CALL it pizza, pitta or fougasse: when Europe’s holidaymakers head for the Mediterranean this summer, they will feast on some type of flatbread with condiments. Such dishes have age-old roots. In the “Aeneid”, Virgil’s heroes forage for a meal of forest fruit laid on pieces of hard bread on the grass. Famished, they eat the bread, too: “See, we devour the plates on which we fed.”
Of all these edible platters, it is pizza that has become the world’s favorite fast food, plain dough onto which each country bakes its own flavours: mussels in the Netherlands, Teriyaki chicken and seaweed in Japan. Born in Naples, the modern pizza was the poor man’s meal. One 19th-century American visitor, Samuel Morse (inventor of the telegraph), thought it “like a piece of bread that had been taken reeking out of the sewer”. For Alexandre Dumas, it was “the gastronomic thermometer of the market”: if fish pizza was cheap, there had been a good catch; if oil pizza was dear, there had been a bad olive harvest.
These days pizza is a gastronomic mirror, reflecting Italy’s anxiety about globalisation. Italians are rightly proud of their food, yet dismayed at…
The Economist: Europe
