Humble, filling and wholesome, it's more than a meal—it's a pizza your heart
By Clark Wolf
In difficult economic times, it's valuable to look at ancient cultures to see how they fared in adversity. Sometimes the resulting food is rather spectacular. Take pizza.
Why is pizza such perfect food? Maybe because it's so very old. Maybe because it wasn't developed by some random R&D team, but rather through experimentation by generation after generation of hungry folks. Maybe it's because it reduces a meal to good, solid, basic elements that deeply satisfy.
Bread is one of the oldest foods and dates back to at least Neolithic times. The practice of adding other stuff to bread can be found throughout antiquity. The ancient Greeks had a flatbread that was eaten with toppings that probably included herbs, onions and garlic. And in Virgil's epic poem The Aenied (written, oh, about 19 B.C.E.), he refers to bread as an edible plate. Talk about a long, slow, trend movement. Love that.
Now, if you want to taste a benchmark, you may wish to go to Italy, where, it turns out, they waited until recently (the 1980s, just in the nick of time) to formalize some nearly ancient, deeply solid traditions. It was the feisty Neapolitans, the people in and around Naples, who brought it all into focus and format. They're a people and it's a city well-versed in good times and bad times. A lot like now.
The fabled Antica Pizzeria Port'Alba in Naples is said to be the world's first pizzeria. Rumor (or history) has it that they started making the magic pie in about 1738 and sold it from an open-air stand straight through until some time in 1830, at which point they evolved into a restaurant with indoor and outdoor seating, which is where they still make and sell boatloads of extraordinary pizza to this day.
What makes a perfect pizza? The Association Verace Pizza Napoletana has some pretty basic ideas—rules, actually—that in fact do ensure that what gets called a pizza is indeed the real deal.
Wood The pizza must be cooked by wood. Gas, coal or electric ovens do not conform to tradition. You never get the right blistering or that lightly smoky finish.
Ingredients 00 flour, San Marzano tomatoes, all natural fior-di-latte or buffalo mozzarella, fresh basil, salt and yeast. Only fresh, all natural, nonprocessed ingredients are acceptable. Variations are fun and tasty, but for me it's a simple Neapolitan (tomato, buffalo mozzarella and basil) or it's a no-go.
Technique Hand-worked or low-speed-mixed dough. Proper work surface (usually slab or marble) and oven temp (800 F). Cranky or even hammy show cooks not required.
Review A designated representative of the association must assure that the ingredients, technique and final product conform to the tradition.
Around 1830 (maybe just after the grand opening party for the indoor seating of the Antica Pizzeria Port'Alba), the French writer Alexandre Dumas described pizza as the only food of the humble people in Naples during winter, and wrote that in those days it was flavored with oil, tallow (pork fat), cheese, tomato or anchovies. All throughout Campania you see those core ingredients on happy and natural display. Their elongated tomatoes are grown in the rich volcanic soil of Vesuvius and get hung under rafters away from the rain and wind to gently dry. The arugula seems to be peeking out everywhere (on menus, that is), and the mozzarella fairly pops out of the water buffalo nearby.
We have all those ingredients here—even the water buffalo. They roam along the Sierra foothills and give the milk that the folks at Bubalus, Bubalis in Gardena, Calif., turn it into oozing, milky balls. We can do it. And one good thing about this drought we seem to be facing is that dry farming, especially of delicious tomatoes, is sure to increase.
On a recent trip to Italy's pizza heartland, I visited a place that sold pizza by the meter. Two toppings per nearly three-foot expanse. The place was clean and big, and the pizza, a bit thicker than that had at other places, was delicious. But clearly this could have been ground zero for bad American pizza, could have been where "concept" escaped and ran amok, producing fun and life and profits and lousy pizza; but it was still shockingly delicious.
As we emerge from what has felt to many like a frightening economic nuclear winter, many of us are hopeful about what's to come. Certainly, our regional bounty of intensely flavorful foodstuffs can be part of the value systems realignment that the world really needs to address. Simple pleasures may well be priceless. And these days, simpler seems so much more right and yet so much harder to do. But so very worth the trouble.
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