Since its invention, pizza has gone from royal meal eaten at special occasions, to staple of the hardworking peasant, to the American cultural icon that it is today. But how often when we sit down for a slice do we think about the history of this seemingly simple dish?
It seems as though it's been around forever, but there was a time when the world was without pizza. Most of the food of Italy hundreds of years ago would be unrecognizable to modern eyes. After all, tomatoes were believed to be poisonous back then, due to their close relation to the deadly nightshade plant. One man, however, is painted by history as having seen the potential in this humble, red fruit. He saw the culinary possibilities and depth that could be accessed by integrating the tomato into Italian cuisine. Though… Only after a rough start. That man was the personal chef to the Queen of Italy, and his name was Giovanni Pizza.
Culinary historians have been unable to piece together exactly the events of that fateful night, but it is generally accepted that the first pizza was created in a blind rage. Monsignor Pizza was a man of clearly ill temper -- he was notably unable to keep an apprentice for any longer than a few weeks. Queen Isabelle of Italy had made some remarks to other nobles at a dinner the previous week that her chef was starting to lose his touch. He was an old dog, she claimed, and he was unable to learn any new tricks. (This is a rough translation. The original Italian statement was significantly more vulgar.)
That chef decided to take matters into his decidedly still skilled hands.
He wanted to poison the queen in a way that would be both subtle and honorable, as befit a person of her station. He baked flatbread until it was crispy and spread mashed tomatoes not quite to the edge -- those, of course, would be the active ingredient. To give the dish a noble touch, he delicately laid basil leaves in a circle atop it. This proved troublesome, however, as the basil leaves would often fly off of the tomato base due to the thermal currents in his walk-in brick oven.
In what would turn out to be his masterstroke, Monsignor Pizza melted mozzarella cheese over all the other ingredients. With the red tomatoes, the white cheese, and the green basil, he had created a dish representative of the tricolore -- the flag of Italy that persists to this day.
Given that his name is now attached to something loved worldwide, and not reviled as that of an assassin, it is easy to guess how the presentation of Pizza's special Flatbread Pie was received. After only a month, Queen Isabelle officially declared that the dish and the man should share a name, for both were equal in greatness. The Pizza family continued to serve the royal family of Italy for hundreds of years, even through bloody usurpations and other breakings of lineage.
Giovanni was also the first to ladle tomatoes over pasta, but generations of Pizzas to come would focus on continuing to improve their namesake. The addition of pepperoni was realized by Giovanni's son Guillome. Extra cheese, by his grandson. A woman by the name of Sofía Marcozzi Pizza -- who married into the Pizza family -- was the first to serve cold pizza the morning after it was prepared. All of these pizza aspects that we simply take for granted were once an amazing culinary revolution.
There were lows among all of these highs, of course. Guillome was the first to try vegetables as a pizza topping, but instead of the now-common peppers, onions, or mushrooms, he used the leaves of the rhubarb plant. These are poisonous, unlike tomatoes, and caused the deaths of over 40 people before the rhubarb was discovered as the culprit. This was not enough to besmirch the name of pizza, capitalized or otherwise, as the deaths were officially labelled "necessary sacrifices in the name of culinary progress" and also "probably a bunch of [illegitimately conceived children] who deserved it anyway."
However, eight generations after the great Giovanni Pizza, Mattimeo Pizza officially went too far. For his creation of a so-called "deeply dished" pizza, the entire Pizza family was chased out of Italy. Curiously, Mattimeo was given as harsh a punishment as his ancestor would have received if he had succeeded in poisoning the queen -- he was put to death in the public square.
Neighboring Germany readily accepted the now-displaced Pizza family. The innovations picked up again quickly, as Mattimeo's daughter added German sausage to the Italian pizza. The topping swept across Europe and even America, thanks in part to the high population of Germans in Texas.
But for a brief period in the deepest throes of World War II, Germany is where the Pizza family -- now called the Von Pizza family -- has continued to live and work. The current generation of Von Pizzas is led by Baron Manfred Von Pizza. He already has under his belt such developments as the dessert pizza, the mango-and-pulled-pork variant of his grandfather's Hawaiian pizza, and that culinary juggernaut, the pizza roll. (California-style pizza cannot be pinned on him, Baron Von Pizza frequently insists, and he does not know where it came from or why it came to be.)
All of this time and effort, the toil of generations, is behind every bite of the sometimes-soggy, sometimes-greasy, but always satisfying food that we Americans consume 23.5 billion slices of each year. Slice carefully, chew slowly, savor every bite, and think of the Von Pizza family next time you order a pie.