Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2010/02/25
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]About Pizza - it is as American as Fortune Cookies. The pizza that the world knows and loves is basically an Italian/American invention and owes relatively little but the name to the Neapolitan variety. At least that's a personal observation. A year prior to the outbreak of WW2 my family spent a couple of months in Naples, allegedly for a vacation but really to help my uncle Max wind up his affairs and immigrate to the US. Uncle Max was the cantor in one of the larger Jewish synagogues in Naples, an odd job for a Russian Jew. As a young man he had studied for the opera stage in Russia prior to the revolution. When he left, one jump ahead of the Bolsheviks, he moved to Italy to continue his studies. As one of the few singers who could read Hebrew, he gravitated to the synagogue and stayed there for 20 years. Even in shul the Italians appreciated good singing. My family stayed in his apartment in a lower middle class section of Naples. His wife wouldn't cook on the sabbath so my brother and I would buy something to eat from the vendor across the street, usually pizza. As I recall it was a wedge of flat bread drizzled with olive oil with some garlic and herbs on top. No cheese, no pepperoni, no anchovies. Just bread. It wasn't until I moved to New York half a century later that I got the real story. Pizza, as we know it, was invented by the Italian immigrants about 1900. They took the traditional Neapolitan pizza and added all the goodies that were too expensive in Italy. First the tomato sauce, then the cheese, finally the meat toppings. Fuel was cheap enough so that you could keep a pizza oven hot all day and make pizza to order. Thank God. I hated the Neapolitan stuff. It might have been healthier but it left my mouth all oily. Fortune cookies were invented in Brooklyn, NY. Larry Z