Two things I didn't know about pizza
Dec. 3rd, 2018 11:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustOur friendly neighbourhood Italophile showed me the book she was reading, Matthew Fort's Eating up Italy: Voyages on a Vespa ('Eating up', because he travels up from the south to the north: cute, eh?). I asked to borrow it because I have good recollections of Matthew Fort's writings for the Guardian. I also have slightly less good ones: I thought it was a pity they had moved him from restaurant reviews, at which he was excellent, to writing about cooking, which he did less well. Unless it was the other way about...
The book contains some of each, plus a certain amount of travel writing and some portraits of artisan food procucers, and having read it all, I still don't know which mode I preferred. As a book, it reads like a series of - well, not exactly newspaper articles, but magazine features. Published in 2004, it doesn't quite feel like a blog, and the monochrome photographs give it a retro feel (they are sometimes striking and atmospheric, sometimes too small for me to make out in less than optimum light (your eyesight may vary).
I didn't feel any desire to try any of the recipes, which are heavy on the 'this is how you use this local product' (and occasionally 'this is how you make this local product', particularly sausages). Occasionally the landscape descriptions made me want to see more of Italy. But the one passage I wanted to hang on to is purely factual:
I had assumed that pizza marinara would involve fish, and I had not known the origin of the pizza Margherita. Margherita was queen of Italy by marriage to Umberto I, apparently...
The book contains some of each, plus a certain amount of travel writing and some portraits of artisan food procucers, and having read it all, I still don't know which mode I preferred. As a book, it reads like a series of - well, not exactly newspaper articles, but magazine features. Published in 2004, it doesn't quite feel like a blog, and the monochrome photographs give it a retro feel (they are sometimes striking and atmospheric, sometimes too small for me to make out in less than optimum light (your eyesight may vary).
I didn't feel any desire to try any of the recipes, which are heavy on the 'this is how you use this local product' (and occasionally 'this is how you make this local product', particularly sausages). Occasionally the landscape descriptions made me want to see more of Italy. But the one passage I wanted to hang on to is purely factual:
The most basic pizza of all is pizza bianca, which may be lubricated with olive oil and flavoured with garlic. Slightly more sophisticated and no less ancient, is pizza marinara, so called because sailors - marinai - could take the ingredients with them to sea. The ingredients for the topping were just tomato puree, garlic, olive oil and oregano. Had pizzaioli stuck to such inspired simplicity, all might have been fine, but they didn't. In 1889 Queen Margherita of Savoy paid a visit to the city, and the pizza Margherita, which combines tomato, mozzarella and basil leaves in imitation of the colours of the Italian flag, was invented in her honour and that has become the archetypal pizza, and the standard by which pizzas may be judged - and that is the problem.
I had assumed that pizza marinara would involve fish, and I had not known the origin of the pizza Margherita. Margherita was queen of Italy by marriage to Umberto I, apparently...
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