![]() Margherita’s seal of approval not only elevated the pizza from being a food fit only for lazzaroni to being something a royal family could enjoy, but also transformed pizza from a local into a truly national dish. Her favourite – the last of the three – was christened pizza margherita in her honour. Hastily summoned to prepare some local specialities for the queen, the pizzaiolo Raffaele Esposito cooked three sorts of pizza: one with lard, caciocavallo and basil another with cecenielli and a third with tomatoes, mozzarella and basil. While on a visit to Naples in 1889, King Umberto I and Queen Margherita grew tired of the complicated French dishes they were served for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Even those dedicated to Neapolitan cuisine disdained to mention it – despite the fact that the gradual improvement in the lazzaroni’s status had prompted the appearance of the first pizza restaurants.Īll that changed after Italian unification. ![]() When the first cookbooks appeared in the late 19th century, they pointedly ignored pizza. In 1831, Samuel Morse – inventor of the telegraph – described pizza as a ‘species of the most nauseating cake … covered over with slices of pomodoro or tomatoes, and sprinkled with little fish and black pepper and I know not what other ingredients, it altogether looks like a piece of bread that has been taken reeking out of the sewer’. Associated with the crushing poverty of the lazzaroni, they were frequently denigrated as ‘disgusting’, especially by foreign visitors. But it was their unpopularity – and hence their low price – that made them attractive.įor a long time, pizzas were scorned by food writers. Only recently introduced from the Americas, these were still a curiosity, looked down upon by contemporary gourmets. But others included caciocavallo (a cheese made from horse’s milk), cecenielli (whitebait) or basil. The simplest were topped with nothing more than garlic, lard and salt. Though similar in some respects to Virgil’s flatbreads, they were now defined by inexpensive, easy-to-find ingredients with plenty of flavour. As Alexandre Dumas noted in Le Corricolo (1843), a two liard slice would make a good breakfast, while two sous would buy a pizza large enough for a whole family. Sold not in shops, but by street vendors carrying huge boxes under their arms, they would be cut to meet the customer’s budget or appetite. Always rushing about in search of work, they needed food that was cheap and easy to eat. Numbering around 50,000 they scraped by on the pittance they earned as porters, messengers or casual labourers. The most abject of these were known as lazzaroni, because their ragged appearance resembled that of Lazarus. As the urban economy struggled to keep pace, an ever greater number of the city’s inhabitants fell into poverty. Fuelled by overseas trade and a steady influx of peasants from the countryside, its population ballooned from 200,000 in 1700 to 399,000 in 1748. Under the Bourbon kings, Naples had become one of the largest cities in Europe – and it was growing fast. They then scattered them with mushrooms and herbs they had found in the woods and guzzled them down, crust and all, prompting Aeneas’ son Ascanius to exclaim: “Look! We’ve even eaten our plates!”īut it was in late 18th-century Naples that the pizza as we now know it came into being. Shortly after arriving in Latium, Aeneas and his crew sat down beneath a tree and laid out ‘thin wheaten cakes as platters for their meal’. These early pizzas appear in Virgil’s Aeneid. ![]() ![]() As far back as antiquity, pieces of flatbread, topped with savouries, served as a simple and tasty meal for those who could not afford plates, or who were on the go. People have been eating pizza, in one form or another, for centuries. But the story of how the humble pizza came to enjoy such global dominance reveals much about the history of migration, economics and technological change. Some three billion pizzas are sold each year in the United States alone, an average of 46 slices per person. ![]() We eat it everywhere – at home, in restaurants, on street corners. Pizza is the world’s favourite fast food. ![]()
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