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Welcome to the History Extra podcast.
Today we're serving up a taster of our brand new series History's Greatest Dishes, our fresh offering that delves into the extraordinary stories behind some of the past's most remarkable delicacies.
In this instalment, food historian Annie Gray tells Emily Briffitt about the rise of pizza from humble Italian street food to global fast food favourite.
What do we know about its origins?
Why has it proven so popular?
And what is the deal with pineapple on pizza?
Tell me, Emily, what do you think of pineapple on pizza?
Well, it's a particularly contentious one, but I suppose this is the topic of today, isn't it?
In this episode of History's Greatest Dishes.
I'm your host, Emily Griffiths, and I'm joined today by Dr Annie Gray.
Pizza where do we even start?
I mean, i'm curious to find out what the general opinion is on pineapple on pizza.
Well, it's one of those things whenever you ask people, they look a little bit shifty and often they'll go oh, i'm not convinced, and a lot of people say that.
And then you've got the people that go oh, i love, i love pineapple on pizza And I've always had this feeling that more people like it on pizza than don't.
And I did a little bit of looking into the statistics.
And it turns out that back in 2022, there were some surveys done.
And 53% of the British population say they approve of pineapple on pizza.
Only 29% say it shouldn't be there, leaving quite a few people sitting on the fence.
But I think we can safely say the majority of the British population are pineapple enthusiasts.
Ah, interesting statistic.
I wasn't quite expecting it to be such a harsh statistic.
No, and what I hate is that emboldens the people sitting on the fence and perhaps some of the people that claim they don't like pineapple on pizza because they think they shouldn't like pineapple on pizza to just come out and agree with.
For once, the majority is right on this, I would say.
The fact that, yeah, pineapple does belong on a pizza.
It is a great thing on a pizza.
So you are a pineapple enthusiast.
I am a huge pineapple enthusiast.
And I mean proper pineapple.
I don't mean, as I once suffered, pineapple chutney and ham hock on a pizza.
Stop trying to make the Hawaiian pizza into something cool.
It should be tin pineapple and preferably spam.
Actually yeah, because so the pineapple ham and pineapple pizza was invented notoriously invented by a greek restaurateur in toronto who named it for hawaii because hawaii was the home of the Spam is a really, really big, very popular meat because of the number of American troops that were stationed there and continue to be stationed there actually.
But post Second World War, spam became a really big thing in Hawaii.
So to me, the true Hawaiian pizza shouldn't just be ham and pineapple.
It should be spam and pineapple.
Spam, of course.
Really crispy, really beautiful, really wonderful thing that is incredibly delicious, despite the fact that it's not the best thing for us in the world, but you don't put much on it.
So i think spam.
And pineapple pizza unadulterated, glorious pineapple from a can.
Spam from a can.
I don't put tomato on mine, but you can mozzarella.
I always put parmesan and a little bit of cheddar on mine as well.
Cracked black pepper box, your uncle.
That is one of the best pizzas in the world, but Do not muck about with it.
Do not tart it up.
Don't try and make it bougie.
Just give me the ham and pineapple.
That sounds interesting.
Is it always the tinned pineapple?
Is that the tradition for tinned pineapple?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, you know, fresh pineapple goes off.
It's difficult to prepare.
In a busy restaurant context, you're not going to bother with a fresh pineapple.
And fresh pineapple is too acidic.
The enzymes in it are too aggressive.
So you actually want, I mean tinned pineapple in juice.
I would say, not sugar, because it makes it too sweet.
The balance is very important.
You want the saltiness of the spam, or ham or bacon and the sweetness of the pineapple, but not so much sweetness that it becomes jam.
So it's about a balance.
And so Greek recipe, but the pineapple's the Hawaiian thing.
Greek restaurateur in Canada working with a nominally Italian dish, calling it after Hawaii.
Yeah.
Amazing.
I think there's going to be some stories of fake law and interesting connections in this particular episode.
Yeah, and the global nature of food actually, and the way in which something that purports to be from one country is perhaps mediated through the influence of another.
So we should definitely come on to the origins, but before that I need to ask you if we were to describe pizza, everyone knows.
Most people, I would imagine, know what a pizza is.
But if you could define it, describe it, how would you?
Pizza is a yeast-based flatbread, so a bread dough rolled out thinly, topped with some toppings, slammed in a very hot oven so that it crisps up, curls up and then is served.
There are variations on the theme of pizza.
Some pizzas are more like, I would argue, bread day based tarts or pies.
So a deep dish pizza.
Really, is it a pizza?
I'd argue it's not a pizza.
And you also get pizzas that are made with non-bread doughs.
So you do get the occasional cauliflower cross pizza.
Again, I would argue not a pizza.
Pizza adjacent.
Pizza wrong.
Actually, just wrong pizza.
But basically, it's a flatbread.
It's a flatbread with toppings.
What makes a pizza a pizza then?
You've added caveats there of maybe a pizza, maybe not a pizza.
They're not pizzas.
They're not pizzas.
What makes a pizza a pizza is that it's got bread dough underneath and it's got toppings on top.
Beyond that, and it's cooked in an oven, a very hot oven, I would say.
But beyond that, what makes a pizza a pizza?
The fact that it's called a pizza.
I do think the bread dough is non-negotiable.
I think you can stretch it to a gluten-free crust, obviously.
Some people do need to eat gluten-free crust, but it does need to be a bread dough and it does need to have topping on top.
So where does the name pizza actually come from then?
It's Italian, as you might imagine.
There used to be people called pizziolas in Italy.
The name occurs well before pizza as we know it occurs.
You get mentions of pizza and no one's quite sure what they are.
There's a lot of debate over pizza.
When is a pizza a pizza?
When is a pizza a flatbread?
Pizza itself really is a phenomenon of the probably 17th century onwards.
There were clearly pizza-like things being made before then.
But pizza as we know it, as something which is effectively a fairly cheap street food, is a story of late 16th, but really 17th century, and a story very much attached to Naples in Italy.
I've heard stories that this might be more of an ancient thing.
That's because there was a fresco in Pompeii that was uncovered a few years ago and hit the headlines as a Roman pizza.
Presumably not a Roman pizza.
Well, If you define pizza as a flatbread with stuff on, then yeah, it's pizza.
It's a flatbread and it's got figs on.
I don't think we would define it as pizza.
You can play with definitions and they are quite slippery things, especially when it comes to food.
Not least because pizza has changed, as with all foods, a lot over time.
The thing that was uncovered in Pompeii is undeniably a flatbread with some stuff on.
I wouldn't call it a pizza personally, because we do know what pizza is and you can play with the definition.
I mean, you get sweet pizzas occasionally.
I think at that point you're into the very, very grey areas and the edges of pizza.
It's sort of really, Nutella and pineapple on a pizza.
Is it a pizza?
Is it a flatbread?
That's the bit where I think it depends on your own personal view.
I'm not going to call the thing that was uncovered on the fresco pompeii a pizza.
I'm going to say that there is a very long tradition in pretty much every culture, but especially wheat-based cultures so, for example, western europe, of making flatbreads in an oven or indeed on a griddle, and putting stuff on them.
You know, at that point you're getting into the idea that, in fact, an open sandwich might be a pizza, Or a tortilla with some stuff on might be a pizza.
And at that point, you start to realise that whole definition thing is problematic.
So you come right back to the middle and you go, OK, it's not a pizza.
I'm just going to go, it's not a pizza.
It seems a fair place to end up because...
This is one of the other contentions.
So we've got pineapple, the pineapple debate.
When it's a pizza, not a pizza.
When it's a flatbread, yeah.
So let's park that there.
Flatbread.
Flatbread is our ingredient of this episode.
Tell us about the history of this.
This all goes really around the history of ovens.
Ovens are expensive things to build.
They were expensive things to build.
They were relatively prestigious.
Not always.
You've got communal ovens, which would be something built in the middle of a village shared by the whole village.
But in essence, an oven is not usually a particularly useful, fuel efficient way to cook.
Because most ovens in the past, and certainly ovens as they developed from the later Roman period onwards, you get Dutch ovens, which is coals with a sort of thing put on top, which are proto ovens.
But the kind of oven as we know it, the beehive oven, It's something that requires brick or stone or clay or mud construction.
That is, a very large dome that you put in order to heat it.
You put lots of fuel into it, usually sticks, so bundles of sticks, put in, set on fire.
You get that as hot as humanly possible, really, really, really, really stinkingly hot.
You rake out the ash and the residual heat that's left bounces off all of those walls and cooks whatever is inside.
Think about a modern pizza oven, what we would call a pizza oven.
That's basically an oven in the past, a beehive oven.
You get them in country houses set into walls.
You get standalone ovens.
You get all sorts of ovens.
But essentially, they are a bit of a ball lake to build.
And they are fiddly to use so an oven is a relatively prestigious thing for the majority of people therefore much cooking really for most of history was done on a bake stone or a griddle stone or a girdle as they were known in scotland big massive piece of cast iron could also be stone And you would make whatever it was, usually a yeasted bread, certainly in the UK and in Western Europe, usually yeasted.
Be that based on oats or wheat flour or chickpea flour, whatever it was that you had to hand, you would make it.
You roll it out, mainly yeasted, not always yeasted.
And then you would stick it on your griddle stone.
And because it was flat it would cook very quickly just in the heat from below.
Turn it over, cook again, serve.
So scones are a sort of flatbread.
Staffordshire oat cakes are a sort of flatbread.
Flatbreads with yeast that are rolled out and turned into, for example pizzas, are a type of flatbread.
Arguably, something that's just pastry and put on a griddle stone and flipped over is a flatbread.
Flatbreads are even more definitionally interesting than pizza.
But flatbread, it's whatever you want it to be.
You look over in South America, you've got flatbreads based on maize, so tortillas as we would now call them.
You've got rice-based flatbreads in China, Chinese pancakes and things like that.
Every culture's got something where you mix some grains with some liquid, you stick it on something that's hot, you turn it over, that's a flatbread.
If you enjoyed that and want to hear more, just search for History's Greatest Dishes, or click the link in the description to find the full episodes and follow the feed.
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