A Short History of Pizza

It is not conclusive when precisely did pizza emerge at its position as one of the tremendously popular dishes in the United States, but nearly everybody will unquestionably concur that pizza has become America's preferred grub over the past 40 years. Millions of pizza pies are eaten daily, but very few people, if at all, stop munching and chewing their beloved pizza to consider the history of their favorite food. The actual origins of this fine cuisine are as colorful as any excellent pizza piled with toppings.

If you go out into the streets and start asking people where they think pizza came from, chances are you will get answers pointing to the common belief that Italians created the pizza. Even so, pizza’s roots go back to the antediluvian times. Despite the fact that we have yet to uncover archeological evidence of a Dominos Pizza before the last century, it is widely recognized that the Babylonians, Israelites, Egyptians and other ancient Middle Eastern cultures were eating flat, un-leaven bread that had been cooked in mud ovens.

The bread was very much like a pita, which is still common in Greece and the Middle East today. Furthermore, it is known that ancient Mediterranean people such as the Greeks, Romans and Egyptians were eating the bread, topped flavored with olive oil and indigenous spices.

The lower class of Naples, Italy is believed to have created pizza in a more familiar fashion. In the late 1800s, an Italian baker by the name of Raffaele Esposito, was considered to have produced such a dish for traveling royals. Fitting in with the narrative, the Italian monarch King Umberto and his consort, Queen Margherita were touring the area. In order to impress them and to demonstrate his patriotic fervor, Raffaele chose to top flat bread with food that would best represent the colors of Italy: red tomato, white mozzarella cheese and green basil. The king and queen were so impressed that word quickly reached the masses. The end results were that the dish was well received to the extent that others began to copy it.

By the onset of the 1900s pizza made its way to the interior cities of the United States, thanks to Italian immigrants. The people of New York and Chicago were among the foremost diners to taste and enjoy their first slices of pizza, due to those cities having voluminous Italian populations. Small cafes began offering the Italian favorite . American soldiers further prompted the dish to become very popular at the end of World War II , having been exposed to it while fighting on the Italian front.

Today pizza has become just as American as baseball and apple pie. Only because of its most recent origins is it considered an Italian dish. Huge U. S. based multi-billion dollar corporations should be thankful for the development of this delicious dish, along with countless poor college students who can appreciate the fine dining experience pizza has given them.