Neapolitan Cuisine - Pizza

Pizza

Pizza is the most popular and best known creation of all Neapolitan cuisine. Its roots are much older than the tomato that tops it, and is probably one of the oldest foods. An early type of pizza was present in the Roman age; it was a sort of wheat bun. Pizza, as we know it today, (with tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese) is about two hundred years old. It soon became very popular among the people as well as barons or princes: it was present in the Bourbon court. King Ferdinand I experienced cooking pizza in Capodimonte's porcelain ovens. After Italian unification, the new kings were also attracted by this southern food. The pizzaiolo Raffaele Esposito created in 1889, in honor to queen Margherita of Savoy, is a nationalistic pizza, where the colors of the Italian flag were represented by the mozzarella (white), tomato (red) and basil (green). Since then this pizza is called the pizza Margherita. Pizza can be cheap and nutritious, so it had great success very quickly. Sometimes pizza is made in home ovens, but the real Neapolitan pizza must be cooked in a wood-fired oven, hand-made by an able pizziaiolo who makes the dough disk thinner in the center and thicker in the outer part; the ingredients and olive oil are rapidly spread on the disk, and with a quick movement the pizza is put on the shovel and then slid in the oven where it is turned around a few times for uniform cooking.