subject: The History Of The Modern Pizza [print this page] The word pizza is thought to have evolved as a mispronunciation of the word pita or picta. Pita was a type of bread that has been popular in the Middle East and Mediterranean for thousands of years. The word pizza first appeared in 997AD in a piece of Latin text found in the town of Gaeta in Southern Italy.
Flavoured flat breads have been found in all parts of the Mediterranean, the Middle East, India and some parts of Northern Europe, some of which date back over 3,000 years. The first reference to cheese being used is when the Persian King, Darius The Great's soldiers cooked a flat bread on their shields. They covered the resulting flat disc with dates and cheese.
Bakers used a piece of flat dough to check the temperature of their ovens to see if they were hot enough to cook the bread. The poor were sold the resulting product. Most bakers covered the piece of dough in a thin white sauce. Slowly this changed with them adding oil, cheese or tomatoes.
The first modern pizza was made in 1889 by Raffaele Esposito to honour the Queen consort of Italy, Margarita of Savoy. The pizza was designed to replicate the colours of the Italian flag, so was topped with mozzarella cheese, tomatoes and basil.
Today you can buy a pizza in any country on earth. The toppings used are continuing to evolve to the point where if you want a pizza with chocolate and chillies as the main ingredients you can have it. Cooking methods are also evolving, but the best way to cook them is still in a wood fired stone oven. Microwaveable pizzas are OK in an emergency, but nothing tastes better than a pizza fresh from a proper wood fuelled pizza oven.
The pizza is also being continually re-packaged and re-branded. The latest marketing ploy is for pizza shops to make you a custom made pizza, which they then deliver to your home for you to bake when you want to.
