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There’s Persephone, the kidnapped goddess of the underworld, who eats pomegranate seeds and dooms the earth to experience winter each year. There’s the infamously decadent (and lewd) feast of Trimalchio in Petronius’ Satyricon , where — among other things — guests are implored to eat from “a circular tray around which were displayed the signs of the zodiac, and upon each sign the caterer had placed the food best in keeping with it…a piece of beef on Taurus, kidneys and lamb’s fry on Gemini…a small seafish on Scorpio, a bull’s eye on Sagittarius, a sea lobster on Capricorn, a goose on Aquarius and two mullets on Pisces.”

pizza from ancient Roman times, the pinsa has become a hot topic lately with pinsa pizzerias popping up all around Europe,” Time Out Tokyo wrote of a recently opened pinsa restaurant. “Think of it in terms of Sean Connery — every James Bond that came after him has paled in comparison!” The cyclical nature of human tastes aside, what’s perhaps most telling about pizza’s inherent appeal as a dish — then, now and every time in between — is that it’s always been a meal of the people, even long before it became synonymous with American fast-casual comfort. While more formal dining settings require a host of tools and trappings for the enjoyment of a meal — plates and glasses, at least, plus a table on which to serve the dishes, and chairs for sitting — a large part of pizza’s appeal throughout history has been its inherent mobility and ease of enjoyment. Chicago deep dish pizza aside, it’s hard to imagine someone slicing up their pizza slice with a fork and knife and not being met with a few painful winces.

But it was in translating a passage from the epic poem The Aeneid during my years as a Latin buff that I stumbled across a dish that seemed, well, curiously modern. Our hero Aeneas and his men devour a form of flatbread piled high with toppings (without realizing the meal had been cursed earlier in their journey by Celaeno, the Harpy queen): “Thin loaves of altar-bread Along the sward to bear their meats were laid (Such was the will of Jove), and wilding fruits Rose heaping high, with Ceres’ gift below.” And while this particular version of the dish didn’t work out quite so well for the wandering Trojans of ancient lore, it’s ended up serving us all pretty well since Virgil penned the tale between 29 and 19 BC. That’s right: I’m talking about pizza. In the United States today, Americans eat roughly 350 slices of pizza per second (yes, really), scarfing down a dish that hasn’t changed all that much in its basic concept since Persian soldiers serving under Darius the Great baked flatbreads with cheese and dates on their battle shields in the 6th century BC.

“We might call ancient flatbreads ‘pizzas’ because they embodied the basic concept of having one’s meal on an edible plate or using one’s bread as the plate and utensil,” writes Carol Helstosky in her 2008 book, Pizza: A History . “The universality of flatbread-as-plate suggests that convenience, perhaps for the sake of mobility or out of economic necessity, shaped ancient eating habits…. We might also describe these ancient flatbreads as the precursors to pizza because they were more than bread: topped with herbs or mushrooms, or a sauce, they constituted an entire meal.”

Pizza is inextricably linked to a tale of both convenience and economic necessity, particu- larly when it comes to Naples, the birthplace of the dish as we recognize it today. By the 18th century, the bustling seaside Italian city was packed with a working class in need of thrifty, on-the-go meals. Street vendors with wood- fired ovens were more than happy to oblige in the form of a flatbread topped with herbs, lard and salt (similar to a “white pizza”) that could be easily folded in one hand for chowing down while hustling back to work. Pizza quickly became the omnipresent weekday meal of the working class. Where’s the tomato sauce, you may ask? Even though tomatoes — a “NewWorld” food — first made their way to Italy in 1519, it wasn’t until a couple of decades later that Italians were wholly convinced that tomatoes weren’t poisonous. (Plants from the nightshade family, which also include eggplant and tobacco, had a particularly bad reputation back in the day as being toxic.) But by 1830, Naples had not only embraced the tomato, but pizza culture itself, wholeheart- edly. Several pizzerias, including the legendary Antica Pizzeria Port’Alba, had opened across the city, even introducing chairs for patrons to sit down in while they enjoyed their wood-fired slices. In his work Le Corricolo , French writer Alexandre Dumas recorded just how prevalent pizza was among the working class of Naples — particularly during the winter — and recalls the several options for toppings that were popular during the time. “In Naples,” he writes, “pizza is flavored with oil, lard, tallow, cheese, tomato, or anchovies.” While pizza certainly became a draw for tourists to Naples throughout the 1800s (as well as a favorite of Spanish soldiers), pizza stayed fairly localized in the city until royalty came calling. In 1889, Raffaele Esposito — the most famous pizza maker in all of Naples and owner of Antica Pizzeria Port’Alba — was summoned

In the United States today, Americans eat roughly 350 slices of pizza per second

The Greeks, Romans, Egyptians and Babylonians were all excep- tional bakers, and used their dough-driven skills to create flatbreads that were cooked in outdoor ovens and then topped with herbs and oils. The Greek historian Herodotus noted that, in most Egyptian households, the fermented dough used for baking was treated with great reverence, and also included several recipes for flatbreads — which would eventually come to be referred to as “focaccia” in the Middle Ages —throughout his works. A first-generation pizza oven was even unearthed from the ruins of Pompeii (the ancient city destroyed by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD) after having been preserved for centuries in volcanic ash. The word pizza most likely derives from the Latin pix , meaning “pitch,” which began as an adjective for describing how well- cooked the flatbread base (the “pitch” of its color) was in the oven. Strangely enough, over the past few years, this Roman proto-pizza has come full circle, with pizza places across the world opening specifically to serve what they call pinsa : a style of pie made using the more traditional Roman method for dough. Hailed as a healthier option and made using a technique and ingredients that produce a lighter, fluffier base for toppings (thanks to the inclusion of a spelt or soy flour), this everything-old-is-new-again pizza style has even reached as far as Japan. “Widely considered to be the original

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