Pizza with toppings was apparently invented after the unification of Italy in the 19th century, when someone created three flat pizzas with different sets of toppings. The most popular one was named after the new queen of Italy.
And it was mostly Italian immigrants to the US who remembered this and started experimenting with more pizza styles. When they returned to Italy in WW2, they were surprised not to find any pizzas there, and local Italians quickly started making and inventing pizzas for these Americans.
The same holds true across the Pacific:
> Chili peppers spread to Asia through their introduction by Portuguese traders, who—aware of their trade value and resemblance to the spiciness of black pepper—promoted their commerce in the Asian spice trade routes.[10][14][15] They were introduced in India by the Portuguese towards the end of the 16th century.[16] In 21st-century Asian cuisine, chili peppers are commonly used across many regions.[17][18]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chili_pepper#Distribution_to_A...
All the 'traditionally' hot dishes of India and Thailand that have chili peppers are post-1492. I think that after a few hundred years it's okay to call the cuisine 'traditional'.
See Mann's book for some more on this:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1493:_Uncovering_the_New_World...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29132535
What is true is that pizza was common only in the south of Italy, but what made it more common in the north (I would say much later, in the '60's) was the flux of people relocating from the south to the north in those years.
They mention in the article that, etymologically, pizza may be derived from "pita" -- the still ubiquitous term for a round flatbread.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1949/10/pizza/6...
I think most immigrant origin foods start in a big city. Then migrates to smaller cities in the same region to other big cities across the country. Only after that will it go "nationwide". And it usually takes a popular chain to make it happen (Chinese being an exception. It was everywhere before Panda Express and Pf Chang's)
It depends on where you are and what you order.
I live in California. We definitely have Americanized chinese food here, but we can also easily get authentic tasting:
- dim sum of various types
- mapo tofu
- kungpao/gongbao chicken
- twice cooked pork
- scallion pancakes
- Peking duck
- noodles of various types
The list could go on.
I’ve also had some mind-blowingly good Cantonese food in NYC and Philly.
It's so incredibly ingrained in Dutch culture that the very first restaurant of any town or village is either a snackbar or a Chinese restaurant.
Egg foo young, chow mein, fried rice, lo mein, and many other items are real Chinese dishes also found in China.
Sure, ingredients have been localized... but no more so than localization that also take place elsewhere. :)
It's more like Indonesian food (former colony), but not really, it's more a collection of Asian-like dishes with tons of sugar added.
This has changed with modern travel. But it surprises me how much of what people believe about food is basically propaganda. At best.
I don't think this means the tomato-based modern pizza is less of a pizza, but that we should maybe more widely embrace the other types if we like them. To be honest I hadn't encountered a "pizza bianca" 'til I left the UK, and I would've taken some convincing it wasn't some weirdo UK thing if I encountered it there :D
> I don't think this means the tomato-based modern pizza is less of a pizza
Quite the contrary, it's more of a pizza.
I've seen pizza bianca in my supermarket. I do wonder, if you don't put tomato sauce on it, what's the fundamental difference between a pizza bianca and a flammkuchen?
but we're talking about simple ingredients and flavors that were already being put together in various ways.
"None pizza, left beef"?
"Let me repeat that: Pizza isn’t Italian.
Pizza is Neapolitan. It’s a distinct speciality of Naples, developed at at time when Italy didn’t even exist as a nation. Saying pizza is Italian is like saying haggis is British. It might be technically true, but not really. "
Take borsch, for example: not only are there half a dozen or more national variations (Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, etc.) but each family has their own little trick for choosing the best meat and aromatics for the broth or ratios for and ways to caramelize the vegetables before throwing them in the pot. Most of these variations impart dramatic flavor differences when you compare them side by side. Availability of different varieties of vegetables and meat further creates a layer of regional differences
There's also an interesting phenomenon happening with the industrialization of international foods: the flavor of Thai food in the United States, for example, is dominated by the quality control of a few suppliers like Maesri and Aroy-d. Since ingredients like curry paste and coconut milk are so time consuming to make, everyone except the poorest of families fall back to the industrially produced ingredients from those suppliers, even in the home country. As the ingredients are globalized through popularity, the entire world market tends to settle on a small number of vendors, homogenizing the flavor of the dishes. There is still plenty of variation between families like the amount of fresh makrut leaves, galangal, or lemongrass and the different techniques to toast the curry paste and coconut milk and so on, but the base flavors are all very much the same.
While we're at that subject: The national administration of Thailand has for the last, well, more than twenty years, been very actively pushing a big gastrodiplomacy and economy program (with certifications/labels, loans/subsidies and lots of other measures) to expand the number of Thai restaurants all over the world… and to standardize the recipes that are considered traditional "Thai cuisine".
On the positive side, that does help to guarantee some quality standards… but on the negative side, it did also have a strong effect of homogenization and reduction of diversity within "Thai cuisine".
- Tomatoes (Italian food)
- Chilies (A ton of asian food)
- Avocados
- Corn
- Cacao (Swiss chocolate)
- Vanilla
- Potatoes
It's no surprise that a lot of dishes are not truly "authentic" (Whatever that means).
It was used to flavor drinks for hundreds/thousands of years in the Americas. But chocolate in a solid form suitable for baking is a European invention; and bars/pieces of chocolate that you would eat as a standalone item are from the UK, if I'm not mistaken.
key passage from history.com
===
Queen Margherita’s blessing could have been the start of an Italy-wide pizza craze. But pizza would remain little known in Italy beyond Naples’ borders until the 1940s.
An ocean away, though, immigrants to the United States from Naples were replicating their trusty, crusty pizzas in New York and other American cities, including Trenton, New Haven, Boston, Chicago and St. Louis. The Neapolitans were coming for factory jobs, as did millions of Europeans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; they weren’t seeking to make a culinary statement. But relatively quickly, the flavors and aromas of pizza began to intrigue non-Neapolitans and non-Italians.
===
[1] https://www.history.com/news/a-slice-of-history-pizza-throug...
also as a german i disregard italian coffee culture as a sharade. i want a proper cup of coffee to drink. not this tiny cup or variations on it. german style filter coffee, heck, even drip coffee, with a sip of milk and some sugar beats all that crafty nonsense any time of the day.
italian restaurants are usually always providing a bad experience. the waiters are stuck up or even down right arrogant pricks. any alternative is preferential.
italian olive oil. well-documented [1] trash. go for greek.
i give them pasta science, tomato sauce and i love making pizza socially.
1: https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/service/lebensmittelskanda...
lol. If you consider greek oil a valid substitute then you've never tasted actual italian oil. Some exported italian oil was altered by mafia, so you stop using it altogether? What should we do with your cars after the diesel scandal then?
> italian restaurants are usually always providing a bad experience. the waiters are stuck up or even down right arrogant pricks. any alternative is preferential.
Tourist traps generally are. You have to be a pretty naive tourist to fall for it tho, there's plenty of great restaurants with great service. German waiters on the other hand are almost always unfriendly and restaurants close way too early in the evening.
With that said, I do think there's something to be said about keeping the provenance of ingredients and flavor. I don't think you need to make mapo tofu exactly how they make it in Chengdu, but it might be good to understand the core ideas of mala (spicy-tingly flavor) or the importance of doubanjiang (fermented chili bean paste). Likewise there's something to be said about Italian food's focus on fresh, seasonal ingredients.
Given what I know of Italian food culture, this is only slight exaggeration.
My initial thought is considering how much modern Italian food was meant as a way to unite the various regions, I'm not sure he wants the outcome that may come with it. I always found it interesting to hear comments about people from other regions of Italy by commenting on how/what they eat. Like the rice eaters in the North.
I keep meaning to read this book "Gastronativism" but I haven't gotten around to ordering it http://cup.columbia.edu/book/gastronativism/9780231202077
"Fabio Parasecoli identifies and defines the phenomenon of “gastronativism,” the ideological use of food to advance ideas about who belongs to a community and who does not. As globalization and neoliberalism have transformed food systems, people have responded by seeking to return to their roots. Many have embraced local ingredients and notions of cultural heritage, but this impulse can play into the hands of nationalist and xenophobic political projects. Such movements draw on the strong emotions connected with eating to stoke resentment and contempt for other people and cultures."
“In the same house, in the 1980s, Nonna Fiore once served some English guests lasagna, per my uncle’s request. The lasagna was cooked from frozen, her story goes. Life was busy and, anyway, she had no qualms about serving a supermarket ready meal; people could only dream of such a luxury during the war. None of the guests suspected that she hadn’t made it from scratch and everyone was delighted, her Italian son included. She reminds me of this, then looks up at me and winks”.
This reminds me of the gongfu method of tea preparation, which acquired a sort of reputation of being the "authentic" means of tea making in certain circles but turns out to be fairly modern outside of a specific region of China.
Like the author interviewed in the piece, Lawrence Zhang has received a certain amount of animosity for writing about it (https://marshaln.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/GFC1601_06_Z...).
“In religious studies and sociology, the pizza effect is the phenomenon of elements of a nation's or people's culture being transformed or at least more fully embraced elsewhere, then re-exported to their culture of origin”
