April 18, 2016 • 50 mins
Pizza-like foods go way, way back in history, long before we associated the delicious dish with Italy. How did pizza's pedigree develop, and how did it get to its second home in the U.S.?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Vie Wilson and I'm Holly Fry and we
are recently back from a trip to Chicago, which was fantastic.
(00:23):
It was Thank you so much everyone who came to
see us in Chicago. We went there for a live
show at D two E two, which is a convention
of all kinds of pop culture, video game, entertainment, comic book,
that kind of stuff, and also Stuff you Missed the
History Class live show. Yeah, that's like the most dangerous
work trip for me to go on because, as Tracy knows,
(00:45):
I bought a lot of art on the show floor. Yep, yep.
You you definitely had art on your mind on the
show floor. I did. It's a problem basically, I can't Yeah,
I can't walk by a good drawing of Grito. That's
the it's Oh. Yeah, we had a great time in Chicago.
We had a great audience. Uh, you all were awesome.
You basically filled a whole room for us to talk
(01:07):
about the history of pizza. And now we're going to
share that episode with the rest of our listeners who
could not be there with us. Uh, you know, we're
we're going to include just the live show part of
of the show that we did live in Chicago. Um,
and I have a couple of notes just before we
get into that. One is that the microphones that we
(01:28):
were on we're a little less forgiving of us popping
our peas than the ones in our studio. Uh, so
there's a little bit more of that in this episode.
And they were also pushed to talk microphones, and we
were really good about pushing when we were talking, Uh,
not as good about continuing to push when the audience
(01:53):
was making noise. So our producer nol Has has helped
us with that. But if you notice anything that sounds
a little odd, that's probably why. And we should also
mention that normally, if you listen to our show, you
know that we run a pretty clean chip here. We
usually keep a family friendly, but there are some illusions
in this particular episode. Anytime there's a live show, it
tends to get a little looser. So we do mention
(02:14):
intoxicating substances that probably we would not be joking about
if we were doing our normal studio record. Just know
that those are there, Embrace try not to faint when
you hear references to the consumption of alcohol. Uh so
let's let's get to it. Hi, there can everyone hear me.
(02:45):
I have to say, you guys are amazing because she
sat there politely and waited for high everybody to like
greet us, So you're incredible. Also, these microphones are pushed
to talk, so that means I have been well trained
from all my years playing World of Warcraft, spend a
long time. They don't ask me about anything recent. It's
weird walking around Chicago because it kind of feels like
we're inside a stream of our podcast. That's true. I
(03:07):
haven't gotten to walk around as much as you, so
I'm just kind of in my own head in the
stream of our podcast. It's it's like that in Boston
to you, But in Boston I'm used to it now,
so it's not quite as much of a big deal.
I made a little Chicago podcast tag. Who comes to
our website ever? Thank you? So I decided to make
(03:29):
a little Chicago podcast tag to kind of round up
a lot of our Chicago stuff. And we have some
cool people like Katherine Dexter McCormick, whose family name you
may recognize from the building we're in. Uh, that's pretty cool.
And then we have Henry Gerber and Chicago Society for
Human Rights. Also cool. It's some sadness there, but generally cool. Uh.
(03:50):
But then the next thing that comes after that in
the list is the Christmas Tree Ship. Then we have
the Iroquois Theater fire. I'm laughing that they're repeated doom.
It is repeated doom. After that we had Maria Talchief
who was a Native American ballet dancer and dance in Chicago.
(04:11):
Francis Glesson Early and her tiny forensic the little dioramas
that she made, Jane Adams, who's awesome mother of social work.
And then we're back into Chicago darkness with H. H. Holmes.
I'm not going to read all of them, but yeah,
when I was putting that together, I thought, some of
this is very dark. Before we launch into pizza party time. Sidebar,
(04:32):
don't think there's pizza under your seat. This is an oprah.
I tried to make a pitch that the cheese would
make it stick really well, but nobody would go for it.
There was some healthcade I don't know, but because I
spent two years of my career writing about food safety.
She did. I think we should start by saying hello
and welcome to the podcast, which we forgot to do
the last time we did one of these lives. Who
(04:54):
should start I'll do it, Okay, Hello and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and Tracy V. Wilson. We're
gonna talk about pizza today. We're gonna talk about pizza
and kind of three arcs. We're going to talk about
the ancient precursors to pizza, and also obviously pizza in
Italy because that's really the birthplace of pizza. And then
(05:16):
we're gonna talk about pizza in America and the rest
of the world altogether, and then a little bit of
wackadoodle pizza trivia at the end. So lots of societies
eat stuff on flatbread. I know, that's a shocker. Uh.
Pizza not really strictly Italian if you want to think
(05:38):
of it in the flatbread arena, like pizza crust is
sort of like a cousin to other flatbreads, Like think
of pizza and tortillas and lavash and maybe even Neolithic people's. Yes,
there's actually some evidence that Neolithic man cooked Uh, like
batter on hot stones, and we there is so some
(06:00):
evidence that they actually used sauces on top of it.
So they were totally onto this jam way before we
thought anybody was eating pizza. Yeah, and it's pretty pretty inventive.
You know, Hey, that rock that's pretty hot from the sun.
What could I put on that and make it delicious?
That's actually how I lived my first five years. I
was really a forager child, alfonterib. I know you were
(06:23):
going to say in college also that I mean to
be frank, it's blurry, but I wouldn't be surprised. So
even when you get to Italy, there were things that
were there were flat pizza like things like torta, which
was like that. But wait but wait am I am?
I am rushing time about Grace yet, Tracy. So Greece
(06:46):
really got closer to the Italian flatbread situation. And it's
actually you could say that pizza was seated in Greece
because they made flatbreads. This sounds so freaking delicious to me,
because they would put oil on them with herbs and
sometimes dates and maybe some other little toppings and things
like honey. Does that sounds sort of yummy? I want
(07:07):
that for breakfast. And then it was actually around six
hundred BC that a Greek settlement was formed in what
is modern day Naples, and pizza sort of traveled to
that new location along with the people that settled. There
is this where we get to torta we can. We
also should mention that Egyptians also ate flatbread, so like
the Mediterranean was totally onto the flatbread thing. So that
(07:30):
you all will not think I totally don't know what
I'm doing. I have written down, Holly has lots It's okay,
I'm gonna do the exact same thing, and just stage directions.
Tell me about Egypt I pretty much did. Okay, they did.
They had flatbreads as well, very similar, very simple, a
little bit of oil, just your basic drizzle, like a
precursor to white pizza. Even yes, a glimpse of what
(07:53):
happens in our studio when Holly and I record together,
and then later our producer Knull makes it sound like
we knew what we were doing. The truth this Null
is the only one with the clue. Now, Tracy is smart.
And then I usually talk about my cats and get derailed.
All right, I just heard the cat ladies in the house. Yeah,
(08:17):
y'all are the ones writing to us about how I
should have blocked that shawl. I knitted right, that wasn't
the problem, So okay, torta. It's like pizza, flat bread
with stuff, except the weirdly the bread part was not
really edible, and that's weird to me, Like how do
you make and I know how you make an inedible
bread by doing it badly, but like why would you
do it on purpose? I can't speak to that because
(08:38):
I would probably still try to eat it. But there
was also an interesting thing going on in Rome where
the Romans had a pizza like food embrace for this
a little bit, so it was made. It sounds very
delightful with wheat flour, cheese, oil, honey, and bay leaves.
But it had an unfortunate name, which was placenta. It's
probably pronounced differently, but when you read it on the page,
(08:59):
that's a laugh riot. But before you giggle, uh, they
kind of had the word first before our current you know,
use of it from the Greek word plaque with plaques,
which actually means a flat surface. So they were making
a flat surface that was also edible, so it's less
ikey when you think about it in those terms. When
we had dinner last night, we were going over our notes, Hollywood, like,
(09:20):
did you find the thing about placenta? And I was like, no,
and don't tell me. I want to be surprised with
everyone else about what you're talking about. So now you
can just stroll about and talk about how delicious placenta is,
and you can be like, you can go totally pedantic
and be like it's historically accurate, y'all. Like just really,
anybody that gives you side, I just really get down
on them about how they don't know history. It's awesome.
(09:42):
Then go lob that into like a mom blog and
see what happened? What do you have next on your list?
Holly Virgil. In the India, go for it. Okay, So
even in the India they talk about pizza like this
stuff is ubiquitous throughout history. There is a story, there's
a reference in the India where they talk about a
hero his feast and they feature cakes of bread that
(10:02):
are loaded with delicious things, and then it ends with
see we devour the plates on which we fed. That's
basically what pizza is. For eating a thing where you
are also eating the plate that it is served on
unless you're eating one that needed a knife and fork.
That's just like early recycling. Like, so just eat your
paper plates. Going forward, what came after Virgil? Uh? You
(10:27):
know in seventy nine b c E. There's evidence of
pizza and POMPEII, and then you have a bunch of
stuff before we get to my next thing, do I
because my notes picked up in fifteen you certainly do. Okay,
I'm shocked. So when we say pizza today, even though
there are white pizzas, we a it's in our head,
(10:48):
flat bread, tomato, we sauce cheese. Right, So that's sort
of coincidentially the pizza thing, and that really didn't come
around until fifteen forty four because this is after the
Colombian Exchange. It's after Christopher Columbus went to the America's
came back to Europe with pizza, not with pizza with
tomatoes the original thirty minutes or less. Ye, So he
(11:11):
when all I have to say, flu, he sailed, this
is not drunk history. I prized did you miss Columbus
in history class? Because I'd be all right if we did. Oh.
I took an entire class on Columbus in college called
Columbus and New World Literature. That was all his diaries
(11:32):
and the men around him writing. That actually sounds kind
of interesting. It was pretty cool. So he brought tomatoes.
He brought tomatoes back to Europe and that is the
first recorded incidents of tomatoes in Italy is in fifteen
forty four. And pizza then in Naples grew into this cheap,
easy food, mostly for working poor people to eat. Did
(11:53):
you find the bit in your research about how allegedly
most people in Europe thought tomatoes were poisonous At first,
I did not find that in my research, but I
have heard that. Yeah, they allegedly didn't. But the southern
Italians were like, we're down. They're also night shades, right,
and there are definitely deadly night shades. We know that
from reading Harry Potter or Nightmare before Christmas. I have
(12:16):
that vessel on my dining room table at home. I
was with you when you purchased it, got it free.
It was a Disney World. That's closing the circle on
our references to other things in our podcast? Uh, what
have you got next? In yours? Uh? So as pizza
became more popular, there was criticism of it even as
(12:36):
it was starting to happen and it was catching on
with sort of the lower classes, where the thought was
that pizzeria's where we're bad people hung out and miscreants.
This would continue into my battern been that modernity. I
thought you were gonna say Montgomery, and I'm like, what
a my Montgomery? Like they we're going to talk about
Alabama pizza, right, So yeah, it was like, consider, uh,
(13:00):
if you had an establishment where people might go and
hang out to eat pizza, although most of it was
street food, which we're going to talk about more. It
was kind of like, oh, that's that's sort of dangerous
and shiftless types clump because throughout history, rich people have
been afraid of poor people, and we should point out
to that. At this point, the pizzas that we're going on,
we're still very similar to the ones that came over
from Greece. That very similar. Um honey, oil Bay leaves
(13:24):
a little bit of soft cheese. Yeah. And it was
really about having a simple, easy thing that you could
buy quickly. You could eat it on the go, you know,
on the street, on the way to work while you
were doing your work. You didn't have to sit down
and and bring out utensils and have this lengthy thing.
You could stop at a cart, get the thing, eat
it on your way. And the earliest pizzerias that we
know of, uh, and I might butcher some of this
(13:45):
Italian not my zone of knowledge, were Zichchio, which was
four in seventy seven, Capasso, which opened in seventeen fifty,
and Da Pietro, which formed in seventeen sixty. That one
eventually became known is Pizzeria Brandy, And that will become
important in a story we're about to get to. I
(14:05):
think you're going to tell that story. I am is it?
Which story is it? It's the Cinderella story of pizza. Oh,
that is correct. It is ahead of a thing that
I had in my notes. So Queen Margarita, the wife
of Umberto Primal, that's terrible Italian pronunciation. Please don't write
something about it. Uh. They went to Naples in nine
(14:26):
They were tired of eating French food, so they were like,
can we please eat some Italian food? And they tried
several different pieces, and the queen really liked this one
that had tomatoes and mozzarella and basil on it. And
before then people have just basically called it mozzarella pizza,
except with an Italian accent. But then they renamed it
for the queen and everyone wanted it. And allegedly she
(14:46):
got some flak for this because she was like, you guys,
this food we see poor people eating. It's freaking delicious,
and a lot of other a lot of other people
at court were like, again, that'sikey, poor people food. Although
I must cast a little bit of doubt on her taste,
because the lady didn't like French food, Like, yeah, that
(15:07):
is a little suspicious, But but she was undaunted by this,
so thankfully due to her love and her not caring
what other people think, which I must applaud her for,
it really became just a huge sensation. And that's sort
of how this that's why they call it the pizza
Cinderella story, because this thing that came from nothing became
(15:28):
super celebrated because one person believed in it, and it really, yeah,
it completely changed how people thought about pizza, which is
which is cool. Even before that, Alexander Dumont had gone
to Naples in thirty five and he had gotten really
fixated on what people were eating, and with this pizza
and At first he was like, this is just simple
food for peasants, and then he realized that people were
(15:49):
changing up their pizza depending on what was available and
what was cheap and what they didn't need to sell
to somebody else to make money. And so it went
from that kind of thing to you after the queen
got involved this kind of thing, And it also really
served to sort of endear the queen to her subjects
because this wasn't that long after unification, like prior to this, earlier,
in like three decades prior, I believe um Italy was
(16:10):
still separated into a southern and a northern and then
they had unified, but she was from the north, if
I remember correctly. So this kind of was like really
a good endearing move for the whole country, in particularly
southern Italy that they were like, oh, she loves our
food and culture, Well she must be okay, that's very kind.
What happened next, well, next is the drama bump bump bomb.
(16:35):
It's not really drama, but I read I found a
really interesting thing. So you'll read in a lot of
pizza history that after she had this, she gave this restaurant,
which was the one that we referenced earlier Pizzeria Brandy
the Royal Seal of approval, and it still sits on
the wall of that restaurant today. However, Bump pa baa.
This is where the drama comes in. So there's a
(16:57):
really wonderful BBC article from twelve where the food historian
contest this whole story because with some digging, uh, the
writer of the article discovered some things and asserts that
this restaurant actually got that royal seal years before the
pizza situation, when it was still a wine shop. And uh,
there there's some indication that possibly Esposito, who was the
(17:21):
chef that made this pizza, his relatives later down the road,
kind of backwards engineered history to make it look like
it was for their pizza. And there's even some possibility
that that letter with the royal seal isn't really from her,
that it was kind of like an underling that dashed
it off. If you look at it their pictures online
and you can see that the royal seal isn't centered,
(17:42):
it's not in the normal place it would be on
a piece of of correspondence from her from like the
royal household. It would be perfect and it's not it's
down at the bottom. It should be at the top.
It's off center. There's a little bit of question marks
around the signature. So it's kind of an interesting uh thing,
but there's no contesting that the pizza there is delicious
and everyone adores it. Um. You also dug up a
(18:06):
thing about how people were paying for pizza, right, So
at this point pizza got so popular in Italy. I
mean it was basically like, uh, you know, this a
staple food, and it was so popular and so important
and particularly as an affordable meal still for the lower
classes and people that didn't have a lot of money,
because that's actually really why pizza comes in slices. Uh.
You could buy as much as you could afford. But
(18:28):
one of the really cool things they came up with
was this thing called uh it was a pizza credit
system called pizza Otto, which meant you could have this
pizza today and pay for it in eight days to
get an eight day period, and that was pizza. It
was like pre Wimpy before he was trying to pay
for his his burgers the next week. And it was
really just this socially accepted thing of like, of course
(18:49):
you can eat today. We're not gonna let you starve
just in the next eight days. Let's work this out.
So this whole style of pizza became so culturally important
in southern Italy that in the more recent time, like
in the nineteen eighties and nineties, people started trying to
get it recognized with the same quality assurance standards that
are used for things like wine and cheese. And I
didn't write down how to say those in Italian on purpose,
(19:12):
because then I would have to try to say them
in front of you all, Holly, do you want to try?
I will. I will also point out that a little
before this, in the late eighteen hundreds, was when they
really started experimenting with pizza and so adding other things
to it. So this is when you start getting interesting
meats and slightly different cheeses in different seasonings. And this
is also the late eighteen hundreds is also when the
magical and very important wood fired brick ovens came into
(19:35):
favor for cooking pizza. Like if you've had it in
that versus another way, you know the difference. But to
go back to this association that formed in I might
butcher it. That's cool. I'm doing my best. It's the
Action No Essociation a verrace Pizza Napolitana and that's it's
shortened to VPN uh. And this group, as Tracy said,
(19:57):
was aimed at protecting the Neapolitan pizza. It had become
so important to the cultural tradition that they recognized that
other kinds of pizzas were being developed. But they really
wanted to um make that not only preserve, but also
make it the standard by which all other pizza in
the world would be judged going forward. I'm sorry I
rushed ahead of you because that entire development was really
important to why they were doing it. Uh. They wanted
(20:20):
to make sure that this, this pizza napolitana was made
right forever, that there would be a way that this
is the right way, and this is the only way
it's recognized. There are three legitimate styles of pizza according
to this rule, and they are Margharita, Marinara, and Marguerite's
Extra uh. And all of these have buffalo mazzarella in them.
No other cheese is allowed. Um. They're all really simple
(20:41):
pizzas topped with mazzarella, tomato and olive oil. And then
the difference in between them is that the Margharita has
basil and the Marinera has oregono in in garlic and
garlic in it. Uh. And then their rules about the dough.
The dough is flour, salt, water, yeast, and nothing else.
All the meeting has to be on my hand or
with a mixer that will not overheat the dough. And
(21:03):
then the dough has to be punched down and shaped
by hand. It does not go into a container or
a pan. It goes directly onto the surface in one
of those bell shaped wood burning ovens that Holly was
just talking about. Also, in the rules, you're supposed to
eat it immediately. You're not supposed to take it home.
You're not supposed to reheat it. You're not supposed to
like wander around with it, letting it drip oil on things.
(21:24):
Eat it now. Uh. And then after this happened, the
places that we're doing a bad job of making this
culturally important Italian pizza got shut down. It's like the
meanest health code ever. It better be delicious. I don't
care if your kitchen's cleaning. We would take your license
away as a random trivia side note that I didn't
have in my notes, and we didn't mention if you
wondered about where the name Marianera comes from, there's a
(21:46):
reason it has the same route as Marina, and it
was considered very popular along the water side where fishermen
needed quick food that they could eat on the run,
that they didn't need a plate for. If this were
stuff you should know, this would be Josh saying nice, Chuck,
I do. I do start to feel like if we
separated out and did did corollaries, I might be more
(22:07):
of Chuck. Really yeah, because Chuck and I have that
hippie jam together now we're when we're in the office,
we talked about a lot of hippie topics, just saying
it's all dogs. And that might make sense because lately
Josh and I have been talking about her taxes ding
I have never talked about taxes with Chuck ever. Ever, Hey,
(22:38):
to get back into our live show from Chicago, we
are going to talk about pizza in the United States
and how it is different from pizza in Italy. So
to get into American pizza, first of all, we're going
to hit you with some fun facts that if you
are anything like my household, none of this will shock
(22:58):
you and the U US, we eat a combined total
estimate of three billion pizzas each year. That's a billion
with a be as in boy, that's a lot. Uh.
That is a hundred acres of pizza a day is
consumed by the likes of us. It really does. It
really does. Say a day when I was rereading over
my notes and I was like, what was that right?
And I pulled my book out and yes, it is
(23:19):
right a day, that's three hundred and fifty slices per second.
So right now, three slices just got chomped on just then.
And what that average is out to each person, including
every child, is eating about forty six slices per year.
When we talked about this at dinner last night, my
husband was sitting next to us and he said, amateurs,
(23:41):
you're you're making up for me because I don't. I
don't eat that. I did have two slices of pizza
in the convention center today. I don't know if that counts,
but now I think you have a lot of information
about pizza in the US. I do. Well. Yeah, So
pizza made its way into the United States basically with
Italian immigrants, and so any city that had an Italian
(24:01):
immigrant population that was large enough to basically support a
restaurant wound up with a restaurant that served pizza. It
was just sort of a natural way of developing. People
wanted to have food that tasted like home, and they
wanted to have food that was made the way that
they were used to having it at home. It's the
same basic story of a lot of different foods that
are you know, come from other cultures into the United States,
(24:23):
that come along with the people who were eating them
like they ate them at home. So that that means
with with basically pizza. Following waves of immigration into the
United States, the first licensed to sell pizza was in
New York City place called Lombardies. This is, I want
to stress this was not the first place in New
(24:44):
York City making pizza. This was the first place in
New York City legally making pizza. But the really cool
thing was they had a super amazing set up there
that they're oven legendary. It could cook fifteen pizzas at once.
It was seven ft high by twelve feet wide by
twelve ft deep. This is like the serious mamma gamma
(25:06):
of pizza. Ovens Uh and Lombardes would eventually expand and
shift to offer some more additional general Italian restaurant type
fair uh and it really became a key spot in
the foundation of Little Italy in New York. The next
it's not the next place, ever. The next place I
have written down in my notes where we had pizza
(25:26):
was in Chicago, uh and, and that was Granados, which
was at nine oh seven West Taylor Street. We know
that they were open as of nineteen twenty four because
there's a postcard that survives that is like the storefront
and the some nice text in There's some discussion about
whether there was pizza being sold from uh from like
(25:47):
hand carts and stuff before that. But that was the
first Chicago pizza place. And Holly and I both read
a very dramatic exchange in the newspaper written in the
nineteen seventies. We're skipping had a little bit with that
because somebody had written about Pizzeria Pizzeria, you know, as
the first pizza place in Chicago. And oh, this food
(26:09):
critic was sorely offended. The word livid does not really
begin to describe it. And he was just like, you
guys are ignoring this place that was really the first place,
you don't know your history, you don't know what this
is about. And unfortunately by that point Granados had closed
at closed in the nineteen six one uh And as
a consequence, because they were doing Neapolitan style, not the
(26:31):
deep dish that Chicago is now famous for, and because
it had closed, it kind of gets overlooked. But to
the best of anyone's knowledge, historically, that really was the
first pizzeria here. So we you know, we had we
had pizza that was spreading through different cities. Every city
was having their own if they had, you know, a
large Italian American immigrant population having their own pizza. I
do want to stress that the reason that people forget
(26:53):
about Granados and we're talking about Chicago history is that
they were serving that uh, you know, Neapolitan pizza. They
were not so raying the types of pizza that Chicago
is famous for now. But then after World War Two,
the popularity of pizza really exploded in the United States.
The same thing was actually happening in Italy. Like in Italy, uh,
(27:14):
after World War two, as tourism was expanding, people who
had started to associate pizza with Italian food would go
to Italy and they would expect to find pizza anywhere
in Italy, even though it was from southern Italy, particularly
around Naples, and so like these restaurants in northern itast
at least started trying to make pizza. And these first
pizza attempts were not very good. They did not know
(27:35):
what they were doing. Yeah, if you go back and
look to like the record, I always think that cookbooks
are like one of the best history books on earth
because they'll really tell you what's going on. And if
you look at at cookbooks from Italy at the time,
nowhere but around Naples did any of them feature like
how to make pizza. It just it really was not
the national food at that point that we thought it
(27:57):
was already that the tourists were scuttling over there to
eat eat. It was still really a Neapolitan thing. But
all of these other pizzerias throughout Italy were like, we
gotta meet demand, and that's why they got all the
mediocre pizza. Yeah, it was, but some of the descriptions
are really gross. They were like and then it started
out with kind of an English muffiny situation, which you
can make. You can make an English muffin pizza home.
(28:19):
It's a nice snack, but you don't really want to
go into a restaurant expecting pizza and get a large
thing with an English that's weird. We're gonna talk about
some more weird pizzas later sold that thoughts too. So
after World War Two, the popularity just getting a lot
in response to a lot of things, like people are
starting to move to the suburbs, people are starting there's
(28:41):
a whole that whole idea of like the fifties housewife
needing to supply her family with a hearty meal that's
easy to make, like a pizza making kids started coming around.
I think you had down when the first one of
that was right, Yeah, the first one was in. And
we should also point out that this was really a
time post World War two was really when the concept
of leisure culture happened in America. So pizza kind of
(29:01):
slotted perfectly into that. Like you could use it as
a party food. It was great for a snack food,
it was a fun treat for kids. Like pizza really
just kind of had that perfect storm of timing where
it got popular here at the same time that we
were kind of past the horribleness of World War two,
and that idea, like she said, of like fifties housewives
and the future was bright and we have time and
(29:22):
money that we can spend on yummy, delicious treats. Pizza.
The first commercial mix for pizza sauce came around at
the same time. It was Roman Pizza Mix from Worcester, Massachusetts,
and it was invented by a guy named Frank A. Fiarello.
And was also the first time that we saw the
concept of frozen pizza, which was again going along with
(29:43):
that kind of like positivity upswing where the US was
kind of into manufacturing and and not just leisure but convenience.
It's also when we started getting the really standardized franchise
pizza restaurant with like the thing that like region have
their their pizza that people living there identify with, and
that maybe people outside of that region, like the you know,
(30:05):
sort of have an idea of what Chicago Deep Dish
pizza is or like what New York style pizza is.
But then there's like the ubiquitous standardized pizza that you
walk into a chain restaurant to get, like is a
flat thing and there's cheese and there's pepperoni and whatever
on it. Uh, if you've been eating any of these,
then you probably if maybe the first time you ever
try to eat a pizza margarita from the more Italian style,
(30:28):
you're like, where's the stuff on it? Because we're used
to eating at places like Pizza Hut, Little Suesars, and Dominoes,
which are open in nineteen nineteen fifty nine, And I
wrote one of these states are wrong? They were. It
was all in like a two year window all these
places opened. Pizza Hut was in Kansas, and Little Suses
and Dominoes were both in Michigan. Uh. And none of
(30:49):
them were founded by people who were Italian or were
actually interested in making good pizza. They were all founded
is basically a business proposition. Uh. And that is the
pizza that a lot of people associate with pizza? Is
that pizza rather than sort of the more unique, individually
culturally flared pizza. Yeah, I have in my notes. The
first Domino was in if the Lanti, Michigan. It wasn't
(31:12):
called Domino's yet, and that was in nineteen sixty Did
I say that right? Sweet? I should know I have
relatives in Michigan, but that does not confer knowledge. Uh,
and and uh it became Dominoes later in ninety five.
There were two brothers that founded it and it it
started as Dominics, and then when the one brother bought
the other one out, he changed it to Domino's. The
(31:32):
other interesting thing that's really going on at this time
is that the nineteen fifties also featured a huge uptick
again as part of that leisure culture and a desire
to be worldly, this fascination with ethnic foods, and so
even though pizza was already here, it like that was
just where it got the super foothold, so much so
that people were actually scared that it was going to
(31:53):
supplant the hot dog is the great American snack, which
I would argue, maybe, dude, we're coming for a hot dogs.
I love a good hot dog, but I think pizza
wins for me. Sure. Tombstone Pizza was introduced in nineteen
sixty two, although I found one thing that said nineteen
fifty seven was actually the first Frisen pizza. But these
weren't originally for home eating. They were more for restaurants. Yeah,
(32:15):
Tombstone actually started as a distributor that marketed their products
to bars because people drink and they want a little
snackaroo with their beer their cocktail. Who doesn't. Uh. So
that was really where it started. And it wasn't until
they realized like, oh, we're really good at this, We're
really good at manufacturing pizza, and I bet we could
go direct to consumer that they shifted to that model
(32:37):
because originally it was just restaurants supply. It was also
an about this time that pizza parlors started becoming a
fun place for young people to hang out and work,
and of course an also place for old people to
disparage because that's where all the young people were. That's
how they did it in the old country, remember right,
remember back in in Italy. What happened next? Holly, Well,
(33:01):
next we're gonna talk about we're gonna shift gears a
little bit and talk about sort of the regional styles
of pizza, and then we'll get to all that fun
trivia great pizza. Uh. And we're gonna talk about trivia next.
But before we get to all the pizza trivia, we're
gonna have a little word from one of our fantastic sponsors.
(33:30):
So we really closed out our live show with some
Q and A from the audience. Uh, And we're not
gonna have the Q and A from the audience as
part of this live show because it was it was
mostly random stuff that folks are personally curious about. So
unlike our live show on presidential assassinations, where we included
the Q and A, because the Q and A was
almost entirely about the presidential assassinations, We're gonna We're gonna
(33:53):
end with what the actual live show part of our
or what the actual live podcast part of our Lives
show ended with, which was some interesting regional pizzas, some
pizza trivia, some uh, some just personal notes about pizza. Okay,
(34:13):
So a lot of the regional pizzas that people identify
really strongly with a specific place started before the boom
in standardized franchise pizzas. So like before things like Pizza
Hut became ubiquitous, communities are already making their own unique pizzas.
Who listens to Judge John Hodgman, Okay, recently, Judg N.
(34:34):
Hodgeman was settling a dispute about whether white pizzas counted
his pizzas or not, and he he said that he
thought New Haven, Connecticut was the center of pizza culture
in the United States. I thought he was making a joke,
but no, there really is a very unique pizza culture
in New Haven, Connecticut, and the pizzas kind of oblong.
Often the crest is a little more charred than you
(34:56):
might see elsewhere. And one of the famous things is
a clam pizza. Yeah. See that either sounds great to
you or terrible to you. I want, I do want
to say it is a white pizza, so there's no
there's no tomato part in there. Uh. And that was
that was created in nive by a guy who I
(35:17):
think his name was Frank Peppe. I am guessing on
how to pronounce that. And that is a real thing
from New Haven, Connecticut. Are you ready to talk about
Chicago Deep Dish? We are ready to talk about Chicago
Deep Dish. Don't get excited. That's not the whole rest
of the thing, But I do love Deep Dish. So
(35:37):
Deep Dish, of course, as most of you probably know,
was born a pizzeria. You know, there's on the corner
of Ohio and Wabash, and that was in three although
it did not actually go by that name until later.
It was first simply called the pizzeria, and then it
was called Pizzeria Ricardo. It was not until Pizzeria Doe opened,
etherialized they needed a pizzeria, you know, and that was
(35:57):
that was in and that's when they which the name.
We drove by their drove. We wrote in a cab
by there yesterday on our way to go to the
dressing down and exhibit, which was lovely. Uh. Pizzia Juno
was actually opened by a Texan named Ike Sewell and
an Italian named Rick Ricardo. But the lore is that
in fact Sewell originally wanted to open a Mexican restaurant.
(36:22):
He didn't He wasn't really going for Italian initially, until
Ricardo was like, I don't like Mexican food, and so
it became a pizza place instead. Uh. And so they're
there's like, there are people who claimed that that Ike
will sue. However, you say that he that he invented it,
and then there are also people that say that his
(36:42):
business partner partner invented it. And then there's a whole
third train of thought that it was their employee, Ruddy
Rudy Monnati. You think that's right, sure, but you're a
wave of disapproval from the ground. I don't know, Okay, good, Yeah,
I like that we have like an instant fact check. Yeah.
(37:03):
And actually Maul Natty's grandson, who worked at pizzerie you
know for a long time, eventually opened lou Mau Natties,
which is in and then his half brother Rudy Jr.
Opened Paisanos. They're pretty much like the Dynasty of Chicago pizza. Really. Yeah,
so I think pretty much everyone agrees that i Will
probably did not personally invent the deep dish pizza himself.
(37:26):
He was just really good at marketing it. What do
you have next to talk about more weird pizza? Yeah,
next time, kind of ready to talk about weird stuff. Well,
I'm gonna talk about a couple other This is definitely
not all the other weird, not necessarily weird, unique unique
pizzas from other places around the United States. Colorado Rocky
(37:47):
Mountain Pie is a pizza with this enormous, enormously thick
crust and you can't really eat all the safty part
and eat all the crust too, So the crust afterward
is dipped in honey, like it's you're dessert. I'm cool
with that. I like honey. Uh. Yeah. This was also
a time so you know, as we get into the
sixties and seventies and going forward, there were some really
(38:08):
weird ones. This one I did not find where people
were doing this, but there was allegedly one experimentation with
the concept of pizza that was fairly common in the
US for a little while. That started with a biscuit
style crust and then they put onion tomato and you
may or may not grown liver worst on top. Half
of you are like that sounds fab and the other
(38:29):
half are like thumbs um. This is also when English
muffin pizzas became a thing, and for a while there
was one particular trend where you would make an English
muffin pizza and because it was on what had been
considered a breakfast food up at that point, you always
served it with coffee. I'm sorry, a pizza and coffee
sounds gross to me. I drink coffee with everything, so
(38:52):
I don't. I have no no gauge, you do you? Uh? So,
of course New York City is really very us for
takeout slices of pizza. Uh. And that is often like
a crust that's simultaneously crispy and chewy, and definitely a
lot thener than in Chicago, and then the last kind
of odd not really on. I don't know why I
keep saying they're odd. They're not the tomato pie in Trenton,
(39:16):
New Jersey. We're basically the cheese is under the toppings
and the toppings go under the sauce. It's kind of backwards.
And that's actually how a lot of the earlier pizzas
in the United States were made, was with the with
the the cheese going under the sauce. And then when
she get into the nineteen eighties, California, those a wacky
heard decided that they would kind of kick up this
(39:36):
concept of gourmet pizza. That's like when the first barbecue
chicken pizza happened, and places like California Pizza Kitchen and
Wolfgang Puck really kind of blossomed and sent that all
off into just the stratosphere in terms of popularity. We
should also point out that there are also a lot
of other Chicago pizza styles besides dust deep dish. Deep
Dish is sort of the thing that everyone outside of
(39:57):
Chicago has decided as the Chicago style pizza, but there
are other ones also. Um there is stuffed pizza, which
is like deep dish, but more extreme. Uh. And then
I read some stuff about how on the South Side
there's one that's like a really thin crust pizza that's
a lot more similar to what was served in April.
I'm glad somebody's excited. Uh. If we were here for longer,
(40:19):
we would need to go on like a pizza tour.
And you actually can go on a pizza tour. It
was really important to us to see that down Nawby exhibit.
Though there was much gasping. But this is not the
only country that has food that people call pizza, even
though other styles are not really what we would look
at and go, oh, that's a pizza. Well, and some
(40:41):
of them are like American people putting the word like
nation before the word pizza to describe a food that
is not recognizable is pizza like cocao miaki people call
the Japanese pizza. It's not like pizza. It is like
a People also like to call it a pancake. It's
not like a pancake e or it is like this
(41:02):
concoction of of shredded cabbage, that is, it is held
together with some things that you would make a pancake
or a dough out of but then you top it
with some delicious sauce and some some bacon or other meat.
It's super good. Benito flakes. Bonito flakes, Uh yeah, Patrick
has made them for me. You are a lucky woman. Yeah.
(41:22):
But pizza, so stop calling a Japanese pizza. There's there's
also a pizza, so it's there's also a food that's
called Turkish pizza. When you hear it, you'll be like
that pizza. Uh. It's called la lama june or lama june.
I'm not sure the exact pronunciation. But it's a flatbread
and you put mince meat on top, and then that
sprinkled with lemon juice like a lot of Mediterranean meat
(41:43):
dishes are, and then it's rolled with veggies in the
middle and then sometimes sliced. That doesn't sound like pizza
at all, but people call it pizza because it starts
with a flat bread and meat. Do you do you
have other pizza things you want to share? Before? I
read a couple of people's just scathing words about how
much they hated pizza. Read the scathing words and then
we'll do fun trivia. Let's do Okay, here's person who
(42:03):
hated pizza Samuel Morse and inventor of Morse Code and
Pizza Hate. Before she even reads this, I really feel
like you need to brace for the level of iron,
because that man hate pizza. Here's how Samuel Morse, inventor
of Morse Code and Pizza Hate, described pizza in a
(42:27):
species of most nauseating cake covered over with slices of
pomadoro or tomatoes, and sprinkled with little fish and black pepper,
and I know not what other ingredients. It all together
looks like a piece of bread that had been taken
reeking out of the sewer. Do you wanna hear somebody
(42:48):
else who hated pizza? I only have one more, and
I tried to go finding more and was because I
was like, these are great. I want to be a
lot of these, uh, And I could only find the
two that were in the book that Holly and I,
independently of one another, reviewed for this podcast Carlo Koladi.
I think is how one size says that who who
(43:09):
was the author of Adventures of Pinocchio? Quote the blackened
aspect of the toasted crust, the whitish sheen of garlic
and anchovie, the greenish yellow tint of the oil, and
fried herbs, and the little bits of red from the
tomato here and there give pizza the appearance of complicated
(43:29):
filth that matches the dirt of the vendor. What a peach, right,
That guy's a jerk. You don't got to be mean
to people. I have fun pizza factoids, tell us, tell us,
so my first and these are kind of like things
that in research caught my eye as delightful or interesting.
Uh so, the first is it? In nine four the
(43:50):
spectacular Sophia Loren, who was born in Rome though she
grew up near Naples. She was really the first one
that kind of associated sex appeal with pizza when she
started Laura di Napoli. She was a gorgeous pizza maker
who had lost her wedding ring, which sort of today
sounds like a wonderful movie as well. I'm waiting for
the remake in the ninth. The ninet sixties was really
(44:11):
when pizza had become so globally popular that both Japan
and Sweden had make at home pizza kits, But of
course they had very different ingredients in them, things like
ginger and benito flakes, which we would never find in
a pizza kit here. I just found that really interesting. Uh.
This next one is kind of googie. So in the
nineteen nineties is some of you probably know being history buffs. Uh.
North Korea was having a terrible, terrible famine, and that
(44:34):
was when Kim Jong Eel was like, you know what,
I would like pizza. Uh. So he actually, in a
completely culturally to his own people tone deaf move, flew
in a famous pizza maker from Italy just to sit
in the palace and make him pizza. Uh. In two
thousand three, we'll we'll go to fun stuff now. In
two thousand three, the most popular fake name that was
(44:56):
used when placing orders with Dominoes, according to Reuters, it
was Paris Hilton. And then, uh, perhaps this is not
so much a trivia, a thing to keep your eye
out for and if you're scared of it, you know,
be ready to defend. The next big pizza craze is
allegedly pizza in Cones, which exists already, but apparently it's
ready to boom. It's it's gonna be the next cupcake. Um,
(45:17):
you heard it here first or maybe not first, maybe
not first. And then I was just going to mention
my favorite or I'll ask you first, do you have
a favorite pop culture reference to pizza? Well, I don't
know if I would say this is my personal favorite,
but it is the one that is on written down
here that is the most tied to Chicago who has
read The Dresden Files. Two Too loves pizza. My favorite
(45:39):
part is like Harry Dresden brings Too Too pizza two
toots so excited and the Harry Dresden is kind of like, man,
what is your deal? And he's like, haven't you ever
had it? It's also much better when you hear James
Marsters tell that story, which is the best way to
experience The Dresden Files. Mine is always gonna be Panucci's
pizza on Futurama, always always, uh, including when Fry gets
(46:05):
in a bidding war with Mom over the last anchovies
on Earth and so he can share the joy of
anchovies sit there with his friends who hate them. How
do you feel about how do you feel about anchovies?
I think anchovies are the bomb, uh, And in fact
I love them so much, and my beloved husband who
is here dislikes them so much. And of course they
they're pervasive, right, like if you get the Mike says,
(46:27):
and one has anchovies, the deal is that I have
to eat all of mine because we can't have it
in the fridge with I have not been really excited
about anchovies on pizza, but I have been excited about
them in a good Seaser's salad before infidel. I'm sorry.
There are occasions when Holly and I'd be eminently disagree
with one another. Apparently one of these is that regards anchovies. No,
(46:50):
that's better more for me before Zoidberg's species eats them all.
I'll be working on it. So that was our live
show in Chicago. We should probably clarify that Samuel Morris
is actually the co inventor of Morse code. He did
not do it by himself. He and Alfred Vale worked
(47:11):
together on Morse code and other stuff relating to that
whole technology. So when we called him the inventor of
Morse code, he's really the co inventor. He had help.
He gets the spotlight because it's named after him. Yeah,
that's why we often forget poor his poor collaborator. This
(47:32):
is always, not always, but often the case with collaborators.
And because this live show was a little longer, than
one of our normal episodes. We are going to leave
without doing listener mail today. This was basically an event
for listeners, so the whole thing is a little bit
like listener mail. Um. We have gotten lots of questions
as we've started doing more live shows about how people
(47:56):
can get us to come to a place or whether
we will come to a place. For now, the best
way to do that is if there is an event
happening near you that you want us to come to,
let the event organizers know and if they feel like
our show would be a good fit for what they're
doing with their event them, they might get in touch
with us, and if they do, we will talk to
them about what it would take for us to get
out there, and we will see. We're not quite up
(48:18):
to the stuff you should know live show tour point
yet that that those guys have been doing. But we've
got a few of these, uh these live shows at
other events under our belts now and they are pretty fun. Agreed,
And I just want to also make sure we think
the organizers of c t E two for a fantastic time. Yeah,
it was definitely a fantastic time. Huge thanks to the
(48:41):
staff at C two e two for the folks that
helped us get the recording done. Even though I did
not think at all about how we should keep pushing
the push to talk during audience responses to things that
was on me. I didn't think about it either. When
I thought of it was when I listened to the
recording for the first time and went, oh, hey, that
would have been handy, so huge. Thanks to the hole
(49:03):
ce t E two team. Thanks to everybody who came
out in Chicago. You were all a marvelous audience, so amazing. Yes,
if you would like to write to us about this
or any other podcasts for a history podcast at how
Stuff Works dot com, or also on Facebook at facebook
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miss in History. Our tumbler is missed in History dot
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(49:24):
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in History. You would like to learn more about what
we talked about today, you can come to our parent
company's website, but the word pizza in the search bar.
You will find lots of stuff about pizza. You can
also come to our website, which is missed in history
dot com and you will find show notes for this
and all of our other podcasts. The share notes for
this one will include the various things that we researched
(49:47):
before putting that live show on. You can also find
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how stuff works dot com or missed in History dot com.
For more onness and thousands of other topics, visit howstaff
works dot com. E
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Vie Wilson and I'm Holly Fry and we
are recently back from a trip to Chicago, which was fantastic.
(00:23):
It was Thank you so much everyone who came to
see us in Chicago. We went there for a live
show at D two E two, which is a convention
of all kinds of pop culture, video game, entertainment, comic book,
that kind of stuff, and also Stuff you Missed the
History Class live show. Yeah, that's like the most dangerous
work trip for me to go on because, as Tracy knows,
(00:45):
I bought a lot of art on the show floor. Yep, yep.
You you definitely had art on your mind on the
show floor. I did. It's a problem basically, I can't Yeah,
I can't walk by a good drawing of Grito. That's
the it's Oh. Yeah, we had a great time in Chicago.
We had a great audience. Uh, you all were awesome.
You basically filled a whole room for us to talk
(01:07):
about the history of pizza. And now we're going to
share that episode with the rest of our listeners who
could not be there with us. Uh, you know, we're
we're going to include just the live show part of
of the show that we did live in Chicago. Um,
and I have a couple of notes just before we
get into that. One is that the microphones that we
(01:28):
were on we're a little less forgiving of us popping
our peas than the ones in our studio. Uh, so
there's a little bit more of that in this episode.
And they were also pushed to talk microphones, and we
were really good about pushing when we were talking, Uh,
not as good about continuing to push when the audience
(01:53):
was making noise. So our producer nol Has has helped
us with that. But if you notice anything that sounds
a little odd, that's probably why. And we should also
mention that normally, if you listen to our show, you
know that we run a pretty clean chip here. We
usually keep a family friendly, but there are some illusions
in this particular episode. Anytime there's a live show, it
tends to get a little looser. So we do mention
(02:14):
intoxicating substances that probably we would not be joking about
if we were doing our normal studio record. Just know
that those are there, Embrace try not to faint when
you hear references to the consumption of alcohol. Uh so
let's let's get to it. Hi, there can everyone hear me.
(02:45):
I have to say, you guys are amazing because she
sat there politely and waited for high everybody to like
greet us, So you're incredible. Also, these microphones are pushed
to talk, so that means I have been well trained
from all my years playing World of Warcraft, spend a
long time. They don't ask me about anything recent. It's
weird walking around Chicago because it kind of feels like
we're inside a stream of our podcast. That's true. I
(03:07):
haven't gotten to walk around as much as you, so
I'm just kind of in my own head in the
stream of our podcast. It's it's like that in Boston
to you, But in Boston I'm used to it now,
so it's not quite as much of a big deal.
I made a little Chicago podcast tag. Who comes to
our website ever? Thank you? So I decided to make
(03:29):
a little Chicago podcast tag to kind of round up
a lot of our Chicago stuff. And we have some
cool people like Katherine Dexter McCormick, whose family name you
may recognize from the building we're in. Uh, that's pretty cool.
And then we have Henry Gerber and Chicago Society for
Human Rights. Also cool. It's some sadness there, but generally cool. Uh.
(03:50):
But then the next thing that comes after that in
the list is the Christmas Tree Ship. Then we have
the Iroquois Theater fire. I'm laughing that they're repeated doom.
It is repeated doom. After that we had Maria Talchief
who was a Native American ballet dancer and dance in Chicago.
(04:11):
Francis Glesson Early and her tiny forensic the little dioramas
that she made, Jane Adams, who's awesome mother of social work.
And then we're back into Chicago darkness with H. H. Holmes.
I'm not going to read all of them, but yeah,
when I was putting that together, I thought, some of
this is very dark. Before we launch into pizza party time. Sidebar,
(04:32):
don't think there's pizza under your seat. This is an oprah.
I tried to make a pitch that the cheese would
make it stick really well, but nobody would go for it.
There was some healthcade I don't know, but because I
spent two years of my career writing about food safety.
She did. I think we should start by saying hello
and welcome to the podcast, which we forgot to do
the last time we did one of these lives. Who
(04:54):
should start I'll do it, Okay, Hello and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and Tracy V. Wilson. We're
gonna talk about pizza today. We're gonna talk about pizza
and kind of three arcs. We're going to talk about
the ancient precursors to pizza, and also obviously pizza in
Italy because that's really the birthplace of pizza. And then
(05:16):
we're gonna talk about pizza in America and the rest
of the world altogether, and then a little bit of
wackadoodle pizza trivia at the end. So lots of societies
eat stuff on flatbread. I know, that's a shocker. Uh.
Pizza not really strictly Italian if you want to think
(05:38):
of it in the flatbread arena, like pizza crust is
sort of like a cousin to other flatbreads, Like think
of pizza and tortillas and lavash and maybe even Neolithic people's. Yes,
there's actually some evidence that Neolithic man cooked Uh, like
batter on hot stones, and we there is so some
(06:00):
evidence that they actually used sauces on top of it.
So they were totally onto this jam way before we
thought anybody was eating pizza. Yeah, and it's pretty pretty inventive.
You know, Hey, that rock that's pretty hot from the sun.
What could I put on that and make it delicious?
That's actually how I lived my first five years. I
was really a forager child, alfonterib. I know you were
(06:23):
going to say in college also that I mean to
be frank, it's blurry, but I wouldn't be surprised. So
even when you get to Italy, there were things that
were there were flat pizza like things like torta, which
was like that. But wait but wait am I am?
I am rushing time about Grace yet, Tracy. So Greece
(06:46):
really got closer to the Italian flatbread situation. And it's
actually you could say that pizza was seated in Greece
because they made flatbreads. This sounds so freaking delicious to me,
because they would put oil on them with herbs and
sometimes dates and maybe some other little toppings and things
like honey. Does that sounds sort of yummy? I want
(07:07):
that for breakfast. And then it was actually around six
hundred BC that a Greek settlement was formed in what
is modern day Naples, and pizza sort of traveled to
that new location along with the people that settled. There
is this where we get to torta we can. We
also should mention that Egyptians also ate flatbread, so like
the Mediterranean was totally onto the flatbread thing. So that
(07:30):
you all will not think I totally don't know what
I'm doing. I have written down, Holly has lots It's okay,
I'm gonna do the exact same thing, and just stage directions.
Tell me about Egypt I pretty much did. Okay, they did.
They had flatbreads as well, very similar, very simple, a
little bit of oil, just your basic drizzle, like a
precursor to white pizza. Even yes, a glimpse of what
(07:53):
happens in our studio when Holly and I record together,
and then later our producer Knull makes it sound like
we knew what we were doing. The truth this Null
is the only one with the clue. Now, Tracy is smart.
And then I usually talk about my cats and get derailed.
All right, I just heard the cat ladies in the house. Yeah,
(08:17):
y'all are the ones writing to us about how I
should have blocked that shawl. I knitted right, that wasn't
the problem, So okay, torta. It's like pizza, flat bread
with stuff, except the weirdly the bread part was not
really edible, and that's weird to me, Like how do
you make and I know how you make an inedible
bread by doing it badly, but like why would you
do it on purpose? I can't speak to that because
(08:38):
I would probably still try to eat it. But there
was also an interesting thing going on in Rome where
the Romans had a pizza like food embrace for this
a little bit, so it was made. It sounds very
delightful with wheat flour, cheese, oil, honey, and bay leaves.
But it had an unfortunate name, which was placenta. It's
probably pronounced differently, but when you read it on the page,
(08:59):
that's a laugh riot. But before you giggle, uh, they
kind of had the word first before our current you know,
use of it from the Greek word plaque with plaques,
which actually means a flat surface. So they were making
a flat surface that was also edible, so it's less
ikey when you think about it in those terms. When
we had dinner last night, we were going over our notes, Hollywood, like,
(09:20):
did you find the thing about placenta? And I was like, no,
and don't tell me. I want to be surprised with
everyone else about what you're talking about. So now you
can just stroll about and talk about how delicious placenta is,
and you can be like, you can go totally pedantic
and be like it's historically accurate, y'all. Like just really,
anybody that gives you side, I just really get down
on them about how they don't know history. It's awesome.
(09:42):
Then go lob that into like a mom blog and
see what happened? What do you have next on your list?
Holly Virgil. In the India, go for it. Okay, So
even in the India they talk about pizza like this
stuff is ubiquitous throughout history. There is a story, there's
a reference in the India where they talk about a
hero his feast and they feature cakes of bread that
(10:02):
are loaded with delicious things, and then it ends with
see we devour the plates on which we fed. That's
basically what pizza is. For eating a thing where you
are also eating the plate that it is served on
unless you're eating one that needed a knife and fork.
That's just like early recycling. Like, so just eat your
paper plates. Going forward, what came after Virgil? Uh? You
(10:27):
know in seventy nine b c E. There's evidence of
pizza and POMPEII, and then you have a bunch of
stuff before we get to my next thing, do I
because my notes picked up in fifteen you certainly do. Okay,
I'm shocked. So when we say pizza today, even though
there are white pizzas, we a it's in our head,
(10:48):
flat bread, tomato, we sauce cheese. Right, So that's sort
of coincidentially the pizza thing, and that really didn't come
around until fifteen forty four because this is after the
Colombian Exchange. It's after Christopher Columbus went to the America's
came back to Europe with pizza, not with pizza with
tomatoes the original thirty minutes or less. Ye, So he
(11:11):
when all I have to say, flu, he sailed, this
is not drunk history. I prized did you miss Columbus
in history class? Because I'd be all right if we did. Oh.
I took an entire class on Columbus in college called
Columbus and New World Literature. That was all his diaries
(11:32):
and the men around him writing. That actually sounds kind
of interesting. It was pretty cool. So he brought tomatoes.
He brought tomatoes back to Europe and that is the
first recorded incidents of tomatoes in Italy is in fifteen
forty four. And pizza then in Naples grew into this cheap,
easy food, mostly for working poor people to eat. Did
(11:53):
you find the bit in your research about how allegedly
most people in Europe thought tomatoes were poisonous At first,
I did not find that in my research, but I
have heard that. Yeah, they allegedly didn't. But the southern
Italians were like, we're down. They're also night shades, right,
and there are definitely deadly night shades. We know that
from reading Harry Potter or Nightmare before Christmas. I have
(12:16):
that vessel on my dining room table at home. I
was with you when you purchased it, got it free.
It was a Disney World. That's closing the circle on
our references to other things in our podcast? Uh, what
have you got next? In yours? Uh? So as pizza
became more popular, there was criticism of it even as
(12:36):
it was starting to happen and it was catching on
with sort of the lower classes, where the thought was
that pizzeria's where we're bad people hung out and miscreants.
This would continue into my battern been that modernity. I
thought you were gonna say Montgomery, and I'm like, what
a my Montgomery? Like they we're going to talk about
Alabama pizza, right, So yeah, it was like, consider, uh,
(13:00):
if you had an establishment where people might go and
hang out to eat pizza, although most of it was
street food, which we're going to talk about more. It
was kind of like, oh, that's that's sort of dangerous
and shiftless types clump because throughout history, rich people have
been afraid of poor people, and we should point out
to that. At this point, the pizzas that we're going on,
we're still very similar to the ones that came over
from Greece. That very similar. Um honey, oil Bay leaves
(13:24):
a little bit of soft cheese. Yeah. And it was
really about having a simple, easy thing that you could
buy quickly. You could eat it on the go, you know,
on the street, on the way to work while you
were doing your work. You didn't have to sit down
and and bring out utensils and have this lengthy thing.
You could stop at a cart, get the thing, eat
it on your way. And the earliest pizzerias that we
know of, uh, and I might butcher some of this
(13:45):
Italian not my zone of knowledge, were Zichchio, which was
four in seventy seven, Capasso, which opened in seventeen fifty,
and Da Pietro, which formed in seventeen sixty. That one
eventually became known is Pizzeria Brandy, And that will become
important in a story we're about to get to. I
(14:05):
think you're going to tell that story. I am is it?
Which story is it? It's the Cinderella story of pizza. Oh,
that is correct. It is ahead of a thing that
I had in my notes. So Queen Margarita, the wife
of Umberto Primal, that's terrible Italian pronunciation. Please don't write
something about it. Uh. They went to Naples in nine
(14:26):
They were tired of eating French food, so they were like,
can we please eat some Italian food? And they tried
several different pieces, and the queen really liked this one
that had tomatoes and mozzarella and basil on it. And
before then people have just basically called it mozzarella pizza,
except with an Italian accent. But then they renamed it
for the queen and everyone wanted it. And allegedly she
(14:46):
got some flak for this because she was like, you guys,
this food we see poor people eating. It's freaking delicious,
and a lot of other a lot of other people
at court were like, again, that'sikey, poor people food. Although
I must cast a little bit of doubt on her taste,
because the lady didn't like French food, Like, yeah, that
(15:07):
is a little suspicious, But but she was undaunted by this,
so thankfully due to her love and her not caring
what other people think, which I must applaud her for,
it really became just a huge sensation. And that's sort
of how this that's why they call it the pizza
Cinderella story, because this thing that came from nothing became
(15:28):
super celebrated because one person believed in it, and it really, yeah,
it completely changed how people thought about pizza, which is
which is cool. Even before that, Alexander Dumont had gone
to Naples in thirty five and he had gotten really
fixated on what people were eating, and with this pizza
and At first he was like, this is just simple
food for peasants, and then he realized that people were
(15:49):
changing up their pizza depending on what was available and
what was cheap and what they didn't need to sell
to somebody else to make money. And so it went
from that kind of thing to you after the queen
got involved this kind of thing, And it also really
served to sort of endear the queen to her subjects
because this wasn't that long after unification, like prior to this, earlier,
in like three decades prior, I believe um Italy was
(16:10):
still separated into a southern and a northern and then
they had unified, but she was from the north, if
I remember correctly. So this kind of was like really
a good endearing move for the whole country, in particularly
southern Italy that they were like, oh, she loves our
food and culture, Well she must be okay, that's very kind.
What happened next, well, next is the drama bump bump bomb.
(16:35):
It's not really drama, but I read I found a
really interesting thing. So you'll read in a lot of
pizza history that after she had this, she gave this restaurant,
which was the one that we referenced earlier Pizzeria Brandy
the Royal Seal of approval, and it still sits on
the wall of that restaurant today. However, Bump pa baa.
This is where the drama comes in. So there's a
(16:57):
really wonderful BBC article from twelve where the food historian
contest this whole story because with some digging, uh, the
writer of the article discovered some things and asserts that
this restaurant actually got that royal seal years before the
pizza situation, when it was still a wine shop. And uh,
there there's some indication that possibly Esposito, who was the
(17:21):
chef that made this pizza, his relatives later down the road,
kind of backwards engineered history to make it look like
it was for their pizza. And there's even some possibility
that that letter with the royal seal isn't really from her,
that it was kind of like an underling that dashed
it off. If you look at it their pictures online
and you can see that the royal seal isn't centered,
(17:42):
it's not in the normal place it would be on
a piece of of correspondence from her from like the
royal household. It would be perfect and it's not it's
down at the bottom. It should be at the top.
It's off center. There's a little bit of question marks
around the signature. So it's kind of an interesting uh thing,
but there's no contesting that the pizza there is delicious
and everyone adores it. Um. You also dug up a
(18:06):
thing about how people were paying for pizza, right, So
at this point pizza got so popular in Italy. I
mean it was basically like, uh, you know, this a
staple food, and it was so popular and so important
and particularly as an affordable meal still for the lower
classes and people that didn't have a lot of money,
because that's actually really why pizza comes in slices. Uh.
You could buy as much as you could afford. But
(18:28):
one of the really cool things they came up with
was this thing called uh it was a pizza credit
system called pizza Otto, which meant you could have this
pizza today and pay for it in eight days to
get an eight day period, and that was pizza. It
was like pre Wimpy before he was trying to pay
for his his burgers the next week. And it was
really just this socially accepted thing of like, of course
(18:49):
you can eat today. We're not gonna let you starve
just in the next eight days. Let's work this out.
So this whole style of pizza became so culturally important
in southern Italy that in the more recent time, like
in the nineteen eighties and nineties, people started trying to
get it recognized with the same quality assurance standards that
are used for things like wine and cheese. And I
didn't write down how to say those in Italian on purpose,
(19:12):
because then I would have to try to say them
in front of you all, Holly, do you want to try?
I will. I will also point out that a little
before this, in the late eighteen hundreds, was when they
really started experimenting with pizza and so adding other things
to it. So this is when you start getting interesting
meats and slightly different cheeses in different seasonings. And this
is also the late eighteen hundreds is also when the
magical and very important wood fired brick ovens came into
(19:35):
favor for cooking pizza. Like if you've had it in
that versus another way, you know the difference. But to
go back to this association that formed in I might
butcher it. That's cool. I'm doing my best. It's the
Action No Essociation a verrace Pizza Napolitana and that's it's
shortened to VPN uh. And this group, as Tracy said,
(19:57):
was aimed at protecting the Neapolitan pizza. It had become
so important to the cultural tradition that they recognized that
other kinds of pizzas were being developed. But they really
wanted to um make that not only preserve, but also
make it the standard by which all other pizza in
the world would be judged going forward. I'm sorry I
rushed ahead of you because that entire development was really
important to why they were doing it. Uh. They wanted
(20:20):
to make sure that this, this pizza napolitana was made
right forever, that there would be a way that this
is the right way, and this is the only way
it's recognized. There are three legitimate styles of pizza according
to this rule, and they are Margharita, Marinara, and Marguerite's
Extra uh. And all of these have buffalo mazzarella in them.
No other cheese is allowed. Um. They're all really simple
(20:41):
pizzas topped with mazzarella, tomato and olive oil. And then
the difference in between them is that the Margharita has
basil and the Marinera has oregono in in garlic and
garlic in it. Uh. And then their rules about the dough.
The dough is flour, salt, water, yeast, and nothing else.
All the meeting has to be on my hand or
with a mixer that will not overheat the dough. And
(21:03):
then the dough has to be punched down and shaped
by hand. It does not go into a container or
a pan. It goes directly onto the surface in one
of those bell shaped wood burning ovens that Holly was
just talking about. Also, in the rules, you're supposed to
eat it immediately. You're not supposed to take it home.
You're not supposed to reheat it. You're not supposed to
like wander around with it, letting it drip oil on things.
(21:24):
Eat it now. Uh. And then after this happened, the
places that we're doing a bad job of making this
culturally important Italian pizza got shut down. It's like the
meanest health code ever. It better be delicious. I don't
care if your kitchen's cleaning. We would take your license
away as a random trivia side note that I didn't
have in my notes, and we didn't mention if you
wondered about where the name Marianera comes from, there's a
(21:46):
reason it has the same route as Marina, and it
was considered very popular along the water side where fishermen
needed quick food that they could eat on the run,
that they didn't need a plate for. If this were
stuff you should know, this would be Josh saying nice, Chuck,
I do. I do start to feel like if we
separated out and did did corollaries, I might be more
(22:07):
of Chuck. Really yeah, because Chuck and I have that
hippie jam together now we're when we're in the office,
we talked about a lot of hippie topics, just saying
it's all dogs. And that might make sense because lately
Josh and I have been talking about her taxes ding
I have never talked about taxes with Chuck ever. Ever, Hey,
(22:38):
to get back into our live show from Chicago, we
are going to talk about pizza in the United States
and how it is different from pizza in Italy. So
to get into American pizza, first of all, we're going
to hit you with some fun facts that if you
are anything like my household, none of this will shock
(22:58):
you and the U US, we eat a combined total
estimate of three billion pizzas each year. That's a billion
with a be as in boy, that's a lot. Uh.
That is a hundred acres of pizza a day is
consumed by the likes of us. It really does. It
really does. Say a day when I was rereading over
my notes and I was like, what was that right?
And I pulled my book out and yes, it is
(23:19):
right a day, that's three hundred and fifty slices per second.
So right now, three slices just got chomped on just then.
And what that average is out to each person, including
every child, is eating about forty six slices per year.
When we talked about this at dinner last night, my
husband was sitting next to us and he said, amateurs,
(23:41):
you're you're making up for me because I don't. I
don't eat that. I did have two slices of pizza
in the convention center today. I don't know if that counts,
but now I think you have a lot of information
about pizza in the US. I do. Well. Yeah, So
pizza made its way into the United States basically with
Italian immigrants, and so any city that had an Italian
(24:01):
immigrant population that was large enough to basically support a
restaurant wound up with a restaurant that served pizza. It
was just sort of a natural way of developing. People
wanted to have food that tasted like home, and they
wanted to have food that was made the way that
they were used to having it at home. It's the
same basic story of a lot of different foods that
are you know, come from other cultures into the United States,
(24:23):
that come along with the people who were eating them
like they ate them at home. So that that means
with with basically pizza. Following waves of immigration into the
United States, the first licensed to sell pizza was in
New York City place called Lombardies. This is, I want
to stress this was not the first place in New
(24:44):
York City making pizza. This was the first place in
New York City legally making pizza. But the really cool
thing was they had a super amazing set up there
that they're oven legendary. It could cook fifteen pizzas at once.
It was seven ft high by twelve feet wide by
twelve ft deep. This is like the serious mamma gamma
(25:06):
of pizza. Ovens Uh and Lombardes would eventually expand and
shift to offer some more additional general Italian restaurant type
fair uh and it really became a key spot in
the foundation of Little Italy in New York. The next
it's not the next place, ever. The next place I
have written down in my notes where we had pizza
(25:26):
was in Chicago, uh and, and that was Granados, which
was at nine oh seven West Taylor Street. We know
that they were open as of nineteen twenty four because
there's a postcard that survives that is like the storefront
and the some nice text in There's some discussion about
whether there was pizza being sold from uh from like
(25:47):
hand carts and stuff before that. But that was the
first Chicago pizza place. And Holly and I both read
a very dramatic exchange in the newspaper written in the
nineteen seventies. We're skipping had a little bit with that
because somebody had written about Pizzeria Pizzeria, you know, as
the first pizza place in Chicago. And oh, this food
(26:09):
critic was sorely offended. The word livid does not really
begin to describe it. And he was just like, you
guys are ignoring this place that was really the first place,
you don't know your history, you don't know what this
is about. And unfortunately by that point Granados had closed
at closed in the nineteen six one uh And as
a consequence, because they were doing Neapolitan style, not the
(26:31):
deep dish that Chicago is now famous for, and because
it had closed, it kind of gets overlooked. But to
the best of anyone's knowledge, historically, that really was the
first pizzeria here. So we you know, we had we
had pizza that was spreading through different cities. Every city
was having their own if they had, you know, a
large Italian American immigrant population having their own pizza. I
do want to stress that the reason that people forget
(26:53):
about Granados and we're talking about Chicago history is that
they were serving that uh, you know, Neapolitan pizza. They
were not so raying the types of pizza that Chicago
is famous for now. But then after World War Two,
the popularity of pizza really exploded in the United States.
The same thing was actually happening in Italy. Like in Italy, uh,
(27:14):
after World War two, as tourism was expanding, people who
had started to associate pizza with Italian food would go
to Italy and they would expect to find pizza anywhere
in Italy, even though it was from southern Italy, particularly
around Naples, and so like these restaurants in northern itast
at least started trying to make pizza. And these first
pizza attempts were not very good. They did not know
(27:35):
what they were doing. Yeah, if you go back and
look to like the record, I always think that cookbooks
are like one of the best history books on earth
because they'll really tell you what's going on. And if
you look at at cookbooks from Italy at the time,
nowhere but around Naples did any of them feature like
how to make pizza. It just it really was not
the national food at that point that we thought it
(27:57):
was already that the tourists were scuttling over there to
eat eat. It was still really a Neapolitan thing. But
all of these other pizzerias throughout Italy were like, we
gotta meet demand, and that's why they got all the
mediocre pizza. Yeah, it was, but some of the descriptions
are really gross. They were like and then it started
out with kind of an English muffiny situation, which you
can make. You can make an English muffin pizza home.
(28:19):
It's a nice snack, but you don't really want to
go into a restaurant expecting pizza and get a large
thing with an English that's weird. We're gonna talk about
some more weird pizzas later sold that thoughts too. So
after World War Two, the popularity just getting a lot
in response to a lot of things, like people are
starting to move to the suburbs, people are starting there's
(28:41):
a whole that whole idea of like the fifties housewife
needing to supply her family with a hearty meal that's
easy to make, like a pizza making kids started coming around.
I think you had down when the first one of
that was right, Yeah, the first one was in. And
we should also point out that this was really a
time post World War two was really when the concept
of leisure culture happened in America. So pizza kind of
(29:01):
slotted perfectly into that. Like you could use it as
a party food. It was great for a snack food,
it was a fun treat for kids. Like pizza really
just kind of had that perfect storm of timing where
it got popular here at the same time that we
were kind of past the horribleness of World War two,
and that idea, like she said, of like fifties housewives
and the future was bright and we have time and
(29:22):
money that we can spend on yummy, delicious treats. Pizza.
The first commercial mix for pizza sauce came around at
the same time. It was Roman Pizza Mix from Worcester, Massachusetts,
and it was invented by a guy named Frank A. Fiarello.
And was also the first time that we saw the
concept of frozen pizza, which was again going along with
(29:43):
that kind of like positivity upswing where the US was
kind of into manufacturing and and not just leisure but convenience.
It's also when we started getting the really standardized franchise
pizza restaurant with like the thing that like region have
their their pizza that people living there identify with, and
that maybe people outside of that region, like the you know,
(30:05):
sort of have an idea of what Chicago Deep Dish
pizza is or like what New York style pizza is.
But then there's like the ubiquitous standardized pizza that you
walk into a chain restaurant to get, like is a
flat thing and there's cheese and there's pepperoni and whatever
on it. Uh, if you've been eating any of these,
then you probably if maybe the first time you ever
try to eat a pizza margarita from the more Italian style,
(30:28):
you're like, where's the stuff on it? Because we're used
to eating at places like Pizza Hut, Little Suesars, and Dominoes,
which are open in nineteen nineteen fifty nine, And I
wrote one of these states are wrong? They were. It
was all in like a two year window all these
places opened. Pizza Hut was in Kansas, and Little Suses
and Dominoes were both in Michigan. Uh. And none of
(30:49):
them were founded by people who were Italian or were
actually interested in making good pizza. They were all founded
is basically a business proposition. Uh. And that is the
pizza that a lot of people associate with pizza? Is
that pizza rather than sort of the more unique, individually
culturally flared pizza. Yeah, I have in my notes. The
first Domino was in if the Lanti, Michigan. It wasn't
(31:12):
called Domino's yet, and that was in nineteen sixty Did
I say that right? Sweet? I should know I have
relatives in Michigan, but that does not confer knowledge. Uh,
and and uh it became Dominoes later in ninety five.
There were two brothers that founded it and it it
started as Dominics, and then when the one brother bought
the other one out, he changed it to Domino's. The
(31:32):
other interesting thing that's really going on at this time
is that the nineteen fifties also featured a huge uptick
again as part of that leisure culture and a desire
to be worldly, this fascination with ethnic foods, and so
even though pizza was already here, it like that was
just where it got the super foothold, so much so
that people were actually scared that it was going to
(31:53):
supplant the hot dog is the great American snack, which
I would argue, maybe, dude, we're coming for a hot dogs.
I love a good hot dog, but I think pizza
wins for me. Sure. Tombstone Pizza was introduced in nineteen
sixty two, although I found one thing that said nineteen
fifty seven was actually the first Frisen pizza. But these
weren't originally for home eating. They were more for restaurants. Yeah,
(32:15):
Tombstone actually started as a distributor that marketed their products
to bars because people drink and they want a little
snackaroo with their beer their cocktail. Who doesn't. Uh. So
that was really where it started. And it wasn't until
they realized like, oh, we're really good at this, We're
really good at manufacturing pizza, and I bet we could
go direct to consumer that they shifted to that model
(32:37):
because originally it was just restaurants supply. It was also
an about this time that pizza parlors started becoming a
fun place for young people to hang out and work,
and of course an also place for old people to
disparage because that's where all the young people were. That's
how they did it in the old country, remember right,
remember back in in Italy. What happened next? Holly, Well,
(33:01):
next we're gonna talk about we're gonna shift gears a
little bit and talk about sort of the regional styles
of pizza, and then we'll get to all that fun
trivia great pizza. Uh. And we're gonna talk about trivia next.
But before we get to all the pizza trivia, we're
gonna have a little word from one of our fantastic sponsors.
(33:30):
So we really closed out our live show with some
Q and A from the audience. Uh, And we're not
gonna have the Q and A from the audience as
part of this live show because it was it was
mostly random stuff that folks are personally curious about. So
unlike our live show on presidential assassinations, where we included
the Q and A, because the Q and A was
almost entirely about the presidential assassinations, We're gonna We're gonna
(33:53):
end with what the actual live show part of our
or what the actual live podcast part of our Lives
show ended with, which was some interesting regional pizzas, some
pizza trivia, some uh, some just personal notes about pizza. Okay,
(34:13):
So a lot of the regional pizzas that people identify
really strongly with a specific place started before the boom
in standardized franchise pizzas. So like before things like Pizza
Hut became ubiquitous, communities are already making their own unique pizzas.
Who listens to Judge John Hodgman, Okay, recently, Judg N.
(34:34):
Hodgeman was settling a dispute about whether white pizzas counted
his pizzas or not, and he he said that he
thought New Haven, Connecticut was the center of pizza culture
in the United States. I thought he was making a joke,
but no, there really is a very unique pizza culture
in New Haven, Connecticut, and the pizzas kind of oblong.
Often the crest is a little more charred than you
(34:56):
might see elsewhere. And one of the famous things is
a clam pizza. Yeah. See that either sounds great to
you or terrible to you. I want, I do want
to say it is a white pizza, so there's no
there's no tomato part in there. Uh. And that was
that was created in nive by a guy who I
(35:17):
think his name was Frank Peppe. I am guessing on
how to pronounce that. And that is a real thing
from New Haven, Connecticut. Are you ready to talk about
Chicago Deep Dish? We are ready to talk about Chicago
Deep Dish. Don't get excited. That's not the whole rest
of the thing, But I do love Deep Dish. So
(35:37):
Deep Dish, of course, as most of you probably know,
was born a pizzeria. You know, there's on the corner
of Ohio and Wabash, and that was in three although
it did not actually go by that name until later.
It was first simply called the pizzeria, and then it
was called Pizzeria Ricardo. It was not until Pizzeria Doe opened,
etherialized they needed a pizzeria, you know, and that was
(35:57):
that was in and that's when they which the name.
We drove by their drove. We wrote in a cab
by there yesterday on our way to go to the
dressing down and exhibit, which was lovely. Uh. Pizzia Juno
was actually opened by a Texan named Ike Sewell and
an Italian named Rick Ricardo. But the lore is that
in fact Sewell originally wanted to open a Mexican restaurant.
(36:22):
He didn't He wasn't really going for Italian initially, until
Ricardo was like, I don't like Mexican food, and so
it became a pizza place instead. Uh. And so they're
there's like, there are people who claimed that that Ike
will sue. However, you say that he that he invented it,
and then there are also people that say that his
(36:42):
business partner partner invented it. And then there's a whole
third train of thought that it was their employee, Ruddy
Rudy Monnati. You think that's right, sure, but you're a
wave of disapproval from the ground. I don't know, Okay, good, Yeah,
I like that we have like an instant fact check. Yeah.
(37:03):
And actually Maul Natty's grandson, who worked at pizzerie you
know for a long time, eventually opened lou Mau Natties,
which is in and then his half brother Rudy Jr.
Opened Paisanos. They're pretty much like the Dynasty of Chicago pizza. Really. Yeah,
so I think pretty much everyone agrees that i Will
probably did not personally invent the deep dish pizza himself.
(37:26):
He was just really good at marketing it. What do
you have next to talk about more weird pizza? Yeah,
next time, kind of ready to talk about weird stuff. Well,
I'm gonna talk about a couple other This is definitely
not all the other weird, not necessarily weird, unique unique
pizzas from other places around the United States. Colorado Rocky
(37:47):
Mountain Pie is a pizza with this enormous, enormously thick
crust and you can't really eat all the safty part
and eat all the crust too, So the crust afterward
is dipped in honey, like it's you're dessert. I'm cool
with that. I like honey. Uh. Yeah. This was also
a time so you know, as we get into the
sixties and seventies and going forward, there were some really
(38:08):
weird ones. This one I did not find where people
were doing this, but there was allegedly one experimentation with
the concept of pizza that was fairly common in the
US for a little while. That started with a biscuit
style crust and then they put onion tomato and you
may or may not grown liver worst on top. Half
of you are like that sounds fab and the other
(38:29):
half are like thumbs um. This is also when English
muffin pizzas became a thing, and for a while there
was one particular trend where you would make an English
muffin pizza and because it was on what had been
considered a breakfast food up at that point, you always
served it with coffee. I'm sorry, a pizza and coffee
sounds gross to me. I drink coffee with everything, so
(38:52):
I don't. I have no no gauge, you do you? Uh? So,
of course New York City is really very us for
takeout slices of pizza. Uh. And that is often like
a crust that's simultaneously crispy and chewy, and definitely a
lot thener than in Chicago, and then the last kind
of odd not really on. I don't know why I
keep saying they're odd. They're not the tomato pie in Trenton,
(39:16):
New Jersey. We're basically the cheese is under the toppings
and the toppings go under the sauce. It's kind of backwards.
And that's actually how a lot of the earlier pizzas
in the United States were made, was with the with
the the cheese going under the sauce. And then when
she get into the nineteen eighties, California, those a wacky
heard decided that they would kind of kick up this
(39:36):
concept of gourmet pizza. That's like when the first barbecue
chicken pizza happened, and places like California Pizza Kitchen and
Wolfgang Puck really kind of blossomed and sent that all
off into just the stratosphere in terms of popularity. We
should also point out that there are also a lot
of other Chicago pizza styles besides dust deep dish. Deep
Dish is sort of the thing that everyone outside of
(39:57):
Chicago has decided as the Chicago style pizza, but there
are other ones also. Um there is stuffed pizza, which
is like deep dish, but more extreme. Uh. And then
I read some stuff about how on the South Side
there's one that's like a really thin crust pizza that's
a lot more similar to what was served in April.
I'm glad somebody's excited. Uh. If we were here for longer,
(40:19):
we would need to go on like a pizza tour.
And you actually can go on a pizza tour. It
was really important to us to see that down Nawby exhibit.
Though there was much gasping. But this is not the
only country that has food that people call pizza, even
though other styles are not really what we would look
at and go, oh, that's a pizza. Well, and some
(40:41):
of them are like American people putting the word like
nation before the word pizza to describe a food that
is not recognizable is pizza like cocao miaki people call
the Japanese pizza. It's not like pizza. It is like
a People also like to call it a pancake. It's
not like a pancake e or it is like this
(41:02):
concoction of of shredded cabbage, that is, it is held
together with some things that you would make a pancake
or a dough out of but then you top it
with some delicious sauce and some some bacon or other meat.
It's super good. Benito flakes. Bonito flakes, Uh yeah, Patrick
has made them for me. You are a lucky woman. Yeah.
(41:22):
But pizza, so stop calling a Japanese pizza. There's there's
also a pizza, so it's there's also a food that's
called Turkish pizza. When you hear it, you'll be like
that pizza. Uh. It's called la lama june or lama june.
I'm not sure the exact pronunciation. But it's a flatbread
and you put mince meat on top, and then that
sprinkled with lemon juice like a lot of Mediterranean meat
(41:43):
dishes are, and then it's rolled with veggies in the
middle and then sometimes sliced. That doesn't sound like pizza
at all, but people call it pizza because it starts
with a flat bread and meat. Do you do you
have other pizza things you want to share? Before? I
read a couple of people's just scathing words about how
much they hated pizza. Read the scathing words and then
we'll do fun trivia. Let's do Okay, here's person who
(42:03):
hated pizza Samuel Morse and inventor of Morse Code and
Pizza Hate. Before she even reads this, I really feel
like you need to brace for the level of iron,
because that man hate pizza. Here's how Samuel Morse, inventor
of Morse Code and Pizza Hate, described pizza in a
(42:27):
species of most nauseating cake covered over with slices of
pomadoro or tomatoes, and sprinkled with little fish and black pepper,
and I know not what other ingredients. It all together
looks like a piece of bread that had been taken
reeking out of the sewer. Do you wanna hear somebody
(42:48):
else who hated pizza? I only have one more, and
I tried to go finding more and was because I
was like, these are great. I want to be a
lot of these, uh, And I could only find the
two that were in the book that Holly and I,
independently of one another, reviewed for this podcast Carlo Koladi.
I think is how one size says that who who
(43:09):
was the author of Adventures of Pinocchio? Quote the blackened
aspect of the toasted crust, the whitish sheen of garlic
and anchovie, the greenish yellow tint of the oil, and
fried herbs, and the little bits of red from the
tomato here and there give pizza the appearance of complicated
(43:29):
filth that matches the dirt of the vendor. What a peach, right,
That guy's a jerk. You don't got to be mean
to people. I have fun pizza factoids, tell us, tell us,
so my first and these are kind of like things
that in research caught my eye as delightful or interesting.
Uh so, the first is it? In nine four the
(43:50):
spectacular Sophia Loren, who was born in Rome though she
grew up near Naples. She was really the first one
that kind of associated sex appeal with pizza when she
started Laura di Napoli. She was a gorgeous pizza maker
who had lost her wedding ring, which sort of today
sounds like a wonderful movie as well. I'm waiting for
the remake in the ninth. The ninet sixties was really
(44:11):
when pizza had become so globally popular that both Japan
and Sweden had make at home pizza kits, But of
course they had very different ingredients in them, things like
ginger and benito flakes, which we would never find in
a pizza kit here. I just found that really interesting. Uh.
This next one is kind of googie. So in the
nineteen nineties is some of you probably know being history buffs. Uh.
North Korea was having a terrible, terrible famine, and that
(44:34):
was when Kim Jong Eel was like, you know what,
I would like pizza. Uh. So he actually, in a
completely culturally to his own people tone deaf move, flew
in a famous pizza maker from Italy just to sit
in the palace and make him pizza. Uh. In two
thousand three, we'll we'll go to fun stuff now. In
two thousand three, the most popular fake name that was
(44:56):
used when placing orders with Dominoes, according to Reuters, it
was Paris Hilton. And then, uh, perhaps this is not
so much a trivia, a thing to keep your eye
out for and if you're scared of it, you know,
be ready to defend. The next big pizza craze is
allegedly pizza in Cones, which exists already, but apparently it's
ready to boom. It's it's gonna be the next cupcake. Um,
(45:17):
you heard it here first or maybe not first, maybe
not first. And then I was just going to mention
my favorite or I'll ask you first, do you have
a favorite pop culture reference to pizza? Well, I don't
know if I would say this is my personal favorite,
but it is the one that is on written down
here that is the most tied to Chicago who has
read The Dresden Files. Two Too loves pizza. My favorite
(45:39):
part is like Harry Dresden brings Too Too pizza two
toots so excited and the Harry Dresden is kind of like, man,
what is your deal? And he's like, haven't you ever
had it? It's also much better when you hear James
Marsters tell that story, which is the best way to
experience The Dresden Files. Mine is always gonna be Panucci's
pizza on Futurama, always always, uh, including when Fry gets
(46:05):
in a bidding war with Mom over the last anchovies
on Earth and so he can share the joy of
anchovies sit there with his friends who hate them. How
do you feel about how do you feel about anchovies?
I think anchovies are the bomb, uh, And in fact
I love them so much, and my beloved husband who
is here dislikes them so much. And of course they
they're pervasive, right, like if you get the Mike says,
(46:27):
and one has anchovies, the deal is that I have
to eat all of mine because we can't have it
in the fridge with I have not been really excited
about anchovies on pizza, but I have been excited about
them in a good Seaser's salad before infidel. I'm sorry.
There are occasions when Holly and I'd be eminently disagree
with one another. Apparently one of these is that regards anchovies. No,
(46:50):
that's better more for me before Zoidberg's species eats them all.
I'll be working on it. So that was our live
show in Chicago. We should probably clarify that Samuel Morris
is actually the co inventor of Morse code. He did
not do it by himself. He and Alfred Vale worked
(47:11):
together on Morse code and other stuff relating to that
whole technology. So when we called him the inventor of
Morse code, he's really the co inventor. He had help.
He gets the spotlight because it's named after him. Yeah,
that's why we often forget poor his poor collaborator. This
(47:32):
is always, not always, but often the case with collaborators.
And because this live show was a little longer, than
one of our normal episodes. We are going to leave
without doing listener mail today. This was basically an event
for listeners, so the whole thing is a little bit
like listener mail. Um. We have gotten lots of questions
as we've started doing more live shows about how people
(47:56):
can get us to come to a place or whether
we will come to a place. For now, the best
way to do that is if there is an event
happening near you that you want us to come to,
let the event organizers know and if they feel like
our show would be a good fit for what they're
doing with their event them, they might get in touch
with us, and if they do, we will talk to
them about what it would take for us to get
out there, and we will see. We're not quite up
(48:18):
to the stuff you should know live show tour point
yet that that those guys have been doing. But we've
got a few of these, uh these live shows at
other events under our belts now and they are pretty fun. Agreed,
And I just want to also make sure we think
the organizers of c t E two for a fantastic time. Yeah,
it was definitely a fantastic time. Huge thanks to the
(48:41):
staff at C two e two for the folks that
helped us get the recording done. Even though I did
not think at all about how we should keep pushing
the push to talk during audience responses to things that
was on me. I didn't think about it either. When
I thought of it was when I listened to the
recording for the first time and went, oh, hey, that
would have been handy, so huge. Thanks to the hole
(49:03):
ce t E two team. Thanks to everybody who came
out in Chicago. You were all a marvelous audience, so amazing. Yes,
if you would like to write to us about this
or any other podcasts for a history podcast at how
Stuff Works dot com, or also on Facebook at facebook
dot com slash missed in History and on Twitter at
miss in History. Our tumbler is missed in History dot
tumbler dot com, or also on Pentterrist at petris dot
(49:24):
com slash missed in History. Our Instagram is also missed
in History. You would like to learn more about what
we talked about today, you can come to our parent
company's website, but the word pizza in the search bar.
You will find lots of stuff about pizza. You can
also come to our website, which is missed in history
dot com and you will find show notes for this
and all of our other podcasts. The share notes for
this one will include the various things that we researched
(49:47):
before putting that live show on. You can also find
an archive of every episode we have ever done. You
can do all that and a whole lot more at
how stuff works dot com or missed in History dot com.
For more onness and thousands of other topics, visit howstaff
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Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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