfully sold the public on stuffed crusts, but Mongiello felt his concept was stolen. He sued Pizza Hut for patent infringement in 1998, opens a new window, but was unsuccessful. Mongiello made a film called Stolen Dough, opens a new window about his experiences with stuffed crust pizza and the Pizza Hut lawsuit in 2023.
Pizza for Our Time
The basic formula of pizza appears deceptively simple. A flat crust, tomato sauce, and cheese on top are the basics. How many different ways can it possibly be prepared? Centuries have proven that pizza’s simplicity makes it a thing of near infinite variety. Pizzerias have experimented, opens a new window with crust shape, toppings, cheese types, and even replaced tomato sauce with other sauces over time. Because pizzas can be prepared many different ways, independent pizzerias and smaller chains can remain viable in the face of massive competitors, such as Domino’s and Pizza Hut. Some local restaurants that offer distinct pizza tastes and recipes include Itavie, opens a new window, Vinny’s, opens a new window, George's,, opens a new window Primavera,, opens a new window Basilico,, opens a new window and Sammy T’s, opens a new window (which offers deep dish). Why not experiment when you make your own pizza, too? There are lots of tricks to try that large pizza chains may neglect, from using a za’atar pita, opens a new window as the crust to putting Mexican cheeses, opens a new window on top and even trying that most controversial of toppings…anchovies, opens a new window. Want to learn more about pizza possibilities? Visit your library and discover a wealth of new recipe ideas!
