Quick note: caciocavello is not horse milk cheese. It's a pasta filata cheese (stretched curd cheese) that is aged. It's formed into jug shaped cheeses with a string tied to the top to age it. Normally there are 2 cheeses tied to either end of the string and you hang them. It's called "cavello" (horse) because you could put it on horse back with one cheese on either side of the horse.<p>It's essentially a drier version of mozzarella, though (very similar to Italian provalone).<p>Edit: non-sensical sentence
By co-incidence I saw this on twitter today:<p>> A beautifully preserved thermopolium (cook shop), one of the places in #Pompeii where one could purchase hot and ready-to-eat food.
Most Romans resided in insulae and did not have facilities to cook at home and relied on thermopolia to buy their hot meals. (photo)<p><a href="https://twitter.com/carolemadge/status/1184381800656920577" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/carolemadge/status/1184381800656920577</a><p>The baking ovens in Pompei are - of course - wood-fired brick structures with domed tops on the inside. Like a pizza oven.<p><a href="http://www.pompeiin.com/en/Bakeries_in_Pompeii.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.pompeiin.com/en/Bakeries_in_Pompeii.html</a><p>I would be completely unsurprised if there is an unbroken lineage from these shops (in other towns that were not obliterated by Vesuvius) through to Pizzerias in present-day Napoli.
In Lee Iacocca's memoirs, he recalls how kids in school bullied him and taunted him for eating pizza, calling it "Dago food". Now it's America's #1 food, but the change was within living memory.
"Some even had tomatoes on top. Only recently introduced from the Americas, these were still a curiosity, looked down upon by contemporary gourmets".<p>Well that settles it. Next time a pizza traditionalist blasts me for having pineapple on my pizza, I'll counter that he shouldn't have tomatoes on theirs.
There is a lot of mysticism over the origin of Pizza. In fact, it's probably a very straightforward kind of dish that probably has been invented multiple times, of course with varying toppings and maybe a few other differing ideals.<p>Basically if you have a wooden oven to bake bread, baking is risky. If the oven is too hot, the bread will become burnt before being thoroughly baked within, if you put it in too late, the heat will not be enough. So how do you, as a baker (or farmer baking for your own supply) test whether the oven has the right temperature? You trial-run with very thin patches of dough, that you can pull out easily and are always done inside, when the outside is nicely burnt: a kind of flat bread.<p>Putting stuff on top of the flat bread and making it your snack on baking day is just a logical conclusion.<p>In fact, around here, there are several regional dishes similar to a pizza serving this purpose. Flammkuchen from Alsace, and Denede from Swabia. The village where I work still has preserved (and renovated recently) a "Backhaus", a common oven of the village that would be fired regularly and then used by all villagers to bake their own bread. Did they triage the heat of the fired oven by putting in a small piece of dough? probably. Did they put stuff on top of that piece? I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised.
Boo, no mention of New Haven's early contribution. Not that I'm biased (I am, they have the best pizza in the world, objectively speaking, of course)<p><a href="http://www.ctvisit.com/articles/new-haven-apizza-history" rel="nofollow">http://www.ctvisit.com/articles/new-haven-apizza-history</a>
The abomination created by putting pineapple on pizza is either Canadian or German:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_pizza" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_pizza</a><p>Dig a bit more and it seems the German claim is a bit stronger. The postwar years were difficult in Europe.
Has "vulkanpizza" (volcano-pizza) spread to other countries outside of Sweden yet? <a href="https://imgs.aftonbladet-cdn.se/v2/images/ce5c799d-dfe7-46e7-b5a6-3b82d521ec1a?fit=crop&h=713&q=50&w=960&s=c76b10318295fa28685c569fd3d17ccb70c7584d" rel="nofollow">https://imgs.aftonbladet-cdn.se/v2/images/ce5c799d-dfe7-46e7...</a>
When I was a kid in the summer my dad would take me with him for the day on his sales route. One of my favorite places for us to stop for lunch was Detroit's first pizzeria.<p>When it opened in the late thirties pizza was totally unknown in Detroit. The founder was an immigrant from Naples. An Italian friend of my father's introduced him to the place and he took my Mother there on one of their first dates.<p>The owner and his wife were by then good friends of my Dad and it was almost like being in someone's kitchen, if things were slow they'd sit at the table with us.
Don't know how true it is, or whether it is a modern invention, but the story goes that the pizza created for Margherita of Savoy had basil, mozzarella and tomatoes to represent the 3 colours on the national flag of Italy (green, white and red).
Here in Wales pizza was originally known as “Italian rarebit” and some still call it that.<p>The best pizza I’ve ever had was from a van in a lay-by off the A470, the “Route 66” of Wales.
This documentary is very interesting about a man's obsession with pizza:<p>Scott's Pizza Tours<p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5252674/" rel="nofollow">https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5252674/</a>
Pizza is the only thing all of my family can ever agree on to eat! To now know the history of pizza will be a good conversation starter next dinner together.