Today, February 9, the world celebrates Pizza Day.
We all know what it is, and how it is enjoyed all over the world in its thin round dough topped with whatever anyone likes and invents - it is not worth enumerating.
According to some, it was invented by the Greeks, and according to others, by the Italians. There are fewer of the former.
Well, they claim that it was invented by the Greeks or Phoenicians at the time when they perfected the secrets of mixing flour with water. They say that the original pizza was a flat dough that was baked under a hot stone, that it was coated with oil with the addition of herbal spices, later cheese and anchovies were added, and that pizza was a cheap dish for the workforce.
Gaeta
It was first mentioned during the time of Byzantine Greece, in 997 in the town of Gaeta near Naples, in the region that later became Italian, hence all the confusion about its origin.
When the explorers of the new continent brought tomatoes to Europe from Peru in 1552, pizza began to become the way we know it.
It is not known what its name means, nor why it was named that way, but it is thought that pizza became pizza in the 18th century, when it began to be produced and sold in the streets and squares of Naples.
The Queen's Chef Rafael
The first modern recipe that has been remembered to this day is related to Queen Margarita and the story that one day in 1889, during a visit to Naples, she saw that many people, especially peasants, were eating a large scone. Curious, she ordered one to be brought to her as well. Since she liked it very much, she asked her head chef Rafael to prepare a pizza for her at court as well.
And, he made her a pizza just for her. It was in the colors of the Italian flag: with red tomatoes, white mozzarella cheese and fresh green basil. He called it Pizza Margarita. Legend has it that pizza became the queen's favorite food, which was enough to make it popular among the people as well.
Soon, various variations of the queen's favorite dish began to appear all over Italy, so for example in Bologna they added minced meat to the topping and got a new classic - Pizza bolognese.
Arrival in America
Only at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century did pizza reach America, thanks to Italian emigrants. After that, pizza went beyond the epithet of food related to one ethnic group, it became a favorite, fast and fun delicacy of many and became completely domesticated.
Research says that the cities where this dish is most popular are Naples, Chicago, New York, Melbourne and Rome - in that order.
Then, Chicago is considered to be the only city in the world that can compete with Naples in terms of pizza quality. A new type of pizza, the Chicago pizza with thick dough, was created there.
In space
It is said that pizza is the dish with the most flexible recipe, anyone can put ingredients on the dough as they wish and declare it their specialty - a Canadian of Greek origin makes it from pineapple and sells it in Ontario under the name Hawaiian.
It can have the dimensions of your plate, and it can occupy an area of 1.200 square meters, which was the size of the largest pizza in the world, made in Rome in 2012.
There is no part of the planet that she has not reached. In Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, the international gastronomic offer consists of a single pizzeria, which was opened in 2009. It also appeared on the International Space Station: in 2001, it was delivered to the Russian astronaut Yuri Usachev, and the guild of the whole enterprise was one million dollars.
And just this: the subject of the first online purchase is pizza. It was in 1994.
Pleasant!
