What Makes it Pizza?

Many of you may have been eating pizza a lot longer than I have, relatively speaking. It wasn’t until towards the end of my senior year in high school that those of us students who worked on performing the school play decided after our performance to drive to the nearest big town and get some pizza. Before that, I had no idea what pizza was. I wondered if I would like it, as we waited for it to be delivered to our tables.

I think it was a round pizza, but it was cut into squares. I can’t say it was love at first bite, but it had a lot of tastes. It had 2 or 3 types of meat on it, and a tomato sauce, and probably onions and green peppers. I wasn’t too happy with the onions, but I didn’t make a fuss over them. I didn’t want anybody to think I was weird. Everybody else thought it was great.

I’ve had a lot of pizza since then. Mostly, it’s been round pizzas, cut into slices, with tomato sauce and cheese. Various meats, vegetables and occasionally even fruit would be on it. (I love a good ham and pineapple pizza.)

About 2 decades ago, I started noticing a new pizza in the grocery store freezers. It was called chicken margarita pizza, or something like that. Instead of tomato sauce, it had some sort of white sauce. I couldn’t tell if it had any cheese at all. The meat was chicken, and there may have been a few vegetables and herbs on it. It didn’t look like pizza to me at all.

All this comes up because I just read a brief article in Archeology magazine. The on-going excavation of Pompeii had unearthed another fresco, one of a still-life on a table. There was a large tray on the table, with a slab of focaccia bread on it. There also was a variety of fruit in the picture. The question asked by the article was, is this a picture of the forerunner of pizza? Of course, back then, they didn’t have access to anything resembling tomatoes, so it wouldn’t have had a tomato sauce. But the scientists thought it looked like focaccia bread covered in various fruits.

Would they have called it pizza? I doubt it; languages change over time. But I rather like the sound of it. A slab of bread covered in fruit. Maybe with a drizzle of olive oil and some appropriate herbs and spices.

I don’t think I’ve seen focaccia bread available in the grocery store since we moved to Florida. To me, it always looked a bit like an extra large slab of fried bread dough. Maybe next time I make that delicacy, I’ll try making a ‘fruit pizza’ out of some of it. What do you think, would you try making a fruit pizza? Would you taste one?

Alas, I am not supposed to have bread, fried or not, so it could take me a while to get to that food experiment.