Between two worlds -- The far-flung story of pizza pie

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Between two worlds -- The far-flung story of pizza pie

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A friend once marveled that fish and lemons, two foods harvested so far apart, could taste so good together.

Many an everyday recipe combines ingredients of far-flung origins. Pizza pie is a good example.

Ancient Roman water buffalo are part of the picture.  According to Judy Ridgway in The Cheese Companion, herds of these animals have inhabited the Campania region of the southern “boot” of Italy since the second century A.D. Although some historians claim the buffalo came to Italy with the Longobards around 596 A.D., it is quite possible that the cattle are native to the area.

Up to 200 years ago, Italians would gather the semi-wild buffalo at sunrise for milking. The rest of the time, the buffalo were left to graze in the countryside.  Except for a setback in World War II, when retreating Nazis killed many of the buffalo, the herds have led a peaceful existence.

Many cheese connoisseurs insist that the only true mozzarella is made from buffalo milk, like that made in the Campanian city of Aversa. To their palate, cow-milk mozzarella is a rubbery, tasteless imitation.

Italians were making pizzas long before Europeans ever knew of tomatoes.  They savored flatbreads with mozzarella and other cheeses, spices and meats, blissful in their ignorance of the yellowish fruit growing in unknown lands.  But this didn’t stop the Aztecs and Incas from enjoying Lycopersicum esculentum, a native of the equatorial highlands of South America.  The Encyclopedia Americana said that the tomato is a member of the nightshade family and a close relative of the eggplant and potato.

The Italians adopted the tomato as early as 1554, soon after it came to the Old World. The English, French, Germans and Belgians waited until the 1580s to cultivate tomatoes, and the plant was not grown in the United States until the late 1770s. Because North Americans long feared that tomatoes were poisonous, tomatoes were not a popular food until around 1900.

In Italy, tomatoes were known as “pomi d’ori” (“gold apples,” for the yellow color of early varieties). David Gerard Hogan, in Gastronomy of Italy, wrote the Neapolitans were the first Italians to add “golden apples” to their pizzas.

Pizza first came to American shores in the late 1800s, brought here by immigrants from the south of Italy (northern Italians preferred focaccia flatbread). “Italian immigrants built commercial bakeries and backyard ovens to produce breads they had eaten in Italy,” said Robert W. Brower in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America. At first, pizza was exclusively an “Italian thing,” but other Americans on the East and West coasts had begun to love it at the end of the Great Depression, in the late 1930s.

My father, a well-traveled Marine, would make pizza for his relatives in Natchez, Mississippi in the early 1960s.  This was an Anglo-American family accustomed to black-eyed peas, greens, okra and cornbread. So, the reactions to pizza were mixed.

It should come as no surprise that a non-Italian like my father was one of America’s pizza pioneers. David Gerard Hogan, also in the Oxford Encyclopedia, revealed that the success of the Pizza Hut restaurant chain has more to do with the late 1950s revolution of fast-food franchising than with any tradition of Italian immigrant cuisine.” The Pizza Hut empire was founded in Wichita, Kansas in 1958 by Dan and Frank Carney, two brothers “with no experience in pizza making, but (a desire) for income to pay their college tuition.”

By the way, the Reference USA online database now lists two Pizza Huts in Natchez.