Name: A History of Pizza in 8 Slices!
Uploaded: 2016-09-24T23:42:01.000Z
Duration: 14 min 58 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The first pizzeria in New York is also the first pizzeria in the United States.

Lombardi's opened in 1905 just down the street

at its original location when Italian immigrant Gennaro Lombardi decided to convert his grocery into a pizza shop.

based on the popularity of one of his employees' handmade pies.

But one estimate for the number of pizza shops in the five boroughs is at around 2000,

many of them serving and some of them focused on the slice, which

incidentally you can't get at Lombardi's, only whole pies here.

So we're going to have to go somewhere else.

In New York City, this really is something of a staple.

I mean, I have heard people describe the New York slice

Distilled down into this single piece of pizza is the stereotypical New York rush.

I want to walk and eat and be satisfied and not late for my Idea Channel shoot.

Today we're going to talk about many different kinds of pizza,

back on the Idea Channel set with pizza, literal pizza,

because if we're making an episode about it

There's evidence going as far back as ancient Rome, Greece,

in "Pizza A Global History", people used,

besides its main toppings,cheese, tomato sauce, and as John Green says, possibly other.

Bread as plate, Helstosky says, puts pizza in the same lineage as pita, lavash, and tortilla.

But what we would point at and go, mmm, pizza,

didn't come together until 18th century Naples, Italy.

Considered low class food, Neapolitan pizza,

which we may call flat bread or thin crust pizza now,

was the first widely recognized marriage of bread, tomato, cheese,

and possibly other put into an oven and baked,

though the possibly other wouldn't become a craze until the mid 20th century.

The tomatoes that are so often the base of a slice or a pie

didn't make it to Italy from Central and South America until the mid 16th century.

Let's just think about that briefly, a time in Italy without tomatoes.

When they arrived, it was thanks to the Colombian Exchange.

At first, most Europeans thought tomatoes were poisonous

being in the deadly nightshade family of plants.

So they were sold as ornaments and decoration

Adventurousness and complex economic and cultural trade resulting from colonialism eventually

produced a simple, satisfying food with humble origins.

Since its start, pizza has depended upon globalization.

whose cultural dominance brought it to the world.

its kind of funny to think that we're likely to call something that looks like this fancy pizza.

While Neapolitan pizza was rounding out on the Western coast,

further south in Palermo, Sicily there was a different square shaped pie in the works.

a thick bread that's often topped with salt, garlic, and herbs.

So while it doesn't resemble the iconic pizza emoji,

because though there are first pizzarias, Lombardi's,

L'antica Pizzeria, Port'alba in Naples, it's tough if not impossible to point to a platonic pizza ideal.

There's no single original model that all pizza references.

The economic climate and poverty stricken population combined with available materials

at pizza's genesis to help feed whole families cheaply

in a way that was satisfying and nutritional.

More so than many other foods beyond its central ingredients,

pizza is historically a culinary solution

to a particular set of economic, cultural, and dietary conundrums

which differ between the communities experiencing them.

Related to the Sicilian slice but distinct

is what is often called the grandma slice, which

admits something great about pizza that I think we rarely confront explicitly.

but gathering around people and sharing a meal with them.

I think about this whenever I get a slice from the corner pizza shop.

What strangers are eating a slice pulled from the same pie as mine?

Who am I, in some distributed and emergent sense, sharing a meal with?

Who are my pizza pals, my pie ties, my cheese chums?

This is not to say that everything is rosy in the plaza del pizza.

There are preferences, allegiances, and animosities,

perhaps none more pronounced than that between Chicago and New York.

At the heart of the geographically reinforced pie dispute is thickness.

New York's pizza is thin like Neapolitan.

Like most things pizza, it's hard to say who did it first.

But Pizzeria Uno is confidently implicated somehow

in serving the first Chicago style deep dish pizza in the 1940s.

than even Sicilian pizza but still round like a Neapolitan

and more pie like with a thick, hard crust.

Jon Stewart famously called it tomato soup in a bread bowl,

which explains why we haven't removed a slice,

because there would be an avalanche of tomatoes

Deep dish devotees, anyway, counter that it's more flavorful.

Or simply and inarguably, I just like it more.

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A History of Pizza in 8 Slices!

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