Asia Times: In search of the original pizza


	September 8, 2001	atimes.com

The Koreas

In search of the original pizza
By Alexander Casella

GENEVA - The culinary flirt of North Korea's Dear Leader with the perennial staple of Naples's hungry masses comes as no surprise to pizza lovers of the world. (I made pizza for Kim Jong-il) wttp://www.atimes.com/koreas/CH17Dg03.html

Indeed, there is hardly a country where pizza, be it freshly baked or deep frozen, is not within reach of a hungry palate. But what the world recognizes today as pizza bears only a faint resemblance to the original; a poor man's fare synonymous with the city where it became a staple of the populace, Naples.

Pizza, in Naples, is an ongoing source of passionate debate. Books have been written on the subject and the issue as to which are the best pizzerias is a source of heated controversy and ardent dispute. But it was not always so. The traditional pizza traces its ancestry to ancient Greece. It was a round, flattened blob of dough baked to a bread-like semblance partaken by the poor. With the expansion of the Roman empire it made its way to southern Italy, an obscure dish for the plebeian mobs.

The discovery of the Americas gave the pizza its first touch of color; the tomato. Thus was borne the original pizza, the "Marinara", spread with oil, garlic, basil and tomato. In 1889, fate willed that Queen Margherita of Italy, the wife of King Umberto l, while on a visit to Naples stopped her carriage in front of the pizzeria Brandi on the Via Chiaia and decided to taste this peculiar dish. Overwhelmed by the royal presence, Brandi, in an outburst of patriotism, added mozzarella cheese to the pizza presented to the queen, to replicate the colors of the Italian flag; basil for the green, tomatoes for the red and mozzarella for the white. The pizza Margherita was borne.

Until World War II, only Naples was the home of the pizza. Even in Rome it was impossible to find. The pizza's first foreign foray came after the war when returning GIs who had liberated Naples brought back to the US a taste for pizza. The New World gave pizza a second lease on life. Having become an American staple it was only 20 years later, in the mid -1960s, that pizza spread to the rest of Italy. By the 1970s it had taken the world by storm.

But is it still pizza, or only a distant cousin of the original? The quintessential pizza starts with dough made of flower, water and yeast, kneaded by hand and left overnight to rise at the right temperature. It takes an expert pizzaiolo to tell when the dough has reached the correct rise. When it has, it is spread by hand in the shape of a pancake and garnished with tomatoes, basil, oil and, if a Margherita, cheese. Never, however, mozzarella cheese made from buffalo milk, but rather fiordilatte, its equivalent made from cow's milk. The oil should be sunflower oil, not olive oil which degrades with heat. Next, the pizza is placed in a wood-burning oven built to the right proportions that will focus the heat, a design that relates more to art than to science. After about five minutes the original pizza is ready.

It goes without saying that it is either a Marinara or a Margherita. As the original pizza embarked on its peregrination to the five continents it took on a life of its own. Foreign chefs, unbound by tradition and spurred by imagination, descended on the hapless pizza. Anything that could be heaped on it became fair game. Olives, capers, salami, artichokes, ham and seafood were only the tamer ingredients let loose.

Pizza became "Oriental", "Brazilian" and the like. The end result goes from the pleasurably edible to the grotesque, but whatever the tag or taste it is but a distant echo of the real thing.

Dear Leader Kim Jong-il should be complimented for having opened his Hermit Kingdom to the modest pizza and Chef Ermanno Furlanis's journey to the Land of the Morning Calm is of the stuff that legends are made of. Purists will, however, suggest that, whatever the talents of Chef Furlanis, the Dear Leader only had a whiff of the real thing. So perhaps the time has come for the Dear Leader to re-embark on his armored train for a destination far more pleasurable than Moscow; Naples, home of the original pizza.

There, the Dear Leader will discover that the original pizza endures where it was born, the back streets of the former capital of the Kingdom of the two Sicilies, a city said to be founded by the gods of ancient Greece. Here a handful of pizzerias still abide by the ancient recipe. Da Michele ai Tribunali on the Via Colletta is the most traditional, serving Margheritas and Marinara at any time of the day or night.

Brandi has remained unchanged since the visit of Queen Margherita. Cafasso at Fuorigrotta and Salvatore at Mergellina are household names to the local pizza cognoscenti, who hold it as an article of faith that there are some good things in life that just cannot be improved upon.

Note
Naples's golden era started in the 15th Century and endured until the fall of the Bourbon Dynasty and the unification of Italy in 1860. For four centuries the city was one of the continent's most sophisticated capitals and warranted a mandatory stay on the Grand Tour, the traditional journey fashionable with young British aristocrats which enabled them to complete their education by studying Europe's classical past.

The city never survived the unification of Italy. Today it can be summed in one word - decay. But a baroque decay that befits an ancient capital of the Mediterranean that is a law unto itself. Probably one third of the city is built in violation of all zoning regulations, and to qualify the traffic as chaotic is un understatement. However, while no longer on the tourist circuit, Naples more than repays a visit. Its monuments, museums and churches reflect a cultural richness untouched by time, and the royal palace at Caserta puts Versailles to shame.

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