If aliens were to descend on planet Earth and collect samples of quintessentially human things, pizza would most certainly be on the list. What's not to like about it? Pizza can be small enough for a personal all-in-one meal or large enough to share with friends and family. It can be cut into whatever portion suits the consumer and the potential for flavor combinations is endless. So, how did this staple of the modern human diet come to be and how did it come to be so ubiquitous?
Well, it's always best to start at the source. In this case, we're talking about Italy... sort of. To get the full history of pizza, we have to expand our search to the entire Mediterranean in general. Since nearly 1000 BC, Persian cultures have been melting cheese on chewy, doughy flatbread and covering it with toppings. The ancient Romans brought a crucial ingredient, olive oil, to the party. In the colony that would eventually become Naples, the site of the first recorded pizza shop, archaeologists have found early baking stones, the later models of which became crucial to pizza-making.
But all of this stone-cooked, cheese-covered, toppings-augmented food is not pizza. What's missing? Well, the sauce, of course. Any amateur culinary historian knows that tomatoes didn't come to Europe until the 16th century when Spanish explorers brought them back from Peru. As is the case with many great recipes, the first traditional pizzas came about through necessity in the poorer classes. The famous recipe grew out of lower-class neighborhoods in Naples where local taverns started serving their olive oil, cheese and crushed tomato pies. That's why pizza goes so well with beer- It started out as bar food.
As for the name, there are two possible origins for the term "pizza". One is the Italian term pizzicare, a verb connoting a small plucking or pinching motion. This either refers to the way pizza dough is pulled and pinched during the stretching phase, or the way the finished product is plucked from the oven using a long wooden board. The other possibility is from the Latin term pinsere, a verb meaning "to press" or "to crush". This refers to the method of flattening the dough with one's hands instead of a rolling pin and relates to the military term "pincer attack".
Regardless of where it got its name, pizza soon migrated to the United States during the 19th century when immigrants brought their home countries' recipes to America. In an attempt to Anglicize the term, a lot of these early American pizzas were simply called Tomato Pie. At the turn of the century, a New Yorker named Gennaro Lombardi opened a pizza stand and the wide New York slice was born. A few decades later, the pie made its way to Chicago where it took on a deep, flaky shape. By the 1950's, American families grew to love the pie. That's when Tom Monaghan, the founder of Domino's Pizza, created a business model based on delivery. He wasn't the first person to deliver a pizza, but he was the first business owner to make it the center of his enterprise.
Today, Americans consume pizza by the billions of pies. We eat it delivery, frozen, restaurant-style and occasionally home made. Without a doubt, this spectacular food with humble origins is one of the great inventions of our species.