What Makes it Pizza?
Many of you may have been eating pizza a lot longer than Ihave, relatively speaking. It wasn’t until towards the end of my senior year inhigh school that those of us students who worked on performing the school playdecided after our performance to drive to the nearest big town and get somepizza. Before that, I had no idea what pizza was. I wondered if I would likeit, as we waited for it to be delivered to our tables.
I think it was a round pizza, but it was cut into squares.I can’t say it was love at first bite, but it had a lot of tastes. It had 2 or3 types of meat on it, and a tomato sauce, and probably onions and greenpeppers. I wasn’t too happy with the onions, but I didn’t make a fuss overthem. I didn’t want anybody to think I was weird. Everybody else thought it wasgreat.
I’ve had a lot of pizza since then. Mostly, it’s been roundpizzas, cut into slices, with tomato sauce and cheese. Various meats,vegetables and occasionally even fruit would be on it. (I love a good ham andpineapple pizza.)
About 2 decades ago, I started noticing a new pizza in thegrocery store freezers. It was called chicken margarita pizza, or somethinglike that. Instead of tomato sauce, it had some sort of white sauce. I couldn’ttell if it had any cheese at all. The meat was chicken, and there may have beena few vegetables and herbs on it. It didn’t look like pizza to me at all.
All this comes up because I just read a brief article inArcheology magazine. The on-going excavation of Pompeii had unearthed anotherfresco, one of a still-life on a table. There was a large tray on the table,with a slab of focaccia bread on it. There also was a variety of fruit in thepicture. The question asked by the article was, is this a picture of theforerunner of pizza? Of course, back then, they didn’t have access to anythingresembling tomatoes, so it wouldn’t have had a tomato sauce. But the scientiststhought it looked like focaccia bread covered in various fruits.
Would they have called it pizza? I doubt it; languageschange over time. But I rather like the sound of it. A slab of bread covered infruit. Maybe with a drizzle of olive oil and some appropriate herbs and spices.
I don’t think I’ve seen focaccia bread available in thegrocery store since we moved to Florida. To me, it always looked a bit like anextra large slab of fried bread dough. Maybe next time I make that delicacy, I’lltry making a ‘fruit pizza’ out of some of it. What do you think, would you trymaking a fruit pizza? Would you taste one?
Alas, I am not supposed to have bread, fried or not, so itcould take me a while to get to that food experiment.
